A comprehensive resource for anyone who’s looking to capitalize on the gathering strength of social media.
A practical handbook for those looking to leverage the power of social media influencers to advance their brands.
According to Schaffer, an instructor at Rutgers Business School, the marketing power of influencers is a natural consequence of the world’s “digital transformation.” The barriers to content creation and its publication and distribution have never been lower, which has resulted in an unprecedented democratization of the online marketplace. Influencers, he notes, often possess more power than celebrities and brands, as they convey an “authenticity and human touch” and “emotional resonance” that’s difficult to replicate. The author explains that extraordinary opportunities exist if one knows how to leverage the power of influencers with not only a targeted advertising campaign, but also the deep engagement with an online community: “This concept of community…underlies a fundamental mind-set shift,” he writes. “Building a community is a longer-lasting way to gather people around your brand or product. Once you’ve established a community, any campaign you launch has a foundation to start with and a cumulative effect to follow.” To that end, Schaffer provides an impressively thorough tour of the influencer’s cosmos; he describes, in lucid but granular detail, the various kinds of influencers, the most effective ways to find and contact them, and 16 different strategies for collaborating with them. The book’s orientation is relentlessly practical throughout, and the author provides actionable counsel on influencer discovery tools and marketplaces, the use of agencies, and the most effective ways to measure one’s returns. Nevertheless, for all the analytical minutiae, the author remains focused, sometimes to the point of redundancy, on the big picture—the “grand scheme of your social media strategy to holistically understand the layout of the landscape and where influencers fit in.”
Schaffer has considerable experience as a marketing educator, consultant, and influencer in his own right, and his tone over the course of this book radiates the reasonable self-assurance of expertise. Despite the brevity of the work, it still manages to be astonishingly thorough, and it’s written in an informal, accessible style that doesn’t assume any special knowledge on the part of the reader. The work could be even shorter, in fact, as the author has a tendency to belabor points at times. Nevertheless, it offers everything that a reader could possibly want in an introductory primer: an overview of the relevant field and its history, prognostication about its future, and a step-by-step commentary explaining how to take advantage of trends. Also, the author makes a powerfully convincing case that no viable business can afford to neglect the potential of social media—and that one must be hands-on when it comes to strategy: “If you’re not engaged in social media, then you miss your chance to connect with this generation. Basically stated: To have any pull in media, you have to be seen on social media….[Y]ou will still need to be involved in social media yourself to some extent.”
A comprehensive resource for anyone who’s looking to capitalize on the gathering strength of social media.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4002-1636-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
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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