Carl Foster
“The Zen of Social Media Marketing”
By Shama Hyder Kabani
October 2, 2011
The Zen of Social Media Marketing begins with a frank outline of the predicament faced by many businesses: “The times, they are a-changin’”(Dylan, 1964, 1:04). The twentieth century belonged to the business owners: they ran the Television Circus, and we were guests in their home if we wanted to be entertained. Now that social media websites like Facebook and Youtube have swallowed our lives, the companies are the guests; and instead of a commercial with scripted lines, a comment thread will speak the consumer’s truth: “Hey, Fritos! You suck!”
My name is Harold Croyne and I want to sell pistachios to wealthy Mexican pencil tycoons. I bought an advance promo copy of Shama Kabani’s book, The Zen of Social Media Marketing, on Amazon.com: It was the cheapest one available, but I did not anticipate all the colorful misspellings and missing graphics I would encounter.Neverthess a rhetorical question persisted in my mind: How does someone like a slick Sprite advertiser work his way into the conversation of people who are no longer indentured to television commercials?
Kabani knows. Kabani has tricked people into becoming her Facebook friend for years. She writes (2010), “Don’t be pushy. Don’t be impatient. Relationships take time to build”(p. 69). Don’t be transparent with your goals. Be sneaky! Manipulation takes time, and people with the internet are very smart. And if they are not smart, they can find a forum where people say smart things and advance their world-views accordingly.
It is also true that that these gradual “relationships” create opportunities. Alejandro Portes (2000) asserted, “The right ‘connections’ allow certain persons to gain access to profitable public contracts and bypass regulations binding on others”(3). This statement is validated in Kabani’s social methodology.However, nearly every other statement offered in Mr. Portes’s body of scholastic work is thoroughly disagreeable, and has been omitted here with purpose.
My own experience in networkingis sufficient example. I ingratiated myself to an elderly Mexican couple for years: I went to their Gabriel Garcia-Marquez readings, I visited them for Christmas instead of my own parents, and I even married one of their daughters. I will not use the daughter’s real name, so let us call her Ms. Chang.I never mentioned pistachios once, even when I walked in on a conversation about snacks.
Ms. Chang’s parents eventually passed on, as many old folks choose to do after a particularly dreary afternoon, but guess whose name was a principal in the will? The man who watched their cat during those summers in Oaxaca, of course. I had just made an immense profit without ever mentioning what I intended to sell.
To display her flair for online vanity, Kabani invites the reader to join her in a seance as she conjures facebook pages and LinkedIn accounts with such lifelike presence as to astound the staunchest skeptics of yesteryear. Kabani uses many of her own profiles and pages as examples of how to be wildly successful. The Zen of Social Media Marketing is not only a social media guide: It is a virtual rolodex full of marketing professionals, and among all the web designers periodically named you will find Kabani lurking in the shadows.
Clearly, the author is no gout on the visage of society: She is revered as a social media expert and upholds the office of President with the Marketing Zen Group. Now she has casually infiltrated the book world and put up a billboard advertising her principles in the Library of Congress.
Like a genie so drunk as to grant any wish that is blurted out, Kabani espouses that there is no end to the list of successful methods in social media. “Don’t like to write?” she asks rhetorically in a video interview with the Mommy Reporter website. “Can you pick up a camera or use a microphone? Find the medium that works for you”(personal communication, March 15, 2011).
Kabani’s basic assertion is correct: We are entering a paradoxical age–set to come crashing down in 2012, yes–but in the meantime, consumers are becoming less literate, less attentive, yet harder to fool than ever! It was a cold fact to acknowledge, and at this point I told myself to forget my pistachios for Mexicans dream. Perhaps Fate ordained I should go back to selling crickets outside of baseball games. But since I was in jail, I decided to keep reading Zen until Ms. Chang came to get me.
By the end I was convinced. Persistance and zen-like complacence bring success. In the eternal words of Sae Won Kim (2007) as expressed to the psychic community of Amsterdam: “When a new idea is introduced, it will start to spread as soon as the ‘infection’ rate is greater than the ‘removal’ rate (150)”, meaning that a marketing scheme begins to thrive when a greater number of those exposed to it keep some bond with it rather than writing it off as pandering. Make the Facebook connection, and keep it until that site tumbles like Myspace.
Hence we live in a time of memetic profusion in which thoughts and catchy slogans can take the world by storm at an alarming rate and with hypnotic force. Since so many aspects of American life revolve around the internet, these elements even have the ability to find us during work, school, or even in our most confined moments of illicit research. “Thought forms can be deliberately built up in any aspect we choose, and sent out to do our bidding (Ahmed, 1994, p. 249)”.
It is time to blend the terms “personal” and “business” with each other and turn the world into a giant unrecognizable store where financial gain is a byproduct of friendship. There is a growing sentimentality for such a consumer lifestyle, and business analysts may one day compare social media marketing to the closed-circuit operation of a fiefdom, or village bartering. Shama Kabani’s book is a very enthusiastic vote for that kind of world.
Works Cited in APA Style
Ahmed, R. (1994). The Black Art. London, England: Senate Publishing. 248-249
Kabani, S. (2010). The Zen of Social Media Marketing. Dallas, Texas: Benbella Books.
Kim, S. W., & Chong, J. C. (December 2007). Habits, Self-Control and Social Conventions: The
Role of Global Media and Corporations. Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 76, No. 2. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25075503
Mommy Reporter Online (2011). Video interview with Shama Kabani. March 15, 2011.
Retrieved from http://www.mommyreporter.com/2011/03/my-video-interview-with-
shama-kabani/
Portes, A. (March 2000). The Two Meanings of Social Capital. Sociological Forum, Vol. 15, No. 1. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3070334
“The Zen of Social Media Marketing”
By Shama Hyder Kabani
October 2, 2011
The Zen of Social Media Marketing begins with a frank outline of the predicament faced by many businesses: “The times, they are a-changin’”(Dylan, 1964, 1:04). The twentieth century belonged to the business owners: they ran the Television Circus, and we were guests in their home if we wanted to be entertained. Now that social media websites like Facebook and Youtube have swallowed our lives, the companies are the guests; and instead of a commercial with scripted lines, a comment thread will speak the consumer’s truth: “Hey, Fritos! You suck!”
My name is Harold Croyne and I want to sell pistachios to wealthy Mexican pencil tycoons. I bought an advance promo copy of Shama Kabani’s book, The Zen of Social Media Marketing, on Amazon.com: It was the cheapest one available, but I did not anticipate all the colorful misspellings and missing graphics I would encounter.Neverthess a rhetorical question persisted in my mind: How does someone like a slick Sprite advertiser work his way into the conversation of people who are no longer indentured to television commercials?
Kabani knows. Kabani has tricked people into becoming her Facebook friend for years. She writes (2010), “Don’t be pushy. Don’t be impatient. Relationships take time to build”(p. 69). Don’t be transparent with your goals. Be sneaky! Manipulation takes time, and people with the internet are very smart. And if they are not smart, they can find a forum where people say smart things and advance their world-views accordingly.
It is also true that that these gradual “relationships” create opportunities. Alejandro Portes (2000) asserted, “The right ‘connections’ allow certain persons to gain access to profitable public contracts and bypass regulations binding on others”(3). This statement is validated in Kabani’s social methodology.However, nearly every other statement offered in Mr. Portes’s body of scholastic work is thoroughly disagreeable, and has been omitted here with purpose.
My own experience in networkingis sufficient example. I ingratiated myself to an elderly Mexican couple for years: I went to their Gabriel Garcia-Marquez readings, I visited them for Christmas instead of my own parents, and I even married one of their daughters. I will not use the daughter’s real name, so let us call her Ms. Chang.I never mentioned pistachios once, even when I walked in on a conversation about snacks.
Ms. Chang’s parents eventually passed on, as many old folks choose to do after a particularly dreary afternoon, but guess whose name was a principal in the will? The man who watched their cat during those summers in Oaxaca, of course. I had just made an immense profit without ever mentioning what I intended to sell.
To display her flair for online vanity, Kabani invites the reader to join her in a seance as she conjures facebook pages and LinkedIn accounts with such lifelike presence as to astound the staunchest skeptics of yesteryear. Kabani uses many of her own profiles and pages as examples of how to be wildly successful. The Zen of Social Media Marketing is not only a social media guide: It is a virtual rolodex full of marketing professionals, and among all the web designers periodically named you will find Kabani lurking in the shadows.
Clearly, the author is no gout on the visage of society: She is revered as a social media expert and upholds the office of President with the Marketing Zen Group. Now she has casually infiltrated the book world and put up a billboard advertising her principles in the Library of Congress.
Like a genie so drunk as to grant any wish that is blurted out, Kabani espouses that there is no end to the list of successful methods in social media. “Don’t like to write?” she asks rhetorically in a video interview with the Mommy Reporter website. “Can you pick up a camera or use a microphone? Find the medium that works for you”(personal communication, March 15, 2011).
Kabani’s basic assertion is correct: We are entering a paradoxical age–set to come crashing down in 2012, yes–but in the meantime, consumers are becoming less literate, less attentive, yet harder to fool than ever! It was a cold fact to acknowledge, and at this point I told myself to forget my pistachios for Mexicans dream. Perhaps Fate ordained I should go back to selling crickets outside of baseball games. But since I was in jail, I decided to keep reading Zen until Ms. Chang came to get me.
By the end I was convinced. Persistance and zen-like complacence bring success. In the eternal words of Sae Won Kim (2007) as expressed to the psychic community of Amsterdam: “When a new idea is introduced, it will start to spread as soon as the ‘infection’ rate is greater than the ‘removal’ rate (150)”, meaning that a marketing scheme begins to thrive when a greater number of those exposed to it keep some bond with it rather than writing it off as pandering. Make the Facebook connection, and keep it until that site tumbles like Myspace.
Hence we live in a time of memetic profusion in which thoughts and catchy slogans can take the world by storm at an alarming rate and with hypnotic force. Since so many aspects of American life revolve around the internet, these elements even have the ability to find us during work, school, or even in our most confined moments of illicit research. “Thought forms can be deliberately built up in any aspect we choose, and sent out to do our bidding (Ahmed, 1994, p. 249)”.
It is time to blend the terms “personal” and “business” with each other and turn the world into a giant unrecognizable store where financial gain is a byproduct of friendship. There is a growing sentimentality for such a consumer lifestyle, and business analysts may one day compare social media marketing to the closed-circuit operation of a fiefdom, or village bartering. Shama Kabani’s book is a very enthusiastic vote for that kind of world.
Works Cited in APA Style
Ahmed, R. (1994). The Black Art. London, England: Senate Publishing. 248-249
Kabani, S. (2010). The Zen of Social Media Marketing. Dallas, Texas: Benbella Books.
Kim, S. W., & Chong, J. C. (December 2007). Habits, Self-Control and Social Conventions: The
Role of Global Media and Corporations. Journal of Business Ethics, Vol. 76, No. 2. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25075503
Mommy Reporter Online (2011). Video interview with Shama Kabani. March 15, 2011.
Retrieved from http://www.mommyreporter.com/2011/03/my-video-interview-with-
shama-kabani/
Portes, A. (March 2000). The Two Meanings of Social Capital. Sociological Forum, Vol. 15, No. 1. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3070334