While it is my personal rule to not give out the conclusion of the book right at the start of a book review; I shall make an exception here. Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook (JJJRH) by Gary Vaynerchuk is an absolutely brilliant book for anyone seeking answers to formulate effective content strategy on social media.
The book covers almost all big and small social media platforms namely Twitter, Facebook, Google +, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine and Snapchat. While some of the platforms are discussed very extensively by Gary, for others he gives general guidelines that one may follow. I will come to the details as we go along the review.
The author starts the book in an interesting manner by giving an overview of the way users consume content digitally in the present days. He also supports his viewpoint with a few statistics that convince the readers of his opinion. He explains how marketers divide their campaigns into three categories – traditional, digital and social. He compares storytelling to boxing and explains the science that one needs to know and follow for excelling in both the arts. The book is divided like a game of boxing in several rounds. In Round II he explains six characteristics of great content and compelling stories. My favourite characteristic explained by him is, ‘good content doesn’t make demands – often’ and he summarises this idea with a very convincing logic. In Gary’s words “Your story needs to move people’s spirit and build their goodwill, so that when you finally so ask them to buy from you, they feel like you’ve given them so much it would be almost rude to refuse.”
The rest of the book is divided into various ‘Rounds’ that explain how one can effectively tell a convincing story on various platforms. He explains Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr in great detail and gives various (10-30 in number) good/bad, effective/ineffective, successful/failure examples on each of the above mentioned platforms. He takes a lot of time to explain each of the examples by answering the following: what was good in a post, what was bad, how could a post have done way better than it did, why a post did so well, the elements lacking in a good & successful post, how could the picture used be more convincing, why a text used in a post was good or bad etc. He basically does a post-mortem of all the examples he has listed that gives readers a very good idea of the do’s and don’ts of a particular platform. He summarizes each of the above platforms by a list of questions that a marketer can ask while executing his/her social media strategy for that particular social network. Gary also explains what he calls ‘Emerging Networks’ at the time of writing the book – LinkedIn, Google +, Vine and Snapchat. He explains why he thinks these platforms are promising and right in the beginning of the book he emphasizes why a marketer must be friends with the emerging technology and not afraid of it.
If I have not made my point clear by now, #JJJRH is a must read for marketers responsible for planning, managing and executing social media campaigns.
– Radhika Nandwani
Radhika is the Corporate Communications Advisor at Dell’s Performance Analytics Group. She started her career in 2011, with one of the leading public relations firms of India – MSLGROUP, specialising in technology brands. The campaigns executed by her while at MSL, have won several public relations industry awards including SABRE and PR Week Asia. In her last role, she was the founding team member and the marketing communications manager at SCoRe. Radhika is an English graduate and holds a Master’s degree in Mass Communication. She loves reading and is passionate about gender equality, food and Bollywood. She can be reached at @RadhikaNandwani on Twitter and here on LinkedIn.
