Booklist 2.0: June 2008

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 Groundswell by Charlene Li, Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide by Amy Shuen, and Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

It’s a great time for people who want to read social media and web strategy in general. Many books are released each month and to find the books that are worth your time gets harder and harder. Groundswell, a book written by Forrester Analist Charlene Li, seems to be such a book. As we know from Forrester, the book is full of hard analytic data to back up your social media strategy building thingy. The book provides many case studies (also ones we haven’t heard of yet), strategy roadmap development and a profile tool to map your (potential) customers with three general criteria on six overlapping levels of participation to find how to best interact with them.

Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations.

Let’s face it: while we all can’t stop raving about the beauty of social media and Web 2.0, we are still not very good in monetizing this trend other than by selling ads or making a smashing IPO. Web 2.0: A strategy Guide, written by Amy Shuen (she’s publishing parts of her book on her weblog), tries to help us with this part by talking about Web 2.0 from a strategy perspective, the major Web 2.0 concepts and it’s effects (not technologies) and real life cases as Flickr, Google and Amazon. This book tries to bridge the gap between the yet relatively limited knowledge of business people on Web 2.0 so perhaps it’s not a book for early adopters as we might all be. But when you are in business, looking for a strategy book on Web 2.0 this might be the one you are looking for.

Designing for the Social Web

I’ve read an interesting review of Designing for the Social Web, written by Joshua Porter, on the blog of Web Worker Daily. They put it nicely: this book is about designing social sites from a higher level view of the process, which makes it more relevant than perhaps yet another book about building rails applications. We all know that the social web requires a different perspective on principles like designing for conversations for example and Porter outlines this nicely in this book. He talks about the usage lifecycle, users intrinsic motivations for participating on your site, getting users on your site, analytics and more. Definitely a must read for all social designers among us.