Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger -- This is the best book I read about social media this year. While the book isn't technically about marketing, the principles it contains are important to anyone who is trying to understand the changes wrought by community publishing. Ultimately, the book is about social tagging, but it's really about how we organize information and how out tools and tactics are changing in the age of the Internet. Weinberger takes us back thousands of years to illustrate how we arrived the expertise-driven model embodied in the Dewey Decimal System. He then demonstrates how communities can develop far richer and more useful organization schemes than those ever envisioned by experts. Written in an engaging and often entertaining style, this book will open your eyes to the new dynamics of self-organization and stimulate you to envision its potential.

The New Rules Of Marketing And PR by David Meerman Scott -- Scott's book, which has topped the Amazon charts much of this year, is as drop-dead practical as Weinberger's is theoretical. Some of his advice is why-didn’t-I-think-of-that simple, such as to write marketing communications using terms that readers use in search engines. Scott takes a holistic approach to advising his readers on how to make a web presence work for them. This isn't just about social media but about online marketing in general. There are plenty of examples of successful companies that have leveraged new media channels to great effect, and Scott's pedagogical approach is emphatic without ever being condescending. If you want a how-to manual for the new world of PR, get this book.

Marketing to the Social Web by Larry Weber -- A lot of new-media marketing books cross the line from advocacy into arrogance. Their tone seems to imply that readers are stupid if they don't embrace the concepts espoused by the author. There's no question that Larry Weber has an agenda; he was one of the first PR visionaries to forecast the decline of mainstream media and to urge marketers to change their thinking about their work. However, this book takes a storyteller's approach to advocacy, preferring to persuade its readers rather than to talk down to them. It's also rich with case studies and third-party commentary, making it unusual in the universe of books written by marketers for marketers.

Join the Conversation by Joseph Jaffe -- While I found this book to be unnecessarily long and Jaffe's writing style, with its frequent parenthetical digressions, to be difficult to follow, there is no question that the author is an authoritative source on social media. Jaffe's passion is apparent, and his style is personal and persuasive. It’s like listening to a someone talk to you over beers at the pub. The book even includes one chapter that was created from a sequence of posts and comments on a wiki. I'm not sure it worked for me, but I applaud the author’s innovation for trying it.

On my list for early in the new year: We are Smarter than Me by Libert & Spector, and Measuring Public Relationships by Katie Paine.

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