Booklist 2.0: May 2009

Every month, The Next Web Blog picks three relevant books for you to read. The teasers are short, the pro’s why to read are relevant. This month we’re discussing The Social Media Bible written byLon Safko & David Brake, The Dumbest Generation written by Mark Bauerlein and The Twitter Book written by Tim O’Reilly & Sarah Milstein.

The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success 

Naming your book a Bible raises expectations… Tremendously. But it looks that the social media bible, tactics, tools, and strategies for business success, written by Lon Safko and David Brake manages to live up to these expectations. First of all, it’s probably one of the most thorough and exhaustive books written on Social Media to date. And one thing the book has in it’s favor is it’s size. The Social Media Bible contains no more than 840 pages! The book promise is that it helps you to convert your organization into a “a social media- enabled enterprise where customers, employees, and prospects connect, collaborate, and champion your products, your services, and your way of doing business”. 43 chapters guide you  through 3 major topics: Background basics & tactics, tools, and strategies. I don’t particularly get the order, but at least it covers probably everything, including 100+ social media tools you can use today. Another thing the book does very well is it’s summaries at the end of every chapter describing commandments, conclusions and further reading. I’d say a must read for every social media professional out there.

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30)

Sounds like a great book title, but it’s content is quite alarming. The first book that probably comes to your mind when reading The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, written by Mark Bauerlein, is the Cult of the Amateur, written by Andrew Keen. Huge difference between Keen and Bauerlein is that Keen, despite his criticism, actually addresses that he loves the web and is deeply encouraged in tools like Twitter. I don’t get that same impression from Bauerlein. In Dumbest Generation Bauerlein discusses that the younger generation today is less informed, less literate, and more self-absorbed than any that has preceded it despite the availability of a world of networked knowledge at just a mouse-click away. Bauerlein claims that we need to do something today if we don’t want to “sacrifice our future to the least curious and intellectual generation in national history”. Fortunately Bauerlein draws up a vision on how we could overcome these deficiencies. A welcome contradictory sound to the Social Media hallelujah we get to read on a daily basis.

The Twitter Book

Another book on Twitter you think. But this time it is authored by the founding father of the Web 2.0 era Tim O’Reilly together with Sarah Milstein. That should raise expecations. After covering Twitter Power, Twitter means business and the Twitter revolution earlier, the Twitter Book is still relevant since it provides you with practical strategies and tactics to become a Twitter power user. Not only do the authors provide you with a thorough explanation of the Twitter lexicon, they also provide you with tips on how to tweet, when to tweet and what to tweet. They provide insight in the different ways you can benefit from using Twitter and how you should alter your strategy based on your goals. It’s a very entertaining book on how to build a personal brand on Twitter. You can find a sneak peek of the book on Slideshare.