MKT392 SocialMediaMarketingF11

If you prefer Hotwired to The Economist, James Carville to David Brinkley, and Tom Peters to Peter Drucker, you will probably enjoy this book. It cheers the power of the Internet to create productive informal relationships between people.The book's primary message is "Markets are conversations." It should have been "Marketing is a conversation."Economic transactions are the exchange of information as well as economic goods and money. The authors are right to condemn the traditional tendency to focus too much on the exchange of economic goods for money. By overstating their case, the authors imply that we can safely ignore the exchange of economic goods and money. As many dot.com investors learned the hard way, dominating a particular conversational niche on the Internet does not automatically lead to success in business.As a book about marketing over the Internet, this book deserves four stars. As a book about Internet economics or information age management, it deserves none.