Book Review: The Digital Handshake by Paul Chaney

I’ve taken my time on this review (oh who am I kidding? I take forever on every book review and still have about 10 books to read!), but it’s not because it wasn’t good. I met the author, Paul Chaney, at BlogWorld 2008. He knows his stuff. So I was pleased to hear he’d put all his knowledge into this book, The Digital Handshake.

This book is a great starter if you’re new or relatively new to social media. Here are some of my favor
ite highlights:

If you want to exert influence through social media:

• Express servant leadership. Do unto others. Lead by example.
• Provide valuable content. This should go without saying but apparently there are people who don’t get it.
• Think in terms of what will benefit the community. Probably not your sales pitch.
• Research. I tend to rush through everything because I don’t feel like I have enough time to research. I could do better.

Paul gives you 7 strategies to grow your business. I won’t give them away, but chances are you’re doing at least a few. He’s definitely more knowledgeable about video than I am, so I paid careful attention to that section. He gave 6 ideas on how to use video, and I look forward to implementing them for Egg and our clients.

He also talks about the social media release, which is interesting, because it used to be so separate from a press release. But these days, I love the fact that companies like PRWeb and PitchEngine are integrating social media components automatically. Soon “press release” and “social media release” will be synonymous!

Paul also addresses how to measure the effectiveness of your social media efforts, which has been a hot topic of conversation. Reading this chapter, you’ll see it’s not hard to measure at all; it’s just a matter of shifting your thinking of what’s important to measure.

All in all, great book. I highly recommend you read The Digital Handshake, even if you think you know “everything” there is to know about social media!