As someone involved in search engine marketing, I’m always prepared to invest in information if I feel it is relevant to the industry and could help those clients I work with gain an advantage over their competitors.
Social Media is one such area that has gained a great deal of exposure of late, in part due to the Twitter explosion and the ever-increasing popularity of Facebook.
When I received an email from B2B Marketing (b2bm.biz) promoting their new guide ‘B2B Marketing’s Best Practice Guide: Social Media‘ I was encouraged that a UK marketing organisation had taken the time to assemble a book that more some definition around the Social Media landscape. The sales letter described it thus:
“B2B Marketing’s Best Practice Guide: Social Media outlines the parameters of social media, helping you to learn how to harness its strength to achieve a measurable competitive advantage for your business.
It allows you to build a strong knowledge base, teaching you how to tap into the power of social media applications such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds and wikis.
Written by a team of specialists, this is one of a few guides that addresses this dynamic channel purely from a business marketing perspective.”
At £130 (special offer price, now £150), I knew that it wasn’t cheap. The PDF was to be approximately 45 pages when released but despite the lightness of the book, the table of contents looked encouraging.
What arrived was 39 pages of which the first nine were made up of a cover sheet, table of contents, executive summary (ahem!) and contributors biographies.
The ‘book’ finally gets started on page nine with an introduction to Social Media. I guess that if you’d spent £130 (or £150) on a ‘Best Practice Guide’ you may feel that this section could be skipped? What follows after this is a series of chapters provided by various contributors. Although fairly well written, it very much feels like a collection of individual articles that lack any real substance.
There are some actionable items but, in the main, these are the exception rather than the norm. All-in-all, this ‘Best Practice Guide’ left me feeling disappointed and a lot of the information contained within it is already in the public domain. Even it you wanted to pay for the convenience of having this information collated for you, the £150 that the guide costs is very expensive for what is actually delivered. My recommendation: Save your money.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Adrian
I'm sorry you were so dissatisfied with our Best Practice Guide – here's my feedback on your comments.
It was never intended to be a 'book' and to the best of my knowledge it was never marketed as such. Its really designed to be a structured, easily digestible breakdown of hints and tips and advice from B2B marketing experts for practitioners on how they can make best use of this new and emerging set of marketing techniques.
The newness of social media as a B2B marketing tool means that it is constantly changing, and definitive benchmarked best practice guidance simply does not exist. However, this guide was designed to help marketers understand what is going on currently, and give them a head start in making use of it themselves.
Another point to make is that, as a marketing service provider, this guide was not really intended for you. We're really aiming them at the client side marketers, who are generally more in need of this kind of information, and find it harder to come by.
So once again, I can only apologise that you found the product so unsatisfactory. I've looked back over the executive summary which was available free and am confident that the completed product delivered what was promised.
However, if you have any suggestions for how this particular guide or the product generally could be improved, please do let me know. We take all feedback very seriously and are constantly seeking to improve what we do.
Thanks and kind regards, Joel Harrison, Editor, B2B Marketing
Hi Joel
Thank you for taking the time to comment. Obviously, I'm happy to publish your response in the interest of balance.
For me, regardless of what we call the product, my main concern would be the cost versus value. That, combined with the lack of response to my email back in November, just led to a feeling of frustration.
I also find it somewhat ironic that the publisher of a guide on social media marketing didn't spot this blog post, subsequent 'Twittering' of it or, indeed, the original email expressing disappointment. Luckily, I had a phone call, presumably to upsell, otherwise I'm sure this feedback would have remained unseen.
No hard feelings and thanks again for your personal response.