A couple weeks ago I flew down to Atlanta to meet Diane Myer (@flydigemini) of StudioCom (@studiocom) at her Atlanta agency. After chatting, she handed me a copy of Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time. Having never read it herself, she passed it off to me so that I might read it and write a book report for her. Here’s that book report.
Twitter Power was written by Joel Comm (@joelcomm) and is a rare bird: a book that is both a shameless, step-by-step self-promotion and marketing guide for social media and a book that trains readers on best practices, which is a great help to people new to social media (Twitter being only one of many social media tools that it shows you how to use).
Twitter Power is dead center between the PhD work of history, case studies, and Twilosophy offered by Shel Israel in the form of Twitterville and the more moralistic 101 step-by-step work of Tee Morris in All a Twitter. What makes Twitter Power different to me is that is spends quite a bit of the book ignoring Twitter. It backs off and deals with the broader social media solutions offered over the last decades, including advice for blogging and the history of social media. Then it paves the way for why Twitter actually matters — not only offering partial context in the form Twitter’s history but also context that traces back to BBS systems.
Mind you, this isn’t Cluetrain. Twitter Power does suggest that just about anything and everything can be monetized and is open to monetization — and it also suggests that maybe, sometimes, dropping affiliate links into everything might not be the right way to play it.
I appreciate this sort of shamelessness. It is more honest and a lot less moralistic than a lot of the other Twitter books. For example, this is the only book I have read that doesn’t do the requisite Guy Kawasaki witchhunt.
In fact, unlike many of the books I have reviewed, I dog-eared page 48. I have been meaning to jump into Photoshop and create myself a custom Twitter background image — like all the cool kids make. The one I have isn’t nearly as pimp-daddy as I would like. So, I turned down a corner to remind me to go back and either make my own or drop $100 for @Twitart to make one for me.
Like I said, this is a useful book!
I think 2009 is the year that the nerds who are trying to keep Twitter pure and pretty get a wedgy and a good pantsing, and Twitter gets a little less “church lady” and a little more “rock star.” Joel Comm is someone I look to as a leader. Additionally, I am much obliged to MC Hammer (@mchammer), Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee), Darren Rowse (@problogger), Chris Pirillo (@ChrisPirillo), Steve Rubel (@steveRubel), and Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) for also paving the way to Twitter and blog shamelessness! God bless all your souls.
Thank you, Joel Comm, for actually writing the book on it.
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