A highly useful, invigoratingly people-centered approach to digital marketing.
A comprehensive guide to managing digital marketing.
In these pages, digital marketing consultant Schaffer, whose last book was The Age of Influence, (2020), describes the altered nature of the consumer world, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. He notes what many have cited as the pandemic’s effects: “the acceleration of the digital consumer,” the primacy of digital outreach, and the overwhelming importance of handling online marketing effectively. To this end, with the goal of establishing a Digital First strategy, he proposes a “new playbook.” In this playbook, Schaffer recommends that businesses and entrepreneurs concentrate on forming and strengthening “Digital Threads,” a system of online outreach: If this system is implemented correctly, it will greatly strengthen a business; if ignored, it could lead to “the risk of being left behind in what worked yesterday”). He breaks down all the various Digital Threads that new marketers must keep in focus, such as search engine optimization, which has advanced enormously from the old “keyword stuffing” state of pre–Covid-19 days. He touches on the use of artificial intelligence but warns his readers that Digital Threads is an intensely person-oriented plan: “You should not lose the soul of how you appear to your customers and prospects,” he cautions. His chapters are distilled into key takeaways that help the reader to clarify the large amount of advice and information they’re getting here (for example, “Building relationships with algorithms is about trustworthiness and authority,” and “Backlinks create validity that your content is useful and trusted”). Absolutely everything is analyzed in terms of enhancing business.
Schaffer’s approach is a winning mixture of the personal and the professional. He opens his book by reflecting on how the pandemic affected his own business as an author suddenly deprived of book tours, book signings, readings, and so on. And throughout the book, he convincingly stresses the strongest, most important aspect of his Digital Threads strategy: people, actual personal connections (hence, his cautions about AI). When discussing the uses of social media (the book’s strongest narrative component), for instance, he advises readers, “There is no better way of becoming friends with the [social media] algorithm and exposing your business to more social media users than by feeding the algorithm what it wants: Platform Authentic Content.” He convincingly urges his readers to “embrace” social media algorithms as a means of connecting with actual human beings. “You’re telling your brand’s story,” he writes, “and you’re telling the story of the consumer within the frame of your brand” (“show, don’t sell,” as he puts it). Even on such quotidian subjects as building an email list, he stresses that mere accumulation of data is not enough; companies and entrepreneurs must “turn these connections into conversations.” Throughout his guide, Schaffer directs readers to the downloadable electronic “workbook” that accompanies his main text, which not only distracts from, but also undermines the sufficiency of the main text itself. But even so, that text abounds with practical tips and insights born of experience. Schaffer is entirely right that many small businesses only hesitantly and incompletely dabble in the digital side of their marketing—a Facebook post here, an email blast there—and his book provides a bracing corrective to this negligence.
A highly useful, invigoratingly people-centered approach to digital marketing.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798990612747
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Pdca Social
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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IN THE NEWS
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.
Helbig and Norman present a game plan for making leadership more responsively human.
In this expanded update to The Psychological Safety Playbook: Lead More Powerfully by Being More Human (2023), the authors provide “practical strategies for responding to resistance, sparking change, embodying the change we want to see, and moving forward deliberately,” specifically in a business setting. They suggest ways to encourage what they call “changemakers” through the use of five key “plays” from their playbook: Communicate Courageously, Master the Art of Listening, Manage Your Reactions (“shift from automatic reaction to conscious response to stay better connected to yourself and others”), Embrace Risk and Failure, and Design Inclusive Rituals. The goal is to ensure that organizational cultures promote psychological safety, guided by leaders who “walk the talk” by emphasizing their own humanity at every turn. (“We must be the first to share our own failures with our teams, which will start to make it possible for others to do the same.”) This call for example-setting is sounded throughout the book as Helbig and Norman urge their target audience (leaders and would-be leaders) to go beyond mere instruction and instead embody the qualities they want to see in their subordinates, such as continuous learning, active curiosity, and self-reflection. Each chapter includes a detailed “Recommended Reading” section and text with extensive numbered and bulleted points formatted to make the core concepts more immediately digestible. The authors effectively employ clear and empathetic prose to assure readers that psychological safety is slow to build and quick to break, observing that such safety requires steady attention and delivers outsize payoffs as a result. They refreshingly ground a great deal of the material in psychology and neuroscience, pointing out, for instance, that research has demonstrated that the parasympathetic nervous system responds to honest appreciation, which improves creative thinking. Some wistful readers might consider some of the authors’ suggestions beyond the reach of their own organizations, as when group facilitators are advised to “gently intervene when someone dominates the conversation,” but hope springs eternal.
A passionate and accessible guide to humanizing the workplace.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9798993550503
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Crazy Idea Press
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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