Definitive Printing Services

, in the chapters of the book that cover spfeciic types of platforms the author enthuses too much about what's great about the platform but doesn't adequately (in my opinion) address the costs of entering these new advertising and engagement media. Like many social media enthusiasts he seems to feel we should just jump into all of it with both feet. The problem is the labor-intensity of learning to adapt and the grunt work of building presences within these new platforms. Obviously we're going to have to choose a few and ignore the rest, but the author's enthusiasm for all the new platforms means that if you follow his advice you'll be buried up to your neck in new websites to join and explore. The author addresses our concerns at the start: that social media marketing can be a big time and resource waster. He promises that he'll show us ways to always come out ahead and get maximum bang for our buck. I didn't feel he made good on the promise though.While the book offers a lot of practical tips, the author is most interested in internet trends towards what he calls Web 3.0. He's speculating as to which media channels may get big and important. In his enthusiasm for all the new toys, I found his arguments for using these new tools became ungrounded. While the book does contain some practical advice for using things like Twitter and texting, it also ventures into areas of marketing in the new media, such as virtual reality worlds, where you would have to have staff investing tremendous amounts of time learning the platforms and networking within them.The author's inspirations are billion-dollar companies like Zappos. These businesses have the resources to put full-time staff on projects like building a presence in Second Life and the 20-odd other virtual reality sites he reals off as worth investigating. I'm happy for the author that he gets to mastermind massive campaigns in these new media and direct his scores of virtual employees, but as a practical matter I found many of the tactics suggested in the book pretty impractical for a business without deep pockets.I found a few tips I could use. The book is nicely designed and the author has a breezy prose voice. While reading I was excited about some of the methods described so I signed-up for a SecondLife account to check it out. I encountered an environment that clearly has a massive learning curve. If you had an employee or two on staff who already enjoyed virtual reality worlds, they'd learn faster I suppose but as a solo-preneur and marketing consultant, I'm just too busy with everything I'm already doing to invest my time learning platforms that basically amount to playing with virtual paper dolls