""A solid... insightful explanation of how the Internet has armed the consumer—which is to say, everyone—against the mindless blather of corporate messaging attempts. Drop everything and read this book.""—The Wall Street Journal

The woman next to you in the coffee shop, typing madly on her laptop, just might be determining the ending to next year's block-buster film or how quickly the hottest new PDAT hits store shelves. In homes, dorm rooms, waiting rooms, planes and trains around the world, millions of people are exercising enormous influence on what we buy, even though they have no official connection to those products and services.

Who are they? What motivates them? Marketing experts Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba explore the ramifications of social media in Citizen Marketers. As everyday people increasingly create content on behalf of companies, brands or products, they are collaborating with others just like themselves and forming ever-growing communities of enhusiasts and evangelists. From the rough to the sophisticated, the ""user-generated media"" of blogs, online bulletin boards, podcasts, photos, songs, and animations are influencing companies' customer relationships, product design, and marketing campaigns, whether they participate willingly or not.

Citizen Marketers is the first book to document this phenomenon, examining some of the early winners and losers in this new genre, as well as some of its most noted constituents. With their exceptional knowledge of brands, products, companies and industries, the citizen marketers are democratizing traditional notions of communication and marketing, even entire business models.

Features:

• Research on social media
• Case studies of people and organizations fueling the growth of citizen marketing
• Clarifies the context and importance of technological and societal shifts that are changing the nature of customer expectations and relationships

Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba have cobbled together a collection of stories showing how bloggers, social networkers, and other online denizens have a platform to spread criticim - and commendations - widely over the internet via blogs and videos. Examples include bloggers who are shedding critical light on Dell, Apple's iPod, McDonald's, NetFlix, Comcast, and others.

But so what? Is there a marketer left on the planet who doesn't know that customers have this power? This, alone, is not enough content for a book. At best, this might make a two-page article in "Duh!" magazine.

There are no insights. It doesn't explore important implications for marketers, like the best way to respond to online criticism, how to fire up customer evangelists, how to engage with the blogger community, how to measure the effectiveness of a company-sponsored online community, or any other practical advice other than "the world has changed, you need to change with it." Even their thin attempts at insights - categorizing citizen marketers into four categories - is just left dangling, with no follow through on how to use these categories to inform your marketing strategy.

This book copies the format of another marketing fake - Seth Godin - by delivering a series of stories but failing to boil out the insights. We need FEWER of these self-indulgent, lazy and intellectually flabby books.

I'm a fan of these guys [Jackie Huba & Ben McConnel]. As most of you, I also met them with Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force, I even bought the Discussion Guide and follow their Blog everyday.
The fact is that this book covers really great experiences of lots of industries. One of my favorites is placed in the Record Industry, I thinkg that if they'd wrote the book these days, RadioHead would be a great case for the book.
More interesting lessons come every chapter, and more than a "Handbook", it's a Review one. And it will definetly be a classic record of our new marketing era.
So... Old School Marketing guys... this could be a book that shows you that Marketing is not the same, since several years ago.

I can't believe this book came out at the end of 2006. I just read a brand new book on a similar subject which referenced a lot of the same examples. No wonder Ben and Jackie have quickly become the authority on social media and new marketing.

This book is as useful as "How to get a date". OK. I may be extreme. The book does have a message. But again, it is nothing new and can be covered in one blog post. If you really care about web 2.0, go out there, open your browser, and read some blogs, play with Digg, YouTube, Faceboook... you will understand more, and keep up with the latest. If you don't care, why bother reading this book?

Much like the cyberculture events that Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba cherish, their book is fun, jazzy and almost habit-forming. They spin tale after tale of individuals and communities that are doing new and exciting things online, demonstrating just how much the emerging "social media" movement has changed the media landscape. Although fan sites devoted to particular cars or fictional universes are similar to older media phenomena such as fan magazines, spontaneously arising mass movements dedicated to saving discontinued soft drinks or spreading song parodies are unpredictable and unprecedented. The authors do a great job of sketching the outlines of the new movement. However, in part because the movement is still emerging, and in part because of their genuine enthusiasm for its activities, their analyses aren't as strong as their descriptions. This is especially true of their discussion of the forces driving social media, which are apparently all positive. With that caveat, we recommend this book to old-media communicators who want to understand the latest cyberculture developments and apply them to their own businesses.