New North Social Media Breakfast

Here’s a quick quiz for you. How many books have been written on the subject of “social media?” Hundreds? Could be. 1500, wow, that seems like a lot, but OK… Try again. According to a search in the Amazon Marketing section alone there are 3,109 books. If you broaden your search to the Business & Investing section, there are over 16,000 books!

I have by no means read all of them, but I have been reading books on social media since Rebecca Blood’s “The Weblog Handbook” in 2002. Imagine that – 10 years of reading social media books. Time flies… In that time, there have been a lot of great books and a lot of not-so-great books on the subject of social media. I’d like to share 10 of my favorites that come to mind here. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but if you were to start with a modest budget and set out to get the best books you can to get up to speed on the subject, I recommend that you start with these books.

1. Engage – Brian Solis
I use Engage as a textbook in my Social Media & Thought Leadership Marketing class that I teach at St. Norbert each January. It is, by far, the most comprehensive book that one can find on the topic, and even at that, there is still so much that is covered in the remaining books here. Engage is dense and is thus not a rapid read (at least it wasn’t for me) but it gives the soon-to-be well-read social media practitioner a strong knowledge base in the discipline.

2. Connected Marketing: The Viral, Buzz and Word of Mouth Revolution – Justin Kirby & Paul Marsden
This book is unfortuantely becoming a bit dated, but it’s such a rich resource for ideas and cases topped off by a complete bibliography of sources cited that it’s actually one of the few books (along with Engage) that I’ve actually re-read. Published in 2006 by a group of smart authors, it captured some of the state of the art ideas and viral & buzz marketing cases of the day. While some of the tools mentioned might be dated, the ideas and methods are evergreen and that’s what keeps this book at the top of my list. It’s a backup resource in my class as well.

3. 31 Days to Better Blogging – Darren Rouse
While this is an e-book, it’s still one of the best resources on blogging that I’ve seen. It’s so practical and so full of managable concepts that any would-be blogger can grasp that if you read no other book on the world of blogging, this book would be it. Darren has built an amazing empire on blogging and this resource walks you down much of the same path that he’s walked to get where he’s at.

4. Social Media Marketing in an Hour a Day – Dave Evans
This book is also getting a bit dated, but Dave did a wonderful job of laying out the practical/tactical approach to doing social media right, day-by-day. Dave has been doing social media for as long as anyone (read: we spoke at the same events together around 2006…) and has a grasp of the daily realities of social media. More to the point, the book introduces some social media models that inspire some realism in how we think about how to implement social media in businesses of all sizes.

5. Influencer Marketing: Who Really Influences Your Customers? – Duncan Brown & Nick Hayes
While this is not specifically a social media book, its fundamentals on the concept of using influencers in your marketing are the foundation on which much of our work rests. The book not only lays out how decisions are made and how influencers work, but also gives you a series of tools and models to use when crafting an influencer marketing strategy.

Bonus: Don’t waste your time/money on…
The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success – absolutely the most useless book I’ve ever reviewed on the subject of social media. I evaluated this as a text book and was thankful that I didn’t actually have to pay for it as an evaluation copy. I would have sent it straight back to amazon had I purchased it. It’s basically a list of tools with a description of each…not much to be “learned” from this book.

One more… Ekaterina Walter, a social media strategist at Intel, wrote a post on her 12 Most Helpful Books on Social Media – it’s got a few different ones from my list with a bit of good editorial on why she chose the books she did. Check her list out as well.

I’ll cover the next 5 in a post next week.  In the mean time, happy reading! Catch you later!