Think Before You Engage: 100 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Social Media Marketing Campaign by Dave Peck (Book Review of the Week-ish)

Using social media to grow your brand isn’t the hardest thing in the world, not by a long shot. But a little planning can go a long way to making your efforts pay off most effectively. Happily, Dave Peck’s new book, “Think Before You Engage: 100 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Social Media Marketing Campaign,” can help you reach that payoff readily.

According to Brian Solis in the book’s forward, “…Dave Peck is handing you the keys to open the doors to social media and vibrant business opportunities.” That’s setting the bar high, but Peck manages to clear it and with room to spare. Structured as a series of questions and answers, Peck covers lots of ground, including:

• The importance of branding in an online age
• Establishing your business’s online identity
• Making sure you’re on the right social networks
• Engaging customers across your entire web presence, including your website
• Listening to customers using socila media monitoring
• Dealing with “worst case scenarios” and social media meltdowns

Obviously, I’m going to be partial to a book with “Think” in the title. But, Peck backs up thought with action, outlining processes to assist you in thinking about your online marketing — especially your social media marketing — and making it work for you, without ever getting in your way. That’s a pretty neat trick, one that Peck manages with style. Each mini-chapter, covering one question and answer, grades its importance to your online marketing strategy. Very cool.

Of course, that structure, while incredibly handy, did point out one area for improvement. I would have loved to see an appendix that organized each chapter by importance to aid you in working through the book beginning with the most important items. Still, that’s a trivial concern and doesn’t diminish the book in any way.

In all, “Think Before You Engage” manages to address your most common questions for online marketing. Grab a copy and get ready to rethink your online marketing process. And your online marketing results.

Are you getting enough value out of your small business website? Want to make sure your business makes the most of the local, mobile, social web? thinks helps you understand how to grow your business via the web, every day. Get more than just news. Get understanding. Add thinks to your feed reader today.

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