Search on the Beach: Summer Search, Social Media, and SEO Books, Your Official SearchViews Reading List
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 10, 2008 | Share This
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Ah, Summer. Here in
Either way, books and the beach go together like Amy Winehouse and liver damage, so we thought it would be fun to put together a little search industry reading list for your Summer pleasure. The idea originally came about when Reprise Media Managing Partner Peter Hershberg was on Business Wire’s recent Social Media panel and was asked to recommend a few books.
Pete picked The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of Marl by Chris Anderson, a book which has fast emerged as a must-read for any business. If you’ve ever heard the phrase and wondered if it was a Raymond Chandler novel about monkeys, here’s your chance to learn what it’s really all about. If you want to find out how the online world has made all kinds of things available to people in far flung places at a profit, this should be your first stop. Pete also picked The Wisdom of Crowds by New Yorker writer James Surowiecki who posits that groups of people can often contain more wisdom collectively than as individuals.
Reprise Media’s Director of Strategic Services Kate Zimmermann came up with three great choices. John Battelle’s The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture which ought not to be confused with Iris Johannsen’s The Search, a book the New York Post called ”Gripping…shocking,” which sounds more like having electric eels Velcro’ed to your neck. Though Battelle’s topic is Google the book works as a great capsule primer on the history and importance of search. Kate also recommended Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger in which he advocates expanding the online world’s annihilation of traditional information taxonomies to just about everyone and The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Stanford smarties Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom who look at “spiders”, top down driven organizations like record companies, and “starfish” , leaderless self-replicating groups like the peer-to-peer sites that are killing the record companies traditional business model.
Miguel Cancino, Reprise Media’s Social Media Analyst, suggested Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing The Way Business Talk with Customers. I was just relieved to know that it wasn’t by Al Goldstein (a potential NSFW search term, youngsters.)Like Goldstein Scoble and
Reprise Media’s Business Development Manager Sara Wiezorek stepped up with some stone cold search classics. She keeps it real with Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference which is a great book even if it doesn’t explain how not to get mud all over you when you push the cow over. What it does explain is how small esoteric interests can snowball into the mass consciousness at large, especially through the Internet. Then there is Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side to Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner which finds unorthodox and sometimes controversial economics-based explanations for all sorts of trends and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything a paean to the power of open source collaboration to revolutionize research and development by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.
Managing Partner Joshua Stylman has been reading Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky which has a cover that reminds me eerily of the time I got trampled at a Jewel concert and had an out-of-body experience. Shirky takes a big picture approach to the way the Internet is transforming our professional and personal lives, especially when it comes to social interactions and social media. Next up for Josh is Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff who together take a managerial approach to understanding and coming to terms with social media from a business perspective.
What will I be reading? I like a good mystery so you’ll find me lazing on my beach blanket with a bottle of rum and a copy of the latest TV-to-book novelization of Murder, She Wrote: Vote For Murder by Jessica Fletcher and Donald Bain. Jessica Fletcher is of course the character played by Angela Lansbury on the show so there’s a bit of literary meta insider stuff going on. Donald Bain is no relation to Diff’rent Strokes dad Conrad Bain. As far as I know. As one commentator noted on Amazon.com, “Since I’ve watched it on t.v. for so many years, I can see Jessica and the other main characters doing the activities I read about.” Hear, hear, isn’t that what reading is all about? May your Kindle stay sand-free this Summer.
Topics: Advertising: Behavioral, Advertising: Online, Blogging, ECommerce, Google, Just for Fun, Media Convergence, Publishing, Reprise Media, SEO, Search: How-To, Social Media, Technology |