Wikinomics is a great book I found on user generated content. Although it focuses mainly on the wiki area of the web, it still gives some very good insight on how the concept has changed the web, marketing, and advertising techniques and best practices into a brand new game. This book, written by Don Tapscott, is a little over a year old, so the content may be slightly outdated, but still very much applies to the world today. Check out this book here: Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Find out what other books Don Tapscott has written here.

Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking is a brand new book that was released on November 1st of2007. If you’re looking for some place to start with Word of Mouth Marketing, begin here! It was written by Andy Sernovitz, Chief Executive of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, and includes a foreword by Seth Godin, a best selling author of marketing books and a genuinely brilliant individual. I encourage anybody interested in Word of Mouth to check it out!

Guerrilla Marketing, 4th edition: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your SmallBusiness: this book is written by Jay Conrad Levinson, the Father of Guerrilla Marketing. Levinson runs the Guerrilla Marketing Online Website, and is the face of the Official Guerrilla Marketing Association. He has sold more than 14 million books in his Guerrilla Marketing series. This new edition includes up to date case studies and new methods to inspire your creative team to think outside the lines that usually confine them. I personally recommend the book and hope you take a look at it!

Guerrilla Marketing for Free: this is another book written by Jay Conrad Levinson, which focuses on how to implement guerrilla marketing for free with viral and word of mouth methods. In this book, Levinson literally gives you ideas and tells you how to implement them to maximize your profits and increase leads…all without depleting your financial resources. Levinson is an extremely talented writer with incredible advertising and marketing ideas, so be sure to check this and his other books out!

Also consider Paul Gillin’s book “The New Influencers,” a further discussion of how individuals are becoming THE influencers of market buys. As you may remember, I had written a post in November 2007, Users are the “New Influencers” of Marketing, raving about a webinar I attended with Paul Gillin as the speaker. This webinar was a small taste of what the book talked about, and still one of THE best presentations I have ever witnessed through a webinar. If you only check out one book on this list, check out this one! The author is brilliant. Also check out Other Books by Paul Gillin.

Also be sure to check out Dave Balter and John Butman’s Book: Grapevine: The New Art of Word-of-Mouth Marketing. This book was co-written by Dave Balter, the founder of both BzzAgent and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), and John Butman, writer and speaker of “consumers, consumption, and related social trends”. This publication is sure to reveal some insider insight on how companies can take advantage of word of mouth marketing creatively and effectively to maximize their profits. Word of mouth marketing is one of the most effective, and yet under-utilized types of nontraditional marketing today. Because it’s “hard to measure,” marketers simply do not capitalize on it. Take your organization to the next level by learning how you CAN implement it and get results!

If you want to learn about how to optimize your landing pages in order to maximize your conversions, then check out Tim Ash’s book: Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions. This book will be released in January of 2008, but has already heard some positive advance praise about how it will enable you to stop guessing at the best design, and educate you on what studies have said the best practices are for maximizing your conversions. Check it out!

Be sure to check out Unleashing Web 2.0: From Concepts to Creativity, a great book by Gottfried Vossen and Stephan Hagemann that explains that Web 2.0 is, in essence, two way communication, and the starting point between your two way relationship with companies and their consumers. The authors help for you to understand this natural evolution of Web 2.0, as well as guiding you to the potential the future holds for Web 2.0 and new media applications that take advantage of the two way communication that is the essence of today’s web.

If this post interested you, then I would suggest you to read a book that outlines the “Google story” up until August of 2006, when the book, The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time, was published. Even though a lot has changed since its publish date, this book helps you to understand the Google company, so that you may better understand where Google has gone and may one day go in regards to endeavors they take on and companies they decide to purchase. This book is a must have for Google enthusiasts, Google haters, and even those with a conflicting love / hate relationship with the brand. Check it out here!

To learn more about the basics of RSS feeds, visit my past post, Using RSS Feeds to your advantage, or check out this basic “Dummies guide” in order to learn how to syndicate your website or blog through RSS feeds. Syndicating Web Sites with RSS Feeds for Dummies will allow you to learn about RSS feeds and how they can help you to increase traffic and build awareness of your site, without having to learn all that technical language. In plain English, this book will teach you how to create an RSS feed from scratch, which will allow you to create a custom feed for your non-blog site. I would recommend this book if you have a website that you can not easily create a feed for, and as a basic “what is RSS and how can I use it” guide.

If you’re interested in SMS marketing, check out Mobile Marketing: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Wireless Technology, a great book I found, about different ways cell phones, smart phones, and PDAs are being used as marketing tools in today’s world of new media. Although published in April of 2006, the book is surprisingly still very relevant in today’s world of e-marketing and new media. To learn more about SMS and other Mobile Marketing techniques, order this book through Amazon as soon as possible!

For some basics of email marketing, check out E-mail Marketing for Dummies. Rated 5 /5 stars on Amazon.com, this book is perfect for the individual just starting to get his or her feet wet into the email marketing world. Learn how to build your first list, keep your message free of spammer techniques, and how to implement your email marketing campaign to complement your overall online campaign. Published in November of 2007, E-mail Marketing for Dummies is an up to date resource for beginner level email marketing. To learn more, check out this excellent resource now!

Dave Balter wrote an incredible, 119 page Word of Mouth Manual: Volume II book, that is available for you to download from a variety of quality marketing bloggers. You can also purchase your own, physical copy here if you’re like me and like to educate yourself while enjoying the sunshine. But hurry! Only a few thousand copies were made and few remain.

I’ve read this book from front to back. Balter’s writing style is easy to read, the words are larger than usual, and the content is intriguing. If you’re interested in word of mouth marketing, this is something you can check out. And why not? It’s FREE!

You can find out more about this book and where you can download it by visiting the BzzAgent page promoting this book.