Alan Vuong Annotated Bibliography

As a small business owner myself, I often wondered what I could do to expand my business. I was a high school student, so I did not have the resources to market my tennis racket stringing company. Therefore, I was often limited to the tennis players of my school. One day, my cousin suggested that I utilize social networking to branch out to the general public. I made a simple Facebook page with some contact information and asked those in my team to spread it around. Within a few weeks I received a few customers asking me to help string their rackets. This is when I opened my eyes to how social media can be a cheap, yet highly effective way to reach out to customers and engage them. The Internet, more specifically social media, has leveled the playing field for smaller businesses to compete with these larger companies, who have the resources to spend on fancy advertisements that give the same return. Therefore, I propose that small businesses utilize the tools easily accessible to them to expand their business. In this paper, I will explain just how to do that, why it works, some successful examples, and negate some concerns some businesses may have in using social media.

1. Harfoush, Rahaf. Yes We Did: An inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand. Berkeley, CA: New Riders, 2009. Print. Harfoush is a new media strategist who researches how technology affects the way we communicate, work, and play. She is writing to those who are looking into how social media can be applied by organizations. She believes that social media is a powerful tool and is very passionate about her research. She introduces many aspects of social networking I have not realized that will help an organization. She also includes how various types of social networking sites can help such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Myspace. She believes if you successfully engage with a consumer on their preferred social network, you will have the added benefit of exposure to that persons extended contacts on their network(144). This will help me introduce many topics for my paper, and in conjunction of other sources, help me show why social media is a reliable tool. Although it may not necessarily relate to a business in general, it will be helpful for me to propose why social media is a very strong tool in strengthening an organization. If it helped build the Obama campaign from a small group to his presidency, it could be very effective in helping small businesses thrive. 2. Fidelman, Mark. "Study: 78% Of Salespeople Using Social Media Outsell Their Peers."Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 19 May 2013. Web. 06 Nov. 2013. Fidelman covers social, mobile, and marketing trends for Forbes. He has had a lot of experience in the business field, and is currently a CEO for Raynforest. In this article, he looks into Jim Keenans social sales research, in which he finds that 78.6% of sales people using social media to sell out performed those who werent using social media. (Fidelman). He is trying to convince more companies to use social media. It has also been shown that social media users have also exceeded quota (exceeded quota by 10% of

Alan Vuong more) at higher rate than non-social media users every year since 2010. (Fidelman) This will help me prove that using social media helps people market to consumers with concrete examples from a reliable source. This will help me add more dimensions to my paper, while supplementing my other sources. The will be an especially good source to use to persuade the small business owners because they will listen to many of the statistics from a credible source such as Forbes and be more convinced that social media is right for them. 3. Copulsky, Jonathan R. Brand Resilience: Managing Risk and Recovery in a Highspeed World. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print. Companies are always at risk with social media, due to the many trolls looking to undermine the name of businesses. Social media news often spreads quickly, and companies are always susceptible to lost profits due to saboteurs looking to diminish their name. In Brand Resilence, Jonathan Copulsky along with other of his colleagues such as David Pelt (a professor of marketing at the University of North Carolina) set out to give some actions that companies can take to reduce their chances of reputation damage online. This source will be very helpful in responding to counterarguments that using social media for a small business may ruin the companys name. This source also lets businesses know that many brand attack attempts should not even be dealt with because they are not worth pursuing. Many are not to be taken seriously and will do little to no harm to a company. 4. Safko, Lon. "Social Media Bible : Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success (3rd Edition)." Wiley, Apr. 2012. Web. 07 Nov. 2013. Lon Sakfo is a marketing consulting with over twenty-five years of experience in the marketing field and has had over fourteen successful companies. In this book, he explains how small businesses, corporations, and non-profit marketers can use social media to reach a targeted audience. He starts by defining social media and emphasizing on audience. In response to why we should utilize social media, he states the reason social media is so much more effective than the conventional marketing that weve done for the last 6,000 years is that its two way communication, not pontification (Sakfo p.5). This source will be incredibly useful in giving tips to small business owners about how they can use social media to reach out to their customers. He also explains why these tactics work. In addition, he goes to further extents to talk about Google algorithms and other complex concepts to maximize social media coverage. This source echoes the claim made by others, working together to create an effective argument that small businesses will benefit from social media.

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5. Agresta, Stephanie, B. Bonin. Bough, and Jason I. Miletsky. Perspectives on Social Media Marketing. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning, 2010. Print. Agresta (currently working for Porter Novelli) and Bough (currently head of digital and social media at PepsiCo) write about how to really understand social media in order to successfully launch social media campaigns for businesses. They start from the basics, which can help a lot in paper to give my audience a background of social media. They also write about many strategies and tactics that social media can be used for. Since the writers apply this to their career fields and have much experience on these topics, this will help gain more credibility for my argument. One thing that keeps coming up in my sources is that fact that social media allows one to connect more deeply with consumers. This book is no different. In defining social media from a brand standpoint, Bough writes social media gives you opportunities to get closer to your consumer than you ever were before (3). 6. Emerson, Melinda. "Checking In on a Diner That Understands Social Media." Youre the Boss Checking In on a Diner That Understands Social Media Comments. New York Times, 1 Nov. 2013. Web. Since 1974, The Squeeze In restaurants have been open seven hours a day. Lately, they have been engaging in the social media fad, taking it very seriously. Emerson, a writer for NY Times, writes about how this small business has become one of the savviest social media users that she has come across. The restaurant uses Pinterest, Instagram, Foodspotting, Foursquare and Google+ to tease the taste buds of its customers (Emerson). An example of using social media includes YouTube. Squeeze It used YouTube, and had the staff work together to make parodies of music videos. They stated that this was not only good for building morale and camaraderie within the staff, but also after posting a video, they literally saw an increase in business of 28 percent the day after we posted that video on YouTube (Young). This is an excellent source I can use for an actual successful example of incorporating social media in a small business. This offers creative tips that small businesses, the audience of the article, can use to strengthen the business in terms of profit and team building. This helps support the view of the sources that I have come across, but also adds a whole new dimension to the argument.