This was the first book I’ve read by Guy Kawasaki, I actually got a copy in advance because I am a part of alltop.com, one of Guy Kawasaki’s projects.

If you are unfamiliar with Guy, he is the former chief evangelist of Apple. He is the co-founder of Alltop.com and a founding partner at Garage Technology Ventures.

Enchantment was a great read! This book will teach you how to market yourself and your business in 2011! It will help you becoming an enchanting individual, enchant your customers, company and your boss! It will also teach you how to enchant the people you lead!

Guy defines Enchantment as “the process of delighting people with a product, service, organization, or idea.”

From a business or ministry perspective, Enchantment will teach you to properly use e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging, or a company website to your benefit. It’s extremely practical and the principles are easy to implement.

I would highly recommend reading this book! Buy it here:

Here at the Chapter Titles in case you are interested:

Why Enchantment?
How to Achieve Likability
How to Achieve Trustworthiness
How to Prepare
How to Launch
How to Overcome Resistance
How to Make Enchantment Endure
How to Use Push Technology
How to Use Pull Technology
How to Enchant Your Employees
How to Enchant Your Boss
How to Resist Enchantment

This video from Seth Godin really challenged me on social networking this weekend. I’m really re-thinking the way I do social networking. This statement is what challenged me the most:

“Networking is always important when it’s real and it’s always a useless distraction when it’s fake”

Here are some questions I’m asking myself. In the future I’ll post about my social media strategy. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these questions:

• How can we use social media to make real connections?

• How can we really add value to people through social media?

• How do you measure the success of how we use social media?

• Are we really making a difference through our efforts?

• How much of the way I use social media is a useless distraction?
  

Thoughts?

¹⁷ And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through him to God the Father. – Colossians 3:17

Yesterday I covered how Social Media could ruin your life, today I want to focus on how it could benefit your life, in addition to changing the world.

Social Media Can Inspire the World – People often downplay tweeting inspirational quotes – does it really matter? Well, all quotes can do is inspire someone. When the inspiration turns to action – it makes a huge difference. My take: inspire as often as possible – you never know who you’re inspiring and what will happen if they act on that inspiration.

Social Media Can Encourage the World- Everybody needs encouragement. Social media provides an avenue to encourage everyone often.  Encourage everybody you can!

Social Media Makes the World a Better Place – Again, it comes down to who is using it. But what if we’re always encouraging and inspiring people with what we do through social media? You can’t tell me the world wouldn’t be a better place!

Social Media Can Expand Your Influence – You have an opportunity to build your reputation and increase your influence for good or bad with everything you do through social media. Build a great platform – I recommend reading Michael Hyatt’s Blog – he is a master at this. He posted about building your online platform here.

Social Media Can Cause Your Product or Business to Thrive - If you’re consistent and continue to provide products, ideas, inspiration, and encouragement that will benefit others, word will spread and you’ll benefit.

Social Media Can Spread Your Message around the World - What are you passionate about? What is the one message you want to communicate to the world? For me, I want people to know that the best life they could ever live is passionately living for God everyday. Everything I do is to spread that message. If it’s a message worth spreading, it will get around!

What am I missing? What other ways are social media beneficial?