5 Books on Corporate Social Media

Mashable has come up with a list of 5 books that can help improve your thinking about the value of social media to the enterprise.

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.

When consumers you ve never met are rating your company s products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

"How do trends emerge and opinions form? The answer used to be something vague about word of mouth, but now it's a highly measurable science, and nobody understands it better than Clay Shirky. In this delightfully readable book, practically every page has an insight that will change the way you think about the new era of social media. Highly recommended."
-Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail

Web Analytics: An Hour a Day

Written by an in-the-trenches practitioner, this step-by-step guide shows you how to implement a successful Web analytics strategy. Web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik, in his thought-provoking style, debunks leading myths and leads you on a path to gaining actionable insights from your analytics efforts. Discover how to move beyond clickstream analysis, why qualitative data should be your focus, and more insights and techniques that will help you develop a customer-centric mindset without sacrificing your company’s bottom line.

The New Influencers: A Marketer's Guide to the New Social Media

"As word of mouth loses opinion-forming power to word of blog, companies are faced with a revolution in how their brands and corporate image will be shaped in the future. Paul Gillin provides a very insightful and well-written guide on how to effectively benefit from these dramatic changes. A must read!" --Patrick J. McGovern, founder and chairman, International Data Group (IDG)

The Art of Strategic Listening

Listening To Your Customers’ Conversations Can Provide Big Dividends

Do you know what your customers or bloggers are saying about your company and your products? Marketers used to be able to assess the perception of their company or their products by simply monitoring the media and reading any letters of complaint that came by mail, but that was pre-internet and social networking.

Now there are more than 80 million blogs, as well as social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, video aggregators like YouTube and EveryZing and thousands of other social media sites on the web where customers talk with each other and make all kinds of comments, good and bad about your firm, your competitors, and your industry.

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