We were gathered at our bi-monthly Boys’ Lunch at Michael’s last month when one of “the boys,” a very senior media-minded communications executive, looked at me incredulously when I said I actually read Bernoff’s Groundswell, Jarvis’s What Would Google Do, and Godin’s Tribes, among others.
He definitely thought I was either drunk on the Kool-Aid or in need of a new life.
Just as the number of new media confabs have proliferated in recent years so have the number of published works heralding in the new world order. Many pros have forsaken these longer form media, replacing it with the Twitter cooler for keeping abreast of the changing times. Even the RSS-reader crowd has opted for the even more real-time Twitter stream for their news and info.
What you read and whom you follow speak volumes about who you are and what you know. In a New York Times media panel I recently moderated, pre-Twitter Lists, I asked NY-based tech reporter Saul Hansell what he regularly read. His answer — paidContent, Silicon Alley Insider (now The Business Insider), TechMeme, and a few others — provided a window into his editorial mindset, but for PR types, some insight into how his story ideas germinate.
Twitter, RSS and random web surfing aside, PR peeps should pay heed when those enmeshed in the new media/marketing space take the time to provide context to today’s changed landscape. So I thought I’d compile a smattering of recent book titles worth exploring:
- Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li’s Groundswell
- Jeff Jarvis’s What Would Google Do
- Ken Auletta’s Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
- Shel Israel’s Twitterville
- Chris Brogan and Julian Smith’s Trust Agents
- The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging
- David Meerman Scott’s New Rules of Marketing & PR
- Paul Gillin’s The New Influencers
- Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge‘s Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
- David Kirkpatrick The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that’s Connecting the World (Jan 2010)
- Tim O’Reilly and Sara Milstein’s The Twitter Book
Jeff Rutherford sent in a handful more including:
- Bob Garfield’s Chaos Scenario
- David Meerman Scott” World Wide Rave
- Adam Penenberg’s Viral Loop
Enjoy and prosper. (If there are others that merit inclusion, please send along.)
Photo: Bryan Derballa/Wired.com