Tag Books

Social Media Books

Ken Leave a comment

There is a stack of books on my basement desk that I have used for the social media course I teach each year. Some of these were books I had read, some were recommended, some I borrowed from the college library.

I have my students read at least one title selected based on their own area of interest in social media. The original list of titles was crowdsourced online.

If you have an interest in social media, you may want to check out some of these. If you have a book to recommend to me or my college students, post it in a comment here.

  1. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected, Connect Your Business to Everyone.
  2. What Would Google Do? – Jeff Jarvis
  3. Power Friending – Amber MacArthur
  4. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices – Christopher Locke
  5. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations – Clay Shirky
  6. Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies – Charlene Li
  7. Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations – Amy Shuen
  8. Designing for the Social Web – Joshua Porter
  9. The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social Network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future – S. Craig Watkins
  10. Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone – patterns, principles, and best practices for starting a social website – has more of a software and design focus
  11. Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. – Mitch Joel – a business focus on using Net marketing, esp. free tools and services
  12. Enterprise 2.0 by Andrew McAfee ~ Web 2.0 for the enterprise
  13. Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation – Tim Brown
  14. The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business (From Publishers Weekly) Hunt, cofounder of community-marketing consulting firm Citizen Agency, presents the hows and whys of accruing “whuffie,” her word for social capital in the Web 2.0 landscape. Introducing a wide range of post-blogosphere social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr, Hunt clues in marketers to the possibilities with online success stories, influential voices and winning strategies. Detailed, practical profiles of networks and related tools make this a valuable, illuminating title for anyone looking to the ever-expanding realm of online social life for business success.
  15. The Cluetrain Manifesto – though ten years old, the authors’ 95 theses about the networked marketplace probably make more sense today. Observations about business in America and how the Internet will continue to change it.
  16. Visual Thinking  by Rudolf Arnheim – more for art students perhaps – takes the premise that all thinking (not just thinking related to art) is basically perceptual in nature, and that the ancient dichotomy between seeing and thinking, between perceiving and reasoning, is false and misleading.
  17. Building Social Web Applications: Establishing Community at the Heart of Your Site –  by Gavin Bell
  18. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success – Safko
  19. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins.  This book puts web 2.0 technologies and trends into a much larger historical context of participatory culture.
  20. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green
  21. The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success
  22. The Zen of Social Media Marketing: An Easier Way to Build Credibility, Generate Buzz, and Increase Revenue
  23. Social Media Marketing For Dummies
  24. The Social Media Marketing Book
  25. Social Media 101: Tactics and Tips to Develop Your Business Online
  26. Social Media at Work: How Networking Tools Propel Organizational Performance
  27. Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs
  28. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business
  29. Facebook Marketing: Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Business
  30. 10 Steps to Successful Social Networking for Business (ASTD’s 10 Steps Series)
  31. Get Connected: The Social Networking Toolkit for Business
  32. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications
  33. The Facebook Era
  34. Twitter Power 2.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time

Some Ways the World May End

Ken
Four Horsemen of Apocalypse

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, by Viktor Vasnetsov. 1887.

“Here’s a song guaranteed to bring you down. It’s called ‘Don’t Let It Bring You Down’.” – Neil Young introducing that song on 4 Way Street

The year just ended, and before you get too optimistic about the new year, here is a book about the End that just might bring you down to Earth. It’s called The Apocalypse Reader and it is a collection of 34 short stories about the end of the world. It is filled with Doomsday scenarios by writers old & new, famous and not so famous, all looking into the future and finding it gone.

The short story isn’t a popular form these days. It has disappeared from many magazines that I used to read them in, like Esquire. That doesn’t seem logical to me. In this time of rushed schedules, too little time and too many inputs, I would have guessed stories would get more attention than novels. Of course, by that theory, poetry should be selling even better.

I discovered this one via an interview online with the collection’s editor, Justin Taylor. One story they include online is actually a funny zombie tale by Jeff Goldberg that you can listen to called “These Zombies Are Not a Metaphor.” Some poor guy is trying to convince his idiot roommates that the zombies outside their door are not a metaphor for something else, but are quite literally zombies.

Okay, maybe this book won’t bring you down.