Herding Cats: A Strategic and Timeless Perspective on Harnessing the Power of Social Media

This book is a concise, insightful, and actionable series of chapters that communicate strategic and timeless fundamentals to help organizations, companies, and brands develop and manage their social media marketing efforts. These fundamentals include defining your purpose and objective based on what your brand or organization stands for, understanding your consumer/customer, developing a content marketing strategy, applying the social media ecosystem perspective, knowing where (through which social channels) to communicate your content, generating consumer insights from online social dialogue, defining key performance indicators (KPIs), and generating relevant analytics that help define your organization's or brand's success against key measures (and not merely reporting raw data). In short, this book is intended to provide the reader (whether an upper-level undergraduate or MBA student, social media manager, or executive) much needed perspectives and frameworks on developing and managing an effective social media strategy. The authors will leverage their extensive industry experience along with much of the current and original research that they are conducting in the field of social media marketing.

Andrew (Andy) Rohm earned his BS in aerospace engineering from the University of Michigan and his PhD in marketing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research examines consumer usage and acceptance of new media as well as firms' use of mobile and social media marketing strategies. He has published in scholarly and managerial publications such as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Consumer Behavior, Journal of Business Research, and Sloan Management Review (among others). After living in the Greater Boston area for 15+ years, and having spent the academic year of 2007 to 2008 as a visiting professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, he is excited about his recent move to Los Angeles, where he has begun to perfect his surfing skills. Andy currently lives in Manhattan Beach with his wife, Kim, their three wonderful children, their black Lab named Pretty Boy Floyd, and a rescue dog named Annabelle; oh, and a hamster named Otis.
 
 
Michael Weiss has been marketing and selling his entire life. From getting his audiences to move and groove on the dance floor to being the CEO of a digital agency and working with brands such as Disney, Estee Lauder, Kellogg's, and AutoTrader to his current role as vice president of marketing at Musician's Friend (a Guitar Center brand), Michael's goal is always to use story and storytelling to educate, inspire, and engage audiences. As an accomplished educator and TEDx speaker, Michael understands that people strive for the unexpected, and he uses this philosophy when presenting and teaching to audiences all over the United States. You can follow him on Twitter @mikepweiss