Reading – The Small Army Strategy

There are more books about blogging and social media trends, tactics, strategies, and manipulation out there than any one person could ever read. As more and more of commerce shifts to the web, and as sites like Facebook and Twitter continue to collect users, the act of writing a book about social media continues to become more and more popular.

Subtitled A Guide for Turning Fans and Followers into Fanatics and Friends for Life, author Srinivas Rao — with his book, The Small Army Strategy* — is taking a different approach to the art of social media than I’ve seen more recommend. Even the book itself, at about sixty pages and just $7, follows the approach Roa recommends in the book:

Go smaller.

Fifteen Short Chapters

The Small Army Strategy* is written more for the web than for the printed form, with each of the fifteen chapters three or so pages long.

Bite-sized chunks of information that — I am certain — would sometimes work better online than they do here; some of the text was clearly hyper-linked at one point so where it says things like “an interesting post” (p. 20) we only get part of the story because we don’t have the link.

Hidden Gems

The book, written in a conversational style and quick to absorb, mostly concerns itself with outreach to a small audience, offering suggestions for turning casual followers into devoted fans. The word “tribe” is used, suggesting that as a blogger or social media “personality” your goal should be to win over a small audience who will follow you through anything instead of trying to simply accumulate a mass of casual readers and followers.

A few ideas that caught my eye and imagination include:

• Create Art, Not Marketing Material – The idea is to get creative with your work online. Blog posts, Facebook updates, and tweets that are entertaining and not even trying to blatantly sell something or earn yourself cash and recognition. This ties directly into:
  
• You Can’t Manufacture Authenticity – Very, very true. One of the reasons I’ve not really gotten into the practice of creating and posting lots of videos is I don’t know how and I don’t believe I would be good at it. I love to talk, speak to crowds without issue, but the art of crafting a video I can be proud of is something I cannot do. And I fear that if I tried it would feel forced and not be fun at all. For any of us.
  
• Write A Post Specifically For Each Reader – Okay, I really love this idea. I actually love the idea enough that this is an invitation to everyone: Comment here telling me what you would like to see me write about and I’ll do what I can to tackle the request. I’ll limit this to only five or so requests — and really weird things I cannot handle will be skipped — but if the idea works well I may do it again in the future.

Worth the Snag

While books about blogging and social media are not for everyone, if you’ve made it this far I suspect you have some interest in the subject. And at about $7 The Small Army Strategy* is worth trying.

I’m tossing this in my messenger bag today and will flip through it when on calls to see if any new thoughts hit me as I read the text again. The book may be short, but that could be a good thing since it’s short enough I have no problems reading it one more time.