The Best Books on Social Media

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies: Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube,
podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and
find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it s unstoppable, it
affects every industry and it s utterly foreign to the powerful
companies running things now. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.

Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation,...: The book shows how people use online social tools to build networks of influence and how you can use those networks to positively impact your business. Because trust is key to building online reputations, those who traffic in it are "trust agents," the key people your business needs on its side.

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide: Henry Jenkins, founder and director of MIT's comparative media studies program, debunks outdated ideas of the digital revolution in this remarkable book, proving that new media will not simply replace old media, but rather will learn to interact with it in a complex relationship he calls "convergence culture."

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations: Blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 accoutrements are revolutionizing the social
order, a development that's cause for more excitement than alarm,
argues interactive telecommunications professor Shirky. He
contextualizes the digital networking age with philosophical,
sociological, economic and statistical theories and points to its major
successes and failures. Grassroots activism stands among the
winners—Belarus's flash mobs, for example, blog their way to
unprecedented antiauthoritarian demonstrations.

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income: This practical guide to creating and marketing a blog with the potential for generating significant income shows you how to choose subject matter that works for you, handle technical issues, and evaluate your blog's success so that you can use your blog to generate income indirectly.

Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature: Can you explain the explosion of social activities like text messaging with little or no promotion of the behaviour? How a Mexican wave happens? The emergence of online communities? Or – more sensitively – the steady rise of floral roadside tributes to traffic accident victims from complete strangers? Unless you have a good explanation of mass behaviour, you’ll have little chance of altering it. Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Bu...: A book for anyone who wants to understand the implications of social media, and how businesses can tap the power of social media to increase their sales, cut their marketing costs, and reach consumers directly.

Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media Is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR: Forget the pitch: Yesterday’s PR techniques just don’t work anymore. That’s the bad news. Here’s the great news: Social Media and Web 2.0 offer you an unprecedented opportunity to make PR succeed more powerfully than ever before. This book shows how to reinvent PR around two-way conversations with traditional and new influencers, bring the “public” back into public relations—and earn a new level of results that just wasn’t possible before now.

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Quirk e-Marketing Text Book (by Rob Stokes and the team at Quirk). A text book written by experienced practitioners at Africa's largest e-marketing agency. It covers the fundamentals of online marketing in a clear and practical manner.

The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (by James Boyle). In this enlightening book James Boyle describes what he calls the range wars of the information age—today’s heated battles over intellectual property. (Purchase hardcopy on Amazon here)

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets an... (by Yochai Benkler): In this thick academic book, Yale law professor Benkler offers a comprehensive catalog of flashpoints in the conflict between old and new information creators. In Benkler's view, the new "networked
information economy" allows individuals and groups to be more
productive than profit-seeking ventures.

Unleash the IdeaVirus (by Seth Godin): Excellent primer on viral marketing from a strategic perspective. Well written and easy to read, profound nonetheless.