Earlier this week I did a post that listed out the business topics most frequently covered in this blog... and which tackled the blog topic area of touch-screen technology. For the purpose of this post, I want to start looking at another large business topic... that of Social Media.
The area deserves attention it's become ubiquitous from a person to person communication perspective through mediums like blogs, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook among others. Arguably even more important, though, is the corporate perspective as companies attempt to use many of these same channels to reach consumers.
From either approach, Social Media is a big deal that I've written about and linked to quite a bit here. With this post I want to bring together some of those posts and links...
Books & Associated Content
Back in Sept 2008 I did a post titled "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good" by Sarah Lacy which was about... yep, Sarah Lacy's book on Web 2.0 companies. It was an interesting read in that the book looks at the newest web entries with particular focus on platform companies such as Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. The post above also links to a BusinessWeek excerpt from the Lacy book which focuses on the platform company Ning.
In Feb 2009 I did a blog post linking to another BusinessWeek excerpt... this time from the Jeff Jarvis book "What Would Google Do?" As to the book itself, I found it an extremely interesting read and wrote a review of it here. While it's true that the book isn't about Social Media, Jarvis is a prolific writer on web topics (often via his website BuzzMachine) and his writing deserves mention in any discussion of web or "new internet" stuff.
The last "Social Media as a topic" book I posted on was "Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters" by Scott Rosenberg which I reviewed here. An excellent book which looks at blogs and their import... as both an ongoing medium and the precursor of other Social Media mediums like Facebook and MySpace (among others).
Magazine Pieces
The most in-depth Social Media magazine writing referenced in this blog was probably in a June 2009 post titled All Around the Social Networking Mulberry Bush. Linked to within was a Time Magazine cover story on Twitter and BusinessWeek cover story about online relationships.
Also deserving of mention here, though, are three additional blog posts done. The first was an Apr 2009 post which referenced the Jarvis book along with the concept of the how relatively easy it is to launch an internet company today. The other two posts had various and sundry articles on Social Media companies and concepts linked... with the first including Facebook and LinkedIn and the second Amazon, Facebook and mobile commerce.
Lots of writing out there about a big topic... which will only get more important as both person to person and company to consumer communication moves forward. Fun times for those who understand and work in this area.
