Here’s what Keith had to say:

It wasn’t long into a meeting with Mike (one he had initiated and in which he approached me to do some mentoring with him) that I realized I had more to learn from him than the other way round! What followed has been an amazing journey as Mike has coached, mentored and supported me in exploring the world of social media technologies and most importantly, how to strategically connect the dots in this world. Mike’s skills sit not merely in his undoubted expertise in this area but also in his incredible ability to make sense of it for someone for whom it…well, doesn’t make sense. I have no hesitation in endorsing Mike as a Coach in this area…and have done so repeatedly. I wish more of the leaders with whom I engage would avail themselves of Mike’s expertise. Then again, I suspect many who work with and for these leaders, wish the same!

Taking things further

Keith is still in coaching as we have dived into further Social Media marketing avenues. Keith recently lauched his personal leadership blog called “On the balcony” which looks at leadership from the balcony. Watching and learning instead of busying ourselves with more and more things to do.

This blog has become the center of Keiths social media and internet presence. Keith plans to continue his social media coaching even more as he has found it to be a neccessity to his business.

Third Place: AddThis WordPress Plugin

The Addthis plugin makes it easy to add social networking links at the top and bottom of your blog posts and pages. If you don’t mind doing a little extra work it is possible to use the Addthis platform to make customised sharing links.

Second Place: Simple Facebook Connect

This plugin takes a bit of setting up on your first time but is well worth investing the time in. The plugin has a wide variety of options but is modular in its assembly. This means that you can choose the modules you need and then delete the modules you don’t – saving page load time and server space.

First Place: TweetMeme Retweet Button

TweetMeme wins outright because it has the simplest installation and it’s easy to use, direct call to action makes it very successful in getting your content retweeted.

About Dan Zarella

Dan has writ­ten exten­sively about the sci­ence of viral mar­ket­ing, memet­ics and social com­mu­ni­ca­tions on his own blog and for a vari­ety of pop­u­lar indus­try blogs, includ­ing Mash­able, Copy­Blog­ger, Read­WriteWeb, Pla­gia­rism Today, ProBlog­ger, Social Desire, Cen­ter­Net­works, Now­sourc­ing, and SEOScoop.

He has been fea­tured in The Twit­ter Book, Fast Com­pany, The Finan­cial Times, AdAge, NYPost, The Boston Globe, Forbes, Wired, The Wall Street Jour­nal, Mash­able and TechCrunch. He was recently awarded Shorty and Semmy awards for social media & viral marketing.

He has spo­ken at Pub­Con, Search Engine Strate­gies, Iowatas­mic, Con­ver­gence ’09, 140 The Twit­ter Con­fer­ence, The Cool Twit­ter Con­fer­ence, Word­Camp Mid Atlantic, Social Media Camp, Inbound Mar­ket­ing Boot­camp, and The Texas Domains and Devel­op­ers Con­fer­ence, and he cur­rently works as mar­ket­ing prod­uct owner at Hub­Spot.

Why I reccommend this book

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in social media marketing. This is why:

1. It does not take long to read
2. It defines social media perfectly and covers each of the top social networks (incl. Digg, Delicious, YouTube, Slideshare,Twitter and Facebook)
3. Dan even tells us how we should approach each social medium to get the most from them

I found the book to be very insightful and comprehensive. It would be particularly useful to someone who is getting into social media to profile themselves or their business.

Buy The Social Media Marketing Book from Kalahari.net

“The book will teach readers which platforms are the right ones for their brand, and which aren’t based on the culture and demographics of each technology as well as the investment required to engage each. Marketers need to understand all the options available to them before they can begin to make educated decisions about which tactics to pursue and this book aims to do just that.” – Dan Zarella