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Authors, book reviews are a great way to let people get to know more about you and/or your book(s). Readers, if you’re an aspiring author, there are places online where you can post book reviews; and they’re a great way to let people get to know more about you. Here’s a short list of sites where you can read and post book reviews.

Amazon – For you readers who want to let people get to know you even better, Amazon lets you post video reviews. You can go through and edit your reviews at any time, and Google indexes reviews.

Goodreads – Whether you’re an author, aspiring author, or an avid reader, this social networking site should be one of your big three (Facebook and Twitter being the other two).  Not only can you write reviews, but you can also follow people and their reviews.

Barnes and Noble – They offer editorial and customer reviews.  Rather than only allowing you to give books a bulk rating, you can rate books according to 15 categories. They don’t connect with any type of social networking sites, but Google indexes reviews.

Powell’s Books – Along with editorial reviews, you can add reviews. The bad news is only editorial reviews connect with social networking sites. The good news is Powell’s Books connects with several social networking sites, along with Facebook and Twitter.

There are other Book Review sites, but those are the best ones where writers can market their books online for free and aspiring authors can begin marketing themselves. I’ll give honorable mention to RedRoom, but RedRoom is to GoodReads what Bing is to Google (a nuisance).

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Facebook will use curated search to rank the popularity of search results according to a link’s popularity in one’s social graph. Google’s Plus 1 button will work in a similar way, in that it will show people search results based on how their friends ranked their sites they visited. I’ve said in various blogs these are mistakes because they are based on the assumption that where my friends from 20 years ago, who now live 1,000 miles away, eat dinner or shop matters to me.

When it comes to social search, Google and Facebook should consider each person’s social radii. That is that they must consider the physical and relational distance between people. Google’s thus far failed in social media, but the average Facebook user has 130 friends. Of those 130 friends, each user may only maintain regular contact with 80. And of those 80, a user may only live within 50 miles of 55 of them. And of those 55, while the average Facebook user may know people in that circle of friends from work, school, church, and other organizations, they may only be good friends with 20 of them. Of course, the only number I know of for a fact is the 130.

Google and Facebook should develop a social media algorithm—a ranking system that groups users according to interests rather than common acquaintances. They should send users within those groups results based on the rankings of others within their group rather than friends they knew 20 years ago who now live 1,000 miles away.

What do you think? Will social search work as it is? Should they develop social media algorithms based on social radii, or do you have a different idea?

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Earlier this week I went to a client’s house to discuss social media with him and his wife. When they asked me if I would come over, they gave me some days and times that would work best. They said after eight in the evening would be best because they put their kids to bed then. That’s out of my normal consulting hours, but since they’re also friends I gladly obliged.

Toward the end of the night, I told them I appreciated how they raised their children. I appreciated that they made sure their children went to bed by eight. They told me they needed that time alone with each other.

Whether your children go to bed by eight or you allow them to stay up as late as you want or you have children is not the issue. The issue is time management. Do you manage your time, or do you allow people and circumstances to manage your time?

It’s easy to get caught up in social media and lose track of time. It’s easy to go from Twitter to Facebook to other social media sites, checking and replying to messages.

Sometimes, I Tweet people, and I get a response right away; other times, I don’t get a response for several hours or a few days. Sometimes I respond to people right away, and other times I don’t. When it comes to time management, of course there’s an app for that. When it comes to self-discipline, there’s no app for that.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Too often, I see people misusing social media, so I compiled this list of ten ways you should not use social media sites. I am sure more could be added to this list. Would you add any? I’d love to hear from you.

1. Don’t tweet about yourself and/or your products all day. People will notice if you only talk about yourself and link to your site.

2. Don’t send e-mails to webmasters of other sites, asking them to exchange links with you. Yes, you can still do this, as long as it’s within Google’s guidelines, but it’s not effective. Here’s what Google has to say about building links.

3. Don’t Add people to Facebook groups without their permission. Yes, Facebook enabled a group feature in which group owners can add people. It wouldn’t surprise me if they did this to better monitor which users are using Facebook for self-serving purposes.

4. Don’t comment spam on people’s blogs just to get links back to your blog. Write thoughtful responses rather than copying and pasting canned blog comment responses.

5. Don’t post comments on blogs that have nothing to do with your site. Google looks at what types of sites link to you. They want to see that quality sites similar to your site link to you.

6. Don’t Ignore people. It doesn’t take that much time to answer a person’s question, thank them for a retweet, or just engage.

7. Don’t buy Twitter followers and Facebook friends. People who do this are breaking Twitter’s TOS. While I can find nothing in Facebook’s TOS about auto-friends, they will suspend your account if you make too many friends requests at once.

8. Don’t Tweet about where you are and what you’re doing, unless it serves your bottom line. It’s okay to send out occasional personal updates because that helps keep social media social, but people don’t need to know about your personal life every 15 minutes.

9. Don’t sign up for a social media service and then leave it. It’s easy to sign-up for a social bookmarking site, decide it’s not worth the time to use a site that ranks 50,000 according to Alexa, get frustrated because you can’t figure out how to delete your account, and then forget about it.

10. Don’t use social media to spam people. This includes posting 20 tweets at once, sending your followers continuous direct messages about your site or products, or using social media for guerilla marketing and not social engagement.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

#Social#Media #1984

I have a #Facebook account for my business and social acquaintances, and then I have another account for my friends and family.  Last night, someone unfriended me on my personal account.

A couple of weeks ago, I made a comment on a friend’s wall, and then a friend of his “Liked” my comment.  The friend who “Liked” my comment did not write a comment or e-mail to me, rather they followed their “Like” by sending me a friends request.  Again, no ‘Hi, I really liked your comment and thought we could chat’ or any other message.  I accepted their friend request and sent them an e-mail saying I looked forward to getting to know them.  Last night, after six days of friendship via Facebook without an e-mail or comment from them, they unfriended me.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell wrote of Newspeak—a government manufactured language, such as the word CrimeThink, meant to cause the deterioration of independent thought.  No, this person “Liking” my comment and sending me a friend request did not signify the deterioration of independent thought; though it did represent the deterioration of the value of communication and relationships in our society.

While we haven’t quite entered Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, and we don’t yet speak a government manufactured language meant to cause the deterioration of independent thought, the more we allow our relationships to diminish into a series of “Likes,” friend requests, check-ins, and other clicks of the mouse the more in danger we become of the extinction of communication and relationships.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

In this video Brian Solis talks with Guy Kawasaki about his new book, “Echantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions,” in which Kawasaki uses the examples of Virgin America, Apple, and Zappos to talk about enchantment being about emotion. He says the three pillars of enchantment are that a company must be likeable, trustworthy, and have a great product, service, or idea.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Click the book for more info!

In this blog, I predicted a literary minefield. #Seth#Godin set off the first explosive with The Domino Project.  In that blog, written almost nine months ago, I said of the coming changes to the publishing industry, “rather than the writer trying to seek the approval of a few people in the publishing industry, they will have to find an audience and seek the approval of their audience.”  In this blog, Seth Godin wrote of The Domino Project:

“Readers have been separated from authors by many levels—stores, distributors, media outlets, printers, publishers—there were lots of layers for many generations, and the editor with a checkbook made the process palatable to the writer.”

The Domino Project will give the author more control in the publishing process by publishing on Kindle, audiobook, and hardcover at the same time.  The Kindle version will work on Macs, iPads, Windows, etc. And The Domino Project will strive to publish literary works in foreign languages.

For those intrigued by the idea of  e-publishing but aren’t ready to make the move from traditional paperback, all books published with The Domino Project will be distributed to those stores Amazon partners with and are interested in offering those books at retail.

Right now, The Domino Project only consists of a staff of six people with a great idea.  They are very up front about their limitations, but they are also open to hearing about great ideas.  If you’d like to contact Seth and his publishing team, you can read about them here.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Adam Singer of TopRank Blog said of BlackHat Social Media, “The intention of being black hat is getting better results faster.”

Have you ever seen a tweet from someone you don’t recall following?  Those are those people who bought thousands of Twitter followers, and you happened to be one of the Twitter followers they bought.  That’s immediate grounds for us unfollowing them and reporting them as a spammer.  Or have you found that someone added you to a group page without your permission?  Facebook allows people to add people to groups, which is intrusive and a very good reason to unfriend someone.

So, what does the future of social media marketing look like?  It will become more compartmentalized to combat black hat social media.  Google is integrating links that people’s friends and followers tweet into search results.  When you search for a term, each page results in the top ten ranked results via SEO.  On the same page, below those ten results, there are ten results from people you follow on Twitter.

This is great for boosting SEO with quality links and content via Twitter; though, it will also lead to a higher necessity for reputation management.  It will lead to people needing to be more diligent about following quality Tweeters, so that, in turn, they attract more quality followers.  It will also lead to people or companies spending less money to buy fans, followers, and friends and more time posting quality content via search engines or other quality tweeters.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

Here are a few great videos on how to get your idea from thought to the bookstore shelf and into potential readers hands. The first video will give you some great insight as to the overall book marketing process, the second will give non-fiction authors a great outline for writing a book proposal, and the last one will help guide you through how to find out how your book’s doing on Amazon.

Stay social my friends,

Erick

On Superbowl Sunday 1984, Apple Introduced the Macintosh with this commercial:

Last week, Facebook introduced curated search, which will allow them to advertise on people’s walls according to what they ‘Like’ on other people’s wall. In late 2010, Google introduced Google Hotpot, and yesterday they introduced Google Circles. Both give search results based on recommendations by friends. Guest blogger Paul Greenberg wrote on BrianSolis.com:

“While between 72% (baby boomers) and 89% (Gen Y) have an account on some social site, 70% of them use them for personal reasons, while only 23% use them to interact with brands. Notably 39% of them use them for reviews – meaning peer trust when it comes to a brand or specific product or service.”

According to Greenberg’s findings and estimates based on my calculations, Facebook’s curated search and Google’s social search will lead to an estimated 16.56% return on relevant search results for baby boomers and 34.71% return on relevant search results for Gen Y users (No results for Gen X).

Facebook’s and Google’s innovations will create a social media oligarchy of users who interact with the Social Web through a stream of ‘Likes,’ posts, and recommendations, using computers, smart phones, tablets, and other technological devices. It will cause people and businesses to either interact with the Social Web according to these new rules of the social media oligarchy or become part of a social media caste system.

All in all, the future of social media will compartmentalize into the ‘interactive’ and the ‘non-interactive,’ causing the Social Web and the Semantic Web to merge and evolve into the Synergistic Web.

Stay social my friends,

Erick