Abstract
The 2013–2014 academic year may be seen as a turning point in development of the field of social media communication. Whether you teach a stand-alone social media course or incorporate the topic within another course, these five books combine to offer a variety of perspectives and alternatives.
The Social Media Handbook is an edited volume that owes its roots to computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the influence of interpersonal research. As co-editor, Jeremy Hunsinger writes, “Social media interfaces engage us through interactivity and the appearance of co-presence, community, and, in the end, the appearance of social connection” (p. 9). This academic skepticism reappears frequently across eleven excellent chapters written by top scholars. The last chapter on journalism and crisis, though, fails to serve as a proper conclusion for the book—one that would synthesize the broad findings and lead us to future studies. The tension remains between academics worried about the business of social media and those in social business offering tricks of the trade.
No wonder professional marketers enter the book space and try to make sense about social media trends. Jay Baer’s YOUTILITY contends social media are turning marketing upside down through top-of-mind, frame-of-mind, and friend-of-mine awareness. His “Youtility” turns to three facets: self-serve information, radical transparency, and real-time relevancy:
With marketing of this type, your success is scenario-specific, which is why it’s so critical to be truly, inherently useful. If you are, your audience will keep your marketing close . . . . You don’t have to be “found”—at least not after initial discovery—because your customers and prospects already know where you are and what you offer. When they need you, they’ll engage. (pp. 92–93)
Baer, president of Convince & Convert, has consulted for more than seven hundred brands. Likewise, wine guru Gary Vaynerchuk is in your face with experiences that work. His VaynerMedia, which develops digital and social media strategies and content for Fortune 500 companies, offers a readable book that emphasizes the need to be native to a particular social media platform:
Twitter speaks to an iconic, urban audience that loves hashtags. An earnest post like “We love our customers!” would probably be soundly ignored. It sounds funny here, and yet posts like these are everywhere, proving that most brands are ignorant about what is native to a platform. (p. 17)
Vaynerchuk uses his storytelling abilities by presenting examples of good and bad social media throughout the book, making this a better choice than Baer’s book for a course supplement.
Alan Albarran’s edited book is a useful blend of theory and practice. The Social Media Industries offers chapters on history, business models, marketing, content, truth, uses, and privacy. There also are valuable chapters on young Latinos, African Americans, and Asians. The scholarly breadth and depth of this book makes it perfect for any business-oriented course. I adopted it for my Social Media Metrics class, and students responded with engaging discussion and current examples that fit each of the chapters. I wanted students to have a conceptual foundation for understanding measurement tools, and this book was ideal. Albarran, a professor and department chair at the University of North Texas, concluded the book with a helpful summary that offers future directions. He admits to having more questions: “We have a far from complete understanding of the social media industries, no doubt due in part to the nascent stage of development” (p. 232). He adds that consumer demand and mobile devices are evolving with the development of wearable technologies. It is difficult to place social media industries in a box when we cannot establish its size or location.
It is worth remembering that LinkedIn and Facebook have been around a little more than a decade, and the last five years have been extremely active and fluid given the development of Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and other mobile apps. If it is too soon to develop sound theories on social media business, the same can be said for tracking recent developments in the law.
Still, Social Media Law, A Guidebook for Communication Students and Professionals helps students read the new case law and place it within a traditional context. Editor Daxton R. “Chip” Stewart, an associate professor at the Schieffer School of Journalism at Texas Christian University, rallied a solid group of legal scholars around the challenging task. Social media cases are organized around eleven chapters covering free speech, defamation, privacy, intellectual property, commercial speech, information and leaks, student speech, obscenity, use in courtrooms, journalist policies, and advertising and public relations. The book worked as a supplement in my Media Regulation & Freedom course. Students wrote book reviews, each focused on two chapters and presented in class. The discussion helped reinforce the media law foundation found in our course textbook. Chip Stewart’s preface helped define social media and offer readers direction: “our goal is to provide professional communicators a foundation of knowledge with practical guidance in what we know to be the most dangerous terrain, with an eye on what is happening now and what is to come” (p. xi).
The challenge for these five books as well as any book written right now about social media, is shelf life. Stewart called the present a “time of great upheaval to the media landscape.” From newspapers to PR, real-time social media practices challenge all forms of communication.
At times, it is easy to forget that e-mail—the first “killer app”—remains frequently the most effective form of social media. Nevertheless, we keep downloading more cool apps, and social media spaces become increasingly fragmented and saturated. For interpersonal communication on social network sites, breaking news from journalists on Twitter, real-time PR engagement, and marketing through social business, the dust will not settle anytime soon. Expect more books, curriculum revision, classroom experimentation, and new theory and methods in response to the social media shift.