Tim Frick is the author of ‘Return on Engagement’ and the founder of Chicago based agency Mightybytes, which just won an ‘Award of Excellence’ from the 16th Annual Communication Awards.
The subtitle of ‘Return on Engagement’ is, “Content, Strategy, and Design Techniques for Digital Marketing”. For once, a book’s title actually matched the contents inside and I enjoyed the read.
Frick immediately recognizes the immense challenges of the management and strategy of marketing a business in the digital realm and discusses in the preface how, as he honed his digital strategy early on the management of social networks and services like Twitter and Facebook grew to occupy the time of employees that needed to be spent doing work that pays the bills. As anyone familiar with managing a digital business knows, social networks and Twitter absolutely produce revenue when managed properly in the form of customer engagement and retention but his point was clear; a person could spend the better part of their waking life on all the different services, tools and sites available without having a clear return on their engagement (which makes the book’s title all the more appropriate).
The book is broken down into 3 parts and 16 individual chapters and takes each portion of the digital puzzle in turn and explains how it fits into an overall strategy. Many people (myself included) have so many obligations and tasks to get done each day something slips when a plan isn’t in place. While having a plan isn’t exactly groundbreaking advice, the way Frick masterfully explains each concept and weaves it into the whole of a marketing strategy is.
‘Return on Engagement’ came out in June of this year and is wonderfully up to date which makes it a good read and likely to be timely for the next year until everything starts to shift again (as it always does) in digital.
Some well known Chicago digital personalities make an appearance in the book as examples of doing things the right way such as Tim Jahn of Beyond the Pedway and Sarah Best of Explore Chicago .
The book gets into topics such as Content Management Systems (CMS) and the importance of regularly updated good content, Development, Blogs, the importance of RSS, Email Marketing do’s and don’ts, social media optimization and Web Video Production.
Frick ends the book by having Chapter 16 as a case study of helping a client take all the pieces and put them together into a cohesive whole.
I will readily admit a few bits went over my head (I am no developer) but 99% of what I read in Return on Engagement was invaluable to me as I find the right way to run Flyover Geeks and communicate with our audience as best as possible.
A great read and very useful to anyone starting a blog or launching a site for a new business.
Here is the author discussing his book: