How your company can find the medium in the message

This book has a simple proposition. It’s a how-to guide for measuring the tangible and intangible results of their social media activities. It will be of particular interest to those not overly familiar with this area who need to get up to speed quickly.

For those who have not yet engaged seriously with these platforms, Holloman’s first piece of advice is to question whether social media is right for your business right now. Does your business have the bandwidth to pull it off? Does it have, within its DNA, the willingness to try and fail and get back up again? Are you doing it to please someone and do your customers actually want it?

Social media strategies undoubtedly require buy-in, and resources need to be committed. Five simple arguments for getting corporate buy-in are presented: competitors are doing it; it’s cheap; it allows you to influence opinion; it really helps connect with customers; and it helps resolve customer relations issues.

Holloman provides a broad overview of the key characteristics of the primary social media platforms from a business perspective. There's practical advice on how to use platforms such as Google Analytics.

HootSuite comes highly recommended. This is a social media dashboard that allows you to create a central point from which multi-platform campaigns can be launched across multiple social networks. It specialises in social media campaign measurement and offers powerful analytics tools and reporting structures that can be customised and will track your performance across Facebook, Google and Twitter, among others. Some of its key tools can be accessed freely.

Holloman provides advice on how to access suppliers that you will need to help. He compares and contrasts the approach of longer established agencies with the trendy digital native-run ones.

There's a useful series of case studies on how companies such as O2, Sabre Hospitality Solutions, machine tool company Makino, and mobile virtual network operator giffgaff employed social media strategies to good effect. Recognising that social media is a two-way process that is about engagement rather than control, the book also addresses what to do when things go inevitably wrong.

There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle when a crisis is playing out on your social media platforms.

To prevent things happening in the first place, the advice is to create a policy that staff must adhere to. This will help control the usage and underline the importance of on-message communication. You should also keep one ear to the air and listen to social media chatter using software such as HootSuite and Radian6, which allows you to pick up brand mentions as they happen. You need to take the temperature online before you join the conversation.

When problems do arise, harness the negative and make it work for you. Above all, if you’ve made a mistake, hold your hands up, apologise and outline what you are going to do to fix it.

The book has enough general advice and practical tips and pointers to get a small enterprise up and running effectively in the social media space.

More importantly, perhaps, it outlines the issues that you need to address with specialist suppliers so that you can brief them on what you need and will enable you to talk at a level that might prevent you from being taken for a ride.

Holloman comes from a newspaper background and currently writes technology trend features for Sky News online. He also consults with large firms on digital projects and has carved out a niche as a conference speaker.

As you would expect, then, the author knows how to put across valuable information in a highly accessible style and has created a useful primer on this subject.