A comprehensive resource for anyone who’s looking to capitalize on the gathering strength of social media.
A practical handbook for those looking to leverage the power of social media influencers to advance their brands.
According to Schaffer, an instructor at Rutgers Business School, the marketing power of influencers is a natural consequence of the world’s “digital transformation.” The barriers to content creation and its publication and distribution have never been lower, which has resulted in an unprecedented democratization of the online marketplace. Influencers, he notes, often possess more power than celebrities and brands, as they convey an “authenticity and human touch” and “emotional resonance” that’s difficult to replicate. The author explains that extraordinary opportunities exist if one knows how to leverage the power of influencers with not only a targeted advertising campaign, but also the deep engagement with an online community: “This concept of community…underlies a fundamental mind-set shift,” he writes. “Building a community is a longer-lasting way to gather people around your brand or product. Once you’ve established a community, any campaign you launch has a foundation to start with and a cumulative effect to follow.” To that end, Schaffer provides an impressively thorough tour of the influencer’s cosmos; he describes, in lucid but granular detail, the various kinds of influencers, the most effective ways to find and contact them, and 16 different strategies for collaborating with them. The book’s orientation is relentlessly practical throughout, and the author provides actionable counsel on influencer discovery tools and marketplaces, the use of agencies, and the most effective ways to measure one’s returns. Nevertheless, for all the analytical minutiae, the author remains focused, sometimes to the point of redundancy, on the big picture—the “grand scheme of your social media strategy to holistically understand the layout of the landscape and where influencers fit in.”
Schaffer has considerable experience as a marketing educator, consultant, and influencer in his own right, and his tone over the course of this book radiates the reasonable self-assurance of expertise. Despite the brevity of the work, it still manages to be astonishingly thorough, and it’s written in an informal, accessible style that doesn’t assume any special knowledge on the part of the reader. The work could be even shorter, in fact, as the author has a tendency to belabor points at times. Nevertheless, it offers everything that a reader could possibly want in an introductory primer: an overview of the relevant field and its history, prognostication about its future, and a step-by-step commentary explaining how to take advantage of trends. Also, the author makes a powerfully convincing case that no viable business can afford to neglect the potential of social media—and that one must be hands-on when it comes to strategy: “If you’re not engaged in social media, then you miss your chance to connect with this generation. Basically stated: To have any pull in media, you have to be seen on social media….[Y]ou will still need to be involved in social media yourself to some extent.”
A comprehensive resource for anyone who’s looking to capitalize on the gathering strength of social media.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4002-1636-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
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
IN THE NEWS
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
