Social TV, Optimize, and Mobilized Marketing: A Triplet Of How-To Books

I’ve got three new books sitting here that I’d like to briefly mention. Interestingly, we see a pattern emerge, at least among the titles:

Social TV: How Marketers Can Reach And Engage Audiences By Connecting Television To The Web, Social Media, And Mobile by Mike Proulx and Stacey Shepatin. While this book is full of new media buzzword bingo (“content,” “curation,” “backchannel”), there are quite a number of really good examples of TV networks and shows expanding their reach and influence with online extensions. There are fewer examples of offline brands leveraging these new methods than I was expecting, but Social TV provides a very detailed view of where television’s heading and where the possibilities lay.

Mobilized Marketing: How to Drive Sales, Engagement and Loyalty Through Mobile Devices by Jeff Hasen. While this book reads like a self-promo piece for Hasen’s firm Hipcricket, the book does provide a basic overview of all the different ways marketers can use mobile, from apps to video to text message-based promotions.

Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media and Content Marketing by Lee Odden. This is the most clinical of the three, because Odden goes into broad strokes on a number of topics, including setting objectives, research, customer profiling, content strategy, and measurement. It’s probably best suited for marketing managers who need a methodical roadmap to developing the more basic components of interactive marketing. Plus, it seems particularly helpful for B2B marketers who have specific audiences they need to reach.

My standard warning for all three books: Get them now. They’ll be outdated by this time next year.

Special thanks to Wiley for providing me with review copies.