My Top Social Media Books

Posted on | February 27, 2011 | No Comments

In general I’m unhappy with the focus and range of books on social media. Still, some interesting works are worth mentioning. I don’t really have them in a particular order as I haven’t really developed a useful taxonomy. Also I don’t have extensive comments as I link them to their Amazon pages where you can read the reviews on each one.

- Opaque and intellectual, this book gets better with time. Its strengths are its discussions of democracy and the emergence of a networked public sphere.

- Readable and likable, it provides a good introduction to social media. A bit too anecdotal for my taste, but like I said, it’s a good start.

- I liked this book but found it a bit too cryptic for the undergraduate class I ordered it for. Still it’s the book I go back to when I want more serious ideas about social media. Looking forward to the second edition.

- If you want to know what Wael Ghonim meant when he said “Ask Facebook”.

– Read this traveling on the trains in Japan and use it in one of my Digital Media Management classes. Really good foundation to the different ways of organizing information and how digital technologies transform the whole area of information management.

- Buy the Kindle version, this book is big.

- Numbers, deal with them.

- I plan to use this in my New Technologies for Advertising and Public Relations course at NYU this summer.

- Google has a mixed record when it comes to social media hits but with $28 billion in 2010 revenues it is a force in itself.

- This is a classic in conceiving some of the economics of social media and blogging.

Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.

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