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It’s Official: Our Book, Social Works, Is Released Today

Intelligence

It’s Official: Our Book, Social Works, Is Released Today

Feb 25, 2013By Michael Stoner

Today’s a big day for us at mStoner.

It marks the official release of the (print) edition of our book, Social Works: How #HigherEd Uses #SocialMedia to Raise Money, Build Awareness, Recruit Students and Get Results. Social Works contains 25 case studies of how college and universities around the world have successfully created campaigns built around a core of social media. Here’s more info about the contents — and you can order your copy right here, right now. [Really: I won’t mind if you pause from reading the rest of this post to buy a book or two.]

I’ve been tracking campaigns (“a focused effort to achieve goals using a variety of channels appropriate to the results sought”) that included a significant social media component since early 2009. Last summer, I realized that people really needed examples of successful campaigns. And detailed case studies exploring why they were effective would be useful to people who were responsible for creating and conducting campaigns — and also to their bosses, or boss’s bosses, who may need to be convinced that this approach is a good idea.

So we began plan this book. Besides me, many of my mStoner colleagues contributed case studies — Susan Evans, Kylie Stanley Larson, Melissa Soberanes, Mallory Wood, and Fran Zablocki — and mStoner designer Kevin Rieg designed the cover.

As we developed Social Works, it only made sense to reach out to our community and ask members to share their insights and expertise. I’m delighted to acknowledge the people outside mStoner wrote case studies for Social Works: Andrew Careaga, Jennifer Connally, Terry Flannery, Ellen Foley, Joel Goodman, Dana Howard, Erika Knudson, Nicole O’Connell, Rebecca Salerno, Donna Talarico, and Justin Ware.

Publishing a book has been an interesting and occasionally arduous journey — we’re still learning a lot (cf. tweaking ebooks for publication). It also takes a community, let me tell you. And a number of people on our publishing team deserve special props:

  • Robin Netherton, who edited the book;
  • Michelle Pais, who designed it;
  • The folks at Thomson-Shore, Inc. who printed Social Works and are distributing it for us (when you buy a print copy — and we hope you buy several! — they’re the ones who send it out to you].

My colleague Kylie Stanley Larson deserves special thanks. Without her hard work, diligence, and dedication this book wouldn’t have seen the light of day by today. After working with her on this project, I can understand why our clients love working with her.

And yes, there will be iBook/Kindle versions of Social Works. We’re still tweaking them  and expect to release them later in the week.

Coincidentally, yesterday was the first birthday of EDUniverse. We launched the site last year, hoping that the community would embrace it and share their thoughts and inspirations about marketing, social media, web development, and other topics in higher ed. We hoped it would become a destination for people seeking the latest thinking about these issues. We’re very happy to see that it has! And we’re very grateful to all the EDUniverse members who have signed up, signed in, and shared. If you’re not part of this community, please consider joining.

While I swear we didn’t plan to release Social Works today because of the EDUniverse anniversary, the two are, in fact, closely linked philosophically. For more about why I believe this is so, you can read mStoner’s 2012 annual report.

You can order your copy right here, right now.

And if you’re in the Boston area, please join us at BU tomorrow night (Tuesday, 26 February) for our book launch. Eric Stoller and I will be talking about effective use of social media in higher ed.


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?