NOTE: corporate email has “migrated” from dchurbuck AT us DOT lenovo DOT com to dchurbuck AT lenovo DOT com. So drop the “us.” And, as always, my personal email remains my name with an @ sign in there someplace.
I’ve known Andy since I joined Lenovo in 2006 in the context of his SEO expertise. A year ago he interviewed me about reputation monitoring, incident detection, and problem resolution — something we spend a lot of time performing at Lenovo with our Social Media Marketing team led by Mark Hopkins and Tim Supples.
This is a very good book because it’s grounded in a ton of hard leg work and case study research — not hand waving theory with the usual Hallmark platitudes about authentic conversation stuff. Andy and his co-author Judy Strauss are not pushing a theoretical agenda — this isn’t one of those detestable business books that repeat the summary on the back cover blurb a hundred times. I’d rank it with Avinash’s Web Metrics as an essential and practical operators manual.
Beal’s strength in writing about the topic is his mastery of search — which is the fundamental enabler and catalyst to the entire field of SMM. Some would argue it’s the blogs, Andy realizes its the detection, the track back and the notifications that makes SMM possible and indeed, essential.