A highly useful, invigoratingly people-centered approach to digital marketing.
A comprehensive guide to managing digital marketing.
In these pages, digital marketing consultant Schaffer, whose last book was The Age of Influence, (2020), describes the altered nature of the consumer world, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. He notes what many have cited as the pandemic’s effects: “the acceleration of the digital consumer,” the primacy of digital outreach, and the overwhelming importance of handling online marketing effectively. To this end, with the goal of establishing a Digital First strategy, he proposes a “new playbook.” In this playbook, Schaffer recommends that businesses and entrepreneurs concentrate on forming and strengthening “Digital Threads,” a system of online outreach: If this system is implemented correctly, it will greatly strengthen a business; if ignored, it could lead to “the risk of being left behind in what worked yesterday”). He breaks down all the various Digital Threads that new marketers must keep in focus, such as search engine optimization, which has advanced enormously from the old “keyword stuffing” state of pre–Covid-19 days. He touches on the use of artificial intelligence but warns his readers that Digital Threads is an intensely person-oriented plan: “You should not lose the soul of how you appear to your customers and prospects,” he cautions. His chapters are distilled into key takeaways that help the reader to clarify the large amount of advice and information they’re getting here (for example, “Building relationships with algorithms is about trustworthiness and authority,” and “Backlinks create validity that your content is useful and trusted”). Absolutely everything is analyzed in terms of enhancing business.
Schaffer’s approach is a winning mixture of the personal and the professional. He opens his book by reflecting on how the pandemic affected his own business as an author suddenly deprived of book tours, book signings, readings, and so on. And throughout the book, he convincingly stresses the strongest, most important aspect of his Digital Threads strategy: people, actual personal connections (hence, his cautions about AI). When discussing the uses of social media (the book’s strongest narrative component), for instance, he advises readers, “There is no better way of becoming friends with the [social media] algorithm and exposing your business to more social media users than by feeding the algorithm what it wants: Platform Authentic Content.” He convincingly urges his readers to “embrace” social media algorithms as a means of connecting with actual human beings. “You’re telling your brand’s story,” he writes, “and you’re telling the story of the consumer within the frame of your brand” (“show, don’t sell,” as he puts it). Even on such quotidian subjects as building an email list, he stresses that mere accumulation of data is not enough; companies and entrepreneurs must “turn these connections into conversations.” Throughout his guide, Schaffer directs readers to the downloadable electronic “workbook” that accompanies his main text, which not only distracts from, but also undermines the sufficiency of the main text itself. But even so, that text abounds with practical tips and insights born of experience. Schaffer is entirely right that many small businesses only hesitantly and incompletely dabble in the digital side of their marketing—a Facebook post here, an email blast there—and his book provides a bracing corrective to this negligence.
A highly useful, invigoratingly people-centered approach to digital marketing.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798990612747
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Pdca Social
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.
Well-crafted memoir by the noted media mogul.
Diller’s home life as a youngster was anything but happy; as he writes early on, “The household I grew up in was perfectly dysfunctional.” His mother lived in her own world, his father was knee-deep in business deals, his brother was a heroin addict, and he tried to play by all the rules in order to allay “my fear of the consequences from my incipient homosexuality.” Somehow he fell into the orbit of show business figures like Lew Wasserman (“I was once arrested for joy-riding in Mrs. Wasserman’s Bentley”) and decided that Hollywood offered the right kind of escape. Starting in the proverbial mailroom, he worked his way up to be a junior talent agent, then scrambled up the ladder to become a high-up executive at ABC, head of Paramount and Fox, and an internet pioneer who invested in Match.com and took over a revitalized Ticketmaster. None of that ascent was easy, and Diller documents several key failures along the way, including boardroom betrayals (“What a monumental dope I’d been. They’d taken over the company—in a merger I’d created—with venality and duplicity”) and strategic missteps. It’s no news that the corporate world is rife with misbehavior, but the better part of Diller’s book is his dish on the players: He meets Jack Nicholson at the William Morris Agency, “wandering through the halls, looking for anyone who’d pay attention to him”; hangs out with Warren Beatty, ever on the make; mispronounces Barbra Streisand’s name (“her glare at me as she walked out would have fried a fish”); learns a remedy for prostatitis from Katharine Hepburn (“My father was an expert urological surgeon, and I know what I’m doing”); and much more in one of the better show-biz memoirs to appear in recent years.
Highly instructive for would-be tycoons, with plenty of entertaining interludes.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780593317877
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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