Marketing and selling over the Web has been a required activity for almost every business I have been involved in for over ten years. In the last couple of years, the web has continued to evolve and now in some undeniably novel ways. The most notable are the appearance and enormous growth of “communities” or “social networks”. It is clear that the existing web marketing paradigm that focuses on pay-for-click advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) is being enormously enriched by the opportunities presented by social or community oriented environments. This later change requires real shifts in the approach and objectives for marketing on the web.

Just as I have begun to attempt my own synthesis of these changes, I have come upon Marketing to the Social Web: how digital communities build your business by Larry Weber (John Wiley & Sons, New York 2007). The author has extensive experience in the Web world and provides more than enough examples and anecdotes to illustrate his case.

The basic argument of the book is that the interactivity of the web is now producing completely new ways in which companies and customers can interact.

Weber develops seven steps to marketing on the social web:

1. Observe - see where, what and how your customers do in the social web. Check out blogs, conversations, relevant content, etc.
2. Recruit - enlist core participants who want to talk about your company, its products and services.
3. Evaluate platforms - which platforms are best to reach your marketing objectives - blogs, reputation aggregators, social networks?
4. Engage - this is all about developing and maintaining content - user generated and yours.
5. Measure - develop metrics relevant to the objectives and measure.
6. Promote - connect with other communities in the web.
7. Improve.

Weber provides lots of discussion and anecdotes to illustrate each of these seven steps. Then he adds four strategies to expanding the reach of marketing on the social network - (1) SEO, (2) blogs, (3) e-communities, and (4) social networks.

This book is a solid contribution to understanding and participating in the ongoing development of the web world. This is esepcially so for creating a more productive balance between traditional web marketing, pay-for -click advertising and SEO, and the emerging world of the social web.

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As a bit of preface to these remarks, I approach customer advisory boards (CABs) from earlier experiences with supplier advisory boards and customer participation in product development. This may variously prejudice or inform here.

Customer Advisory Boards are powerful tools for engaging with customers in a variety of dimensions. Companies are using them to interactively work with their customers on developing new products and services, to keep them abreast of changes in their customers’ perceptions of the changing landscape of their business world, and more. CABs provide a platform to share and develop in an environment where the customer is present and participating. CABs are used by big and small firms, They are relatively inexpensive and potentially very high in rewards. Given this, it is of immediate interest to read a book on this topic.Customer Advisory Boards: a strategic tool for customer relationship building by Tony Carter (Binghampton, NY: Best Business Books Haworth Press, Inc. 2003)The tagline for this book, “a strategic tool for customer relationship building” only hints at the confusion of ideas within its covers. 45% of the book, “Section I:Customer Relationship Building”, is taken up with a discursive sampling of theory and practice in relationship selling, customer-centered value, and the ‘nature of relationships” (this includes a side venture into leadership and emotional intelligence theories). Many of these discussions are interesting, even provocative in themselves. Unfortunately, Carter makes no organized effort to map these onto the actual topic at hand, CABs. Further, Carter mixes in discussion of Advisory Boards for start-up firms with applications more typical for mature firms.The balance of the book, “Section II: Building Customer Advisory Boards” and “Section III: Strategic Uses and Effective Management” will not reward senior managers or consultants with much of practical value. The view of strategic value is limited to customer acquisition and customer retention. There is no useful discussion of how meetings are actually conducted, how participants interact, what values they might gain,or how the meeting facilitation role is accomplished. In the end much of these sections of the book are taken up with cases studies that seem only peripherally to shed light on CABs.For a book that pops up very high on a Google search for “customer advisory boards”, this is a disappointment.

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