Spring Book Reviews: Four For Your List

It’s that time again. When the stack of books I’ve been asked to review gets so high, I feel bad about not taking a few off the top. So I’ve put together another video review of four books I think are worth your time and effort for this spring. Each has some application to the social media marketing and online communications world.

For you publishers out there, thanks for the free copies of the books. I typically give them away to someone I think can use them when I’m done with them. If I don’t like the book, I generally don’t review it, but a non-review doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t like it. I’m a notoriously slow reader (of books) and just don’t have time to get through them all. Six more are sitting on the corner of my desk to read right now. The next review could me years off.

Here’s a run down of the four books featured in the video above:

IdeaSelling by Sam Harrison is an easy read and a nice set of ideas on how to communicate creative ideas and sell them through to clients, bosses and the like. It’s chock full of inspirational quotes and ideas that can jump start your brain. Worth a read.

Social Media Metrics by Jim Sterne is a must-read for those of you needing to focus at least some of your efforts on measurement. It does a great job of rolling through performance indicators in the social space and how to choose which ones are key to your marketing efforts.

Branding Yourself is by my buddies Kyle Lacy and Erik Deckers and takes the personal branding concept a few steps farther than other books by thinking through the off-line as well as on-line aspects. There’s a section devoted to public speaking and other non-Internet channels, even.

Finally, The Ultimate Online Customer Service Guide from Marsha Collier offers a great primer on using the web to facilitate customer service. If you’ve heard my social media strategies talks, that’s one of the six fundamental reasons your business is involved with social media. So this is an important book and one of the first to break that social media purpose down.

Click above or below to buy your copies. All links here are affiliate links. If you buy a book or two with them, I get a cheeseburger. I like cheeseburgers.

Enjoy!