Booklist 2.0: November 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 the Future of Reputation written by Danial J. Solve, Secrets of Social Media Marketing written by Paul Gillin and Click written by Bill Tancer.

The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet

Lots and lots is being written nowadays on all the positive things that are happening on the social web. Most of those books are descriptive: they describe the phenomena, throw in some cases and some best practices and that’s it. Few on the other hand, try to get to the (sometimes negative) bottom of a specific phenomenon. The future of reputation, written by Daniel J. Solve, is such a book. Solve is professor of Law at the George Washington University and has written extensively about reputation and privacy in the past. In the future of reputation, Solve thoroughly writes about the trail of information about our lives that is instantly available online and the implications of this on our personal lives. How it affects our being and how we are perceived in the information age. Well thought and well written. If you don’t want to buy the book you can always read the entire text online.

Secrets of Social Media Marketing: How to Use Online Conversations and Customer Communities to Turbo-Charge Your Business!

I’ve read “Join the Conversation” and “Marketing to the Social Web” before, which I think are both very insightful and entertaining books on marketing in the age of the social web. No wonder I got excited by Paul Gillin’s latest work Secrets of social media marketing. Known from it’s best seller “The new Influencers“, Gillin has now written a true  handbook on social media marketing. The appraisals name Paul Gillin as one of the few who truly understand marketing to the social web. As you would expect, the book is chock-full of information, new cases and best practices. As The Future of Reputation, much of Secrets of Social Media Marketing can be read online so you can find out yourself whether you should by this book as well.

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Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters

Bill Tancer is the leader of global research at Hitwise, so he should know a bunch about our online behaviour don’t you think? Well it seems he does and he wrote it all down in Click: What Millions of People are doing online and why it matters. Click gives a sneak peek into the works at Hitwise, a research firm with sample populations in the ten’s of millions of people. Clicks gives insights in what we search for, some cool online analysis, and what our online behaviour tells us about ourselves. One cool finding I got from Bill Tancer’s website is the following: “The combination of charting search and social network traffic to music artists’ sites provides a visual depiction of Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point.” Entertaining, but not much more to expect.