The NOW Revolution: A Review, A Criticism and Two Thumbs Up

Indra // March 1, 2011 // Social Media // No Comments

I have a confession to make. I generally read one third of a non-fiction, business book. By that point, I believe I’ve gotten the gist of the author’s point and am hungry to move on to all the incredible fiction in the world. I fear there is not enough time on this planet to read all the truly great fiction that is available to us, so I am loathe to give much time to books about business. So it was with some measure of trepidation that I volunteered to read and review Jay Baer & Amber Naslund’s new book, The Now Revolution. What if I didn’t want to finish it?
Here’s the irony of it all. In my opinion, the most important part of the book is the last chapter – Shift 7, entitled Make a Calculator. I think this chapter should have been the first chapter! But I read the whole thing to get there and it was worth it. The entire book, as is typical of Jay and Amber, is dense with information. In the introduction it states that this is not a how-to book but rather a “how to engineer your business for and in response to the Web” book. That’s not entirely true. It does indeed point a new path for companies that are ready to join the social revolution, but it is also full of how-to info.

There are lists, QR codes, and step-by-step recommendations for making that shift and that makes the book a treasure of information. On the other hand I believe it may be a bit overwhelming for the social media novice. Each chapter could be its own book. Shift 1 – Engineer a New Bedrock, basically states that your company needs an entirely new culture to effectively blend social media into a communication strategy. I agree. But that is a huge proposition to relay in one chapter. Yet, Jay and Amber are so generous in their desire to teach that they pack an entire book’s worth of info into each chapter.

But I digress. Let’s get back to Shift 7, you know, the one I think should have been Shift 1. Here’s why….my team and I spend a lot of time talking with companies large and small about social media and how it might fit into their marketing and invariably people want to know how you measure the ROI of social media.

The Now Revolution nails the ludicrous expectations that people have about social media as compared to every other form of marketing. In the book they list various search phrases and the number of Google web pages served for those searches. For “email ROI” you will be served 12,200 pages. For a search of “radio ROI” you will be served 8,170 pages, yet for a search of “social media ROI” you will be served 208,000 pages. That’s ridiculous. And so is the expectation.

Chapter 7 clearly spells out why you must first figure out what you are trying to achieve with your social media effort — awareness, sales or loyalty, and then demonstrates the various ways you can measure the success of that effort. I believe this comes first. If you can figure out what you want to achieve, what signifies success, and how it ties into your other marketing efforts, you have a realistic approach toward social media. Now you’re ready to go read the rest of this terrific book and figure out how to do it. Just know in advance that it isn’t a perfect science, that it takes experience and that everyone’s experience is very new as we are all still figuring this crazy thing out.

Now that you are all excited about reading the book, we’ve got good news for you. We have a couple of free copies and we’ve come up with a fun way to give them away. Want to play along? In the comments, fill out the Now Revolution Mad Libs by giving us your choices for the missing words listed below. You have until EOB Thursday and then we’ll be posting the Mad Libs on our Facebook page. Based on the number of “likes” (along with our judge’s discretion) we’ll award the two books on Friday. Couple of rules – no foul language and no genitalia. Those are old Mad Libs cheats and won’t work here. Good luck!

Here are the words we need from you

• Noun
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• Adjective
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• Plural Noun
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