Acknowledgments

Social media is a community first. One of the cool things about this community is that we help each other, even our competitors. So we want to thank some very special people who made this book possible.

First, thank you to Katherine Bull, our editor at Pearson, for making sure we could do our work and that we got our work done. Special thanks to Brandon Prebynski and Leslie O’Neill for the editing work that made the book so much better than it would have been. (We especially want to thank Leslie for being the willow in the windstorm of putting up with our grumblings.)

Thanks to Karen Annett for copy editing and making this book look so damn good, and to Betsy Harris for keeping us on task and making sure everything is done properly! Thanks to the rest of the support team at Pearson for believing in our off-beat approach.

We also want to thank people in our community. Without working with you, learning from you, and sharing ideas with you, we wouldn’t be able to write a book like this. Your generosity of time, knowledge, and ideas made this book possible. So thank you, in no particular order, to Paul Lorinczi, Kyle Lacy, Lorraine Ball, Doug Karr, Jay Baer, Darrin Gray, Sarah Robbins, Scott Stratten, Amber Naslund, Scott Monty, Chris Brogan, Nick Huhn, Tamar Weinberg, DJ Waldow, Aaron Marshall, and Dean Holmes. Also, thanks to Gary Vaynerchuk, whose line, “If you’re not using Twitter because you’re in the camp that thinks it’s stupid, you’re going to lose,” became the seed of an idea that resulted in this book.

We would be remiss if we didn’t thank our teachers over the years. You don’t become a writer or professional without help. Jason would like to recognize Jeanne Williamson Clark for teaching him how to write and Modena Sallee for making him want to. Jason also tips a cap to Dan Burgess, Todd Spencer, and Dave Wilkins of Doe-Anderson for giving him the confidence and freedom to work with clients when few knew what social media was. Erik wants to recognize his friend Joel Hedge for giving him his first writing break, Carmon and Jan Wenger of WE International for teaching him enough about business and marketing to become the kind of professional to write a book like this, and his mom and dad for instilling a love of the written word in him.

(Erik would also like to thank Jason for saying yes to a late-night text, asking him if he would like to write a book, after spending the previous two years swearing he never would. Jason would like to thank Erik for talking him out of being such a curmudgeon and putting his ideas down on paper.)

Finally, Erik would like to especially thank his wife, Toni, and his children, Maddie, Emma, and Ben, for their unwavering support, love, and hugs. Jason would like to thank his wife, Nancy, and his children, Grant and Katie, for giving him the freedom, the support, and the reason to do what he does. And finally, his mother, Sara George, for getting him to the point he could.