Social media is changing the way people think about marketing. It's much more than pushing out the same content through new channels. The biggest shift is that communications is now bi-directional; you can (and must) listen to your customers rather than just talking to (at) them. But, with so many social media channels and new rules of engagement, even seasoned marketing professionals sometimes get stuck on where to begin.

This book was created for business-to-business (B2B) marketing professionals who need to move quickly towards a marketing mix that now includes social media. While there are many books on social media marketing, there are few that focus on B2B. While B2B marketing is still the commonly used term to differentiate it from business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, social media -- and the future of marketing -- is about people-to-people (P2P) communications.

In this book, social media practitioners Michael Procopio, Peter Spielvogel, and Natascha Thomson share their combined 20 years of hands-on social media experience explaining how you can best leverage social media for your business. Learn how to understand market requirements, engage in conversations with your customers, build awareness for your solutions, and generate targeted leads with social media.

Using a combination of proven best practices and real-world stories, the authors describe how to maximize your return on investment with Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other popular online channels. The focus is on how to engage more effectively with your customers and prospects using social media.

The phased approach used in the book enables you to make steady progress as you move into social media without getting overwhelmed by too many options. Instead, the book makes it easy to integrate what you learn into your existing marketing strategy and day-to-day execution, step by step, while avoiding classic mistakes like over-committing resources. Providing small and well-defined chunks, this book will help you define what is right for your business, as taking on too much has caused many failures.

If you want to remain relevant as a marketing professional and avoid common mistakes, read this book.

The authors are donating all their royalties to the Khan Academy, an organization committed to providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere. http: //www.khanacademy.org