Reading Reflection No. 2

The book I chose is "The Art of Social Media" by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick.  The book is primarily about setting up strong business profiles for multiple social media outlets and tips on maintaining each profile.

The book related to the course a lot in the sense of building ourselves first, in order to build our products or services.  Our class discusses a lot of the mental conversations we must have with ourselves before progressing our ideas (for example, the entrepreneurial process).  Our class has been following the entrepreneurial process and breaking down each step into smaller steps, which ultimately has helped each of us understand our role.  This book does a similar thing, it helps build your personal brand by creating the right message you want to send to people while also giving tips on how to generate traffic to your sites.  The book can help create a brand to go along with the product or service that each of us has created.

If I had to create an exercise for this class based on the book, I would have people alter their profiles or create new profiles that would help them send the appropriate message about who they are, what they plan to do, and what they have to offer.  The assignment could easily be as simple as following the first two chapters of the book, which gives step by step instructions on how to set up each account and what people should be including in their bios.  The second chapter gives tips on the content to release, as well as how to keep up with posting.

This may seem silly, but my biggest 'aha' moment came from the book's breakdown of Facebook.  The authors explained how important it is to have your Facebook profile set up as a page rather than a timeline.  I know it makes a lot of sense and for most people it could be considered common sense, but I had never thought about the risks and dangers that can come from using a timeline on Facebook.  For instance, using a personal timeline for business can result in the closure of your account, which is explained in the terms of service.  However, as most of us know, nobody actually reads the terms of service.