20130821-10100176-jjjrhThe Big Promise: How to tell your story in a noisy, social world.

My biggest problem with this book is its core metaphor. Boxing? Blood sports? Knocking out your prospects? What the hell were you thinking, Gary? It took everything I had to just get through the intro.

My second problem is that Google+ wasn’t even mentioned.

Once you get to the body of the book, you might find it has some good, actionable advice. A lot of it consists of case studies: actual marketing campaigns from big and smaller companies on various social media sites. Gary explains exactly how or whether each company pulls off their campaigns. And gives examples of what would work better.

Like most of these kinds of books, a great deal is geared toward the corporate marketer (the Chief Marketing Officer, the Chief Content Officer, etc.). But if you’re a micro biz owner (who needs to do most of your own content marketing), you’ll still get good value — you’ll just need to adjust the depth and breadth of what you attempt to do on your own.

Gary’s main point shouldn’t sound new to most of us. We already know we need to stop using social media to just push out marketing messages and start using it for conversations.

Recommended for: those who are responsible for implementing social media in their company.

Rating (up to five stars): 3.5 

Get it on Amazon