Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Should your company be blogging? What’s Twitter going to do for you? Why is Facebook all the rage? I’m happy to report that my new book, Social Media 101 (amazon aff link) is available for purchase.

Here are a few places where you can buy it, should you want it:

Social Media 101 – 800CEORead

Social Media 101 -Amazon

Social Media 101 – Amazon KINDLE edition

Social Media 101 – Barnes & Noble

Social Media 101 – Books-a-Million

Social Media 101 – Borders

(I’ll add more as they come about)

**Audiobook coming soon, but not for a bit. Kindle coming soon, but not for a bit.

Who Should Want This Book?

First off, the book is a collection of information that you might have read about here on chrisbrogan.com. Most of it comes from blog posts, tidied up to be useful to you. But that’s the point.

This book is for people who are less likely to read my blog. It’s also a way to have my information distilled in a static form so you can refer to bits as you need them. That’s one benefit to it.

Another benefit? You can share this with folks who might not normally read the blog who might need to get what we’re doing here in social media.

Make sense?

It’s Not the NEW Stuff

It’s the basics. It’s the little tricks and ideas. It’s suggestions of what to do next. Is it new and mind-blowing? No, not really. It’s important. Yes, it’s important.

Special Thanks

This book wouldn’t exist without my mom and dad. Steve Brogan and Diane Brogan did tons and tons of work on this book. My wife, Katrina, helped out, as well. Imagine that: a book brought to life by family. Hands-on by people who are NOT social media experts, but who get it. They all use these tools in their own ways, very differently from me. And yet, they use them.

Will you?

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I spend a lot of time in Twitter search. I do it for several purposes. One is for my client partners. For instance, if I’m thinking of ways to do things for MolsonCoors, I might start up searches on various beer brands to get some competitive analysis. I might start figuring out if there are location-specific tweets about Molson products. For instance, during the Vancouver Olympics, I might have found several people tweeting about their beers while out and about enjoying the events. I could do something with that.

But there are lots of ways to use it. Do you need to find more case studies? Here’s a simple search for case studies: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=”case+study”+filter:links

Do you want to know who’s talking about burgers near San Francisco? http://search.twitter.com/search?q=burger+near:SF+filter:links”

Want some negative proof? I sniffed around for “site sucks” – http://search.twitter.com/search?q=”site+sucks” – to see who’s saying what about bad websites (note: don’t forget to speak the way your tweeters would speak).

Maybe you’re in pharma? I checked out “allergies plus meds OR medication – http://search.twitter.com/search?q=allergies+medication+OR+meds”

There are lots more opportunities to consider. One of my favorites? http://search.twitter.com/search?q=”looking+for”. It’s like permission to sell. Right there. (If you’re not a jerk.)

Oh that Twitter. Such a silly tool. Why even bother? (Keep telling yourself that.)

Bonus Round

Save your searches. Cook them up and put them in your Google Reader or your Seesmic Desktop or your Tweetdeck. Build STATIONS around these kinds of searches. Build response protocols for them. (I’ve barely scratched the surface, but wanted to start somewhere).

And you? Success stories?

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I’m looking over at you, Dave Winer, because you probably wrote about this years ago or something.

I’m sitting here at Zemoga’s offices in Colombia. I realized that I wanted to be able to find a “Team Zemoga” list, click on it, and then dump the entire team into a list on my Seesmic Desktop. I realize that I can follow other people’s public lists, but the functionality is just a bit too clunky still.

I want the ability to take a Twitter list and share it as a new “team” list, with the ability to quickly manage the “follow/followback” as well as the ability to DM them almost like they’re IM users.

Make sense? Is this just me?

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My friend Marsha Collier pointed out something really important for you to know about, if you’re dabbling with Google Buzz. If you disable Google Buzz, Google cans your Google Profile.

So what the heck? That doesn’t sound useful.

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