Book Review: Likeable Social Media

I recently read Likeable Social Media: How To Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, & Be Generally Amazing On All Social Networks That Matter by Dave Kerpen. This book offers valuable insight to running social media for a business without talking down to you like you are baby boomer who doesn't know how to use a cell phone. (No offense to baby boomers. They just generally get a bad wrap for not knowing how to use technology, which makes for some pretty funny memes.)

Kerpen is an entrepreneur and public speaker who co-founded Likeable Media, a social media and word-of-mouth marketing agency for large businesses and Likeable Local for small business, so he is more than qualified to give advice and best-practices on the subject matter.

This book covers a wide range of social media topics, so I won’t go into them all in this review. I highly recommend checking out the book for yourself, but I will be discussing some highlights, takeaways, and points of disagreement.

Kerpen starts off with what all marketers should start off with – defining their target audience, which is NOT merely demographics. A description of your target audience includes demographics like age, gender, race and income, but you should also examine your customers’ likes, dislikes, attitudes, values, fears and beliefs. How do you learn all these things about your target audience? Kerpen recommends you listen, and never stop listening to them. You need to be on the social media platforms that your target audience is on, and you need to be providing relevant and valuable content that interests them. Kerpen references multiple times the idea of taking off your marketing hat and putting on your consumer hat. Think about how YOU would like to be treated as a customer. Do you want spammy emails and pop-up ads all the time that distract you from the content you’re trying to view? Probably not.

Kerpen makes a relationship metaphor throughout Likeable. He suggests that being engaged to your fiancé is kind of like being engaged to your consumers – promising to be truly concerned about what they say, think, feel and need. Kerpen says, “Just as we fall in love with people who can listen to us and we can trust, we fall in love with companies that can do the same.” To inspire brand loyalty and capture customer lifetime value, companies need to create a dialogue with their consumers. Companies should respond to good as well as bad comments. It may be tempting to quickly take down negative criticism or a customer’s bad experience, but Kerpen advocates for the do not delete rule. This rules states that unless a comment is obscene, profane, or bigoted, or it contains someone’s personal and private information, it should never be deleted from a social network site. Your non-response is also a response which is why it’s important to respond quickly to criticism and take it to direct messages if needed. Likeable is filled with great examples of all these points, but a prominent example in this scenario is a customer who was upset with his bill from Verizon. The company apologized, sent him a private message, and just four days later, the customer went back to social media singing the praises of the customer support team and the company. This example demonstrates that your unhappy customers can become your biggest supporters, so as tempting as it may be, do not delete their bad comments!

 Some other golden nuggets from Likeable include being authentic, honest and transparent, asking questions to engage your audience, making use of consumer generated content, and providing value. Each chapter has action items so you can begin putting these best practices into place at your company.

Kerpen practices what he preaches. I tweeted about his book, and he responded by liking my message, retweeting it, and having a small conversation with me. That is really all it takes to make a customer feel appreciated!

My biggest critique is that Kerpen paints social media as the holy grail of customer engagement. It seemed as if every problem can be solved by social media, which may not be the case. There are certainly situations where throwing social media into the problem makes it worse. Although we live in a digital age, traditional marketing tools like focus groups, press conferences and good old fashion market research can sometimes be the better avenue rather than going through the sensationalized ads and fake news on social media.