Read This: Online Marketing 101

Last week, Ryan Chapman, the digital marketing specialist for Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, posted a syllabus of books for online marketers that was, as the kids say, full of win, including some unexpected choices like William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Here’s a few more books I would add to his list:

The Backchannel, Cliff Atkinson: Although this book’s focus seems pretty narrow—a discussion of the ways speeches and conference panels have been affected by the ability of audience members to engage in running commentary with each other and to the outside world—that’s also a powerful reminder to marketers that we don’t have anything remotely like complete control over the stories that are being told about our products… but we can work with the system instead of throwing our hands up in despair. See also Sarah Milstein and Tim O’Reilly’s The Twitter Book, one of the best guides I’ve seen so far to finding “your microblogging voice.”

Presentation Zen and Presentation Zen Design, Garr Reynolds: No surprise here, as the Presentation Zen blog has long been on my ultimate blogroll. Again, the premise you see on the surface may seem limited, but by teaching you how to conceptualize and deliver compelling presentations, Reynolds is giving you valuable lessons in how to organize the elements of the stories you tell about whatever it is you’re marketing—on that front, you’ll also want to read Nancy Duarte’s Slide:ology, even if you’re never going to put together a PowerPoint presentation in your career.

Linchpin, Seth Godin: Again, if you’re familiar with me, you’re probably not surprised to see Godin’s latest book on this list, as I’m extremely open about how he’s shaped my views on marketing. This book isn’t directly about marketing—having just finished it yesterday, I view it as a philosophical counterpart to Lewis Richmond’s Work as a Spiritual Practice, a book that was extremely meaningful to me when I first read it a little over a decade ago. Both books offer great advice about bringing your professional life into accord with your most personal values and dedicating yourself to meaningful work that brings value to other people’s lives; in that context, I’m also a huge fan of Sally Hogshead’s Radical Careering (although, in the interest of disclosure, I should mention that I helped copyedit it).

I’m leaving out a lot of obvious examples (Chris Brogan! Gary Vaynerchuk!) because I feel like I want to say more about those books than I can right now in this particular context. But I hope the ones I have been able to feature give you plenty to think about… and at least as much inspiration as they’ve given me.

22 February 2010 | read this |