This guide combines useful strategies with a compelling case for leveraging the power of influencers.
A marketing firm leader explains how to use social media influencers, public figures, and celebrities in marketing campaigns.
Katz begins his guide in 1985, when he attended, near the start of his two-decade music industry career, a Live Aid concert. The event was an example of what he terms the “Influencer Effect,” or the “exponential impact” that public figures (in this case, musicians) have by “throwing their popularity, social capital, and platform behind a particular cause or brand.” Now the leader of a firm called Entertain Impact, a “social impact marketing and advocacy agency,” the author first discusses how influencer marketing “is effective, growing, and here to stay,” citing various generational, demographic, and marketing research studies. He then focuses most of the book on how to “engage a public figure, celebrity, or social media influencer who has a passion for your particular brand or cause, even if you do not personally know them.” Katz puts influencers in mega, macro, micro, and nano categories based on their potential audience reach (drawn from such data as Twitter followers and other influencer research resources) and notes the advantages of leveraging any or all of these groups in campaigns. He organizes the approach to influencer engagement and activation via what he calls the “D.R.E.A.M.” method, or “Design your Action Plan, Research your Influencers, Engage your Influencers, Activate Your Campaign, Measure your Impact.” Tips include that six to nine months is generally needed to build a campaign from scratch, allowing time for plan development and approval. Companies will need to identify and target many influencers up front in order to get some positive responses. They must be specific about the level of commitment needed from influencers, be it just a supportive tweet or an event appearance.
Katz has written a guide that is inspirational and practical. He offers the heartening perspective that campaigns leveraging influencers, who often greatly reduce or even waive typical fees for the right cause, can help change the world for the good. Then, through case study examples, cited research studies, and how-to tips, he provides ammunition to anyone working for a for-profit or nonprofit company who wants to convince management to use influencers and be strategic in reaching out to them. While a cheerleader for this kind of marketing, Katz is cleareyed about its challenges, noting that many of the new, emerging influencers on social media will require payment and that breaking news can always distract or disrupt a campaign. This book largely focuses on campaigns that have some kind of cause-related tie-in, including what Katz terms a “Multi-Pact,” or a business partnering with a nonprofit and an influencer, which results in “amplified commercial & social impact to the Nth degree.” But the book also features some excellent examples of low-cost, high-impact campaigns in the for-profit arena, such as Dove’s offering cash and products to 50 nano influencers “to hyper-focus on an audience and create word of mouth or buzz about their product.” Some of Katz’s suggestions, including to have S.M.A.R.T. (“Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time‐bound”) goals and a “Call to Action” in campaigns, are long-held marketing concepts. Yet they are essential to reiterate since they remain applicable in this exciting and growing part of the marketing world.
This guide combines useful strategies with a compelling case for leveraging the power of influencers.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798986326139
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Commit Media Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.
A helpful guide to working effectively with people from other cultures.
“The sad truth is that the vast majority of managers who conduct business internationally have little understanding about how culture is impacting their work,” writes Meyer, a professor at INSEAD, an international business school. Yet they face a wider array of work styles than ever before in dealing with clients, suppliers and colleagues from around the world. When is it best to speak or stay quiet? What is the role of the leader in the room? When working with foreign business people, failing to take cultural differences into account can lead to frustration, misunderstanding or worse. Based on research and her experiences teaching cross-cultural behaviors to executive students, the author examines a handful of key areas. Among others, they include communicating (Anglo-Saxons are explicit; Asians communicate implicitly, requiring listeners to read between the lines), developing a sense of trust (Brazilians do it over long lunches), and decision-making (Germans rely on consensus, Americans on one decider). In each area, the author provides a “culture map scale” that positions behaviors in more than 20 countries along a continuum, allowing readers to anticipate the preferences of individuals from a particular country: Do they like direct or indirect negative feedback? Are they rigid or flexible regarding deadlines? Do they favor verbal or written commitments? And so on. Meyer discusses managers who have faced perplexing situations, such as knowledgeable team members who fail to speak up in meetings or Indians who offer a puzzling half-shake, half-nod of the head. Cultural differences—not personality quirks—are the motivating factors behind many behavioral styles. Depending on our cultures, we understand the world in a particular way, find certain arguments persuasive or lacking merit, and consider some ways of making decisions or measuring time natural and others quite strange.
These are not hard and fast rules, but Meyer delivers important reading for those engaged in international business.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-250-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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