Spencer Johnson’s classic short read about change management: “Who moved my cheese?”
Digital marketing creates a great deal of change in the way organisations and the people within them fit together. Your agencies may have certain ways of working and certain practices that you’ll want to challenge. This change management book is full of useful ways to see this from their perspective and help them embrace change. That’s why we’ve included Johnson’s easy to read classic about how to view the changing landscape.

Buy Who Moved My Cheese now

Heavyweight manual for a wide range of techniques in optimising sites for conversion, technical performance, and search engine rankings – essential handbook for marketers with direct responsibility for leading website publishing or retail projects.

Buy Website Optimisation now

Builds understanding about the long tail and its implications for brands wanting to connect with consumers. Anderson unlocks a clear model of specialisation that the web has enabled. When you look at the web as millions of niche audiences all instantly reachable, it changes your approach to online media and planning.

Buy The Long Tail now

Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams taught the world how mass collaboration was changing the way businesses communicate, compete, and succeed in their best seller Wikinomics. The follow-up examines the new age of networked intelligence, and how businesses and communities are bypassing crumbling institutions. Brands, financial institutions and governments go under the microscope as they show how individuals are using mass collaboration to revolutionise not only the way they work, but how they live, learn, create, and care for each other.

Buy Macrowikinomics now

A systematic overview of how to build business intelligence using the REAN model for analytics and how to combine multiple media channels into a single framework.

Buy Cult of Analytics now

Seth Godin’s foundation text for relationship marketing: ‘Permission marketing’

As Yahoo’s former VP of direct marketing, Seth is writing from a digitally centric position of changes in consumer expectations and their relationships with brands. Written in 1999, Permission Marketing explores the changing nature of advertising and the gradual evolution into a permission based culture in which consumers grant consent rather than absorbing the traditional forms of interruption advertising. Strong case studies from Amazon and American Express among others, and a confident style from someone who helped define the discipline.

Buy Permission Marketing now

Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger laid down the gantlet in 2000 for life in a freely interconnected world. They began by looking at the rights of individuals and the role of markets as conversations – big takeouts for brands and their teams.

Buy The Clue Train Manifesto now

Clay Shirky’s 2009 best seller ‘Here Comes Everybody’ a good text for understanding how social connected spaces change consumer behaviour, and by implication the rules for brands that want to connect online.

Buy Here Comes Everybody now

Another solid title from the Head First series at O’Reilly. This series champions making the complex simple and the instructional design of the training books give some early wins for the reader as they gradually build up to complex technical installations. WordPress has become one of the most popular website platforms and is part of the wave of technologies that collapsed the cost of website builds.

And this text is more than a great entry level roadmap. It makes WordPress publishing simple and accessible to non-programmers as well as giving programmers a bullet proof step by step and useful reference guide. The biggest appeal will be to small businesses and groups that want to set up a web presence beyond FaceBook and a Yellow Pages listing, but have the constraints of needing an ultra-low cost solution. O’Reilly may not have set out to sell WordPress to us as a solution, but the book makes a powerful case.

For the less techie reader it manages excellently to explain the nature of content, templates, tagging and configuration, unbundling the complexity of a website into its component parts and making the relationships between cause and effect clear: adding photos? Here’s how to align them neatly. Adding new sections? Here’s how to organise the content using tags. For small businesses that will be an eye opener because it shows the ease and simplicity of website publishing without having to build the organisation’s home purely inside Facebook Pages or one of the other global platforms.

For experienced web publishers Head First WordPress will probably bring a smile too. As publisher of Telegraph.co.uk I remember commissioning content management systems and integration support that quickly crossed the million mark. Almost all that functionality is now inside WordPress and Jeff Siarto shows how to unlock it easily. Sometimes we forget the realities of Moore’s Lore and the implications for how to plan smartly in the digital ecosystem. This is a nice reminder and for manager commissioning a website design and build it will prompt smart questions to their agency and technologists. All in all an excellent and accessible read.

Cutroni has created the perfect manual for understanding, implementing and rethinking Google Analytics. He guides through the implementation to show how the tool can deliver far richer insights than the familiar entry level reporting most sites restrict themselves to. He shows how to set up conversion modelling in online stores to track the performance of websites from entry point to sale. For marketers, his guide to offsite tagging reminds the read that Google has a low cost lightweight alternative to more complex third party measurement tools. This tackles a challenge that vexes media planners and brand managers alike when they try to unravel lead attribution to identify which media sites produce the best results.

As the role of analytics grows in business, and as analytics starts to drive business decision making, every marketer needs to have the basic insights in place. One of the challenges in online communications comes when those who have the creative energy to build new approaches are not close enough to the tools that can measure what’s working and what’s not. That’s why Google Analytics should have an appeal far wider than those directly involved in implementation and optimisation of website design.

It’s difficult to produce accurate texts in a space moving this quickly. Google makes significant adjustments with every product release, but the insights Cutroni has assembled should continue to give value in the medium term because much of the focus is not simply about the software but instead about its use.

Where Cutroni goes further than authors of previous titles is in guiding the meaning and context of each aspect of Google Analytics; readers will come away with a clear sense of not simply how to install and operate the tools, but what matters, why it matters and how to act. This feedback look is what’s so often missing in the use of analytics and Cutroni tackles it head on.

The only thing missing? On-screen integration of the chapters within Google Analytics itself: but for that one we might have to wait a while.

February 2010

Danny Meadows-Klue digs into the latest analysis of Google and finds a must-read for everyone in the industry.

The internet made everything available, Google made anything findable. Google has changed our worlds and our lives in a way unparalleled by any other brand. It’s become synonymous with the web and its name a verb for searching. Every industry sector has been touched by it and its presence extends into every country at every level. Whether you’re a marketer by trade, or a newcomer finding that the web has landed in your job goals for the first time, it’s hard to imagine discovery in search engines not being high on the agenda. As search engine marketing has grown to become the critical link in connecting customers with companies, interest in search marketing has crossed from the geeky world of search engine optimisation and mainstreamed.

Buy Googled now | Read the Digital Book Club review

Ken Auletta had unprecedented access to the founders and the campus. He followed the rise of the world’s most successful dotcom pureplay from deep inside the brand and paints the most vivid picture of the vision and philosophies of ‘Larry&Sergei’ from classroom to boardroom. For digital specialists it’s the most gripping of thrillers with a high-octane plot of digital product development that peals back the layers of the web, creating a paradigm for navigating our knowledge. For business analysts it’s the story of staying true to a vision and investing ceaselessly in a digital product with only the best of the best people. For the marketer it gives a sense of the nature of game-changing disruptive behaviours, and reiterates both why the industry continues to change so rapidly, and why the marketing mix has to fight to keep up.

Auletta’s pedigree as a leading US business journalist records this through the dispassionate lens of true investigative journalism. He was on the campus for solid weeks more than a dozen times, interviewing 150 people and probing the founders many many times over. He took part in the Friday company briefings, the meetings with outsiders and reports the conflicting abrasion and evangelism of those conversations. Googled is a genuine fly on the wall report which adeptly captures the spirit of being inside Google; the culture, the beliefs, the DNA and the difference from the other heavyweight dotcoms it displaced.

In dissecting the language and confrontations with traditional media groups, Auletta adeptly describes the nature of a disruptive business. With so many media groups trying to size up their new competitor, Googled is rich in insights about the way the company behaves and thinks. Through this he offers brilliant insights about why Google is so different and why its business model is so threatening.

Today Google has expanded far beyond those origins in search. Its margins on pay per click advertising revenues fuelled expansion into the full range of portal services, desktop software, mobile and advertising platforms. With 200 factors currently driving the rankings of firms in Google’s algorithmic listings, product development in the core business has continued to be strong. The focus on visual and audio search, translation, and the connections with location underscore the continued development, and what this book succeeds in achieving is giving a clear lens through which to judge what happens next.

For a company this game-changing, and insights this deep, Googled is a must-read

June 2009

Could coming second be your winning strategy? During 15 years at the heart of the internet industry, we’ve seen the businesses behind hundreds of good ideas collapse. For every Google, Facebook and Twitter, there have been a thousand failures. Why? Being on the leading edge means living at the bleeding edge. Resources are burned fast as teams invent the products, the processes and the routes to market. That’s why, in developing business strategies for digital media, we often find ourselves coaching management teams on the benefits of Second Mover Advantage. Why invest everything you have to trail-blaze when you could coast in second, getting 80% of the rewards for 50% of the effort? That’s why when we sneaked an advanced draft of ‘Secondomics’ we found a book that proved that this was one of the missing principles of success. From economics to psychology, game theory to biology, first time author Graham Bower has uncovered one of those principles that helps explain how the world works.

Full review coming soon – just waiting for the final draft of the book.
Release candidate edition is available on Lula

Buy Secondomics now | Read our interview with Graham Bower

May 2009

Twitter: micro blog, presence application, new era messenger tool, the next Facebook – whatever you think about this funky young platform, you have to acknowledge that it’s become the new ‘must-have’ for every big marketing strategy. This is the first book to properly tie it all together in a clear, simple and effective way.

Buy The Twitter Book now | Read the Digital Book Club review

Twitter: micro blog, presence application, new era messenger tool, the next Facebook – whatever you think about this funky young platform, you have to acknowledge that it’s become the new ‘must-have’ for every big marketing strategy.

Having played with it for about three years, I’ve been puzzled by two things:

• The level of interest a brand needs to have for people to want to follow it
• The amount of talk and hype, often from those who never even used the platform

So when O’Reilly announce they’ve published The Twitter Book, you have to be interested. Tim O’Reilly has that rare art of both being able to make the complex simple, and being a deep subject expert at the coalface. He writes his own blogs, Tweets his own Tweets, and pulls no punches when hype is ahead of substance.

The book starts as a deceptively simple 1.01 of how to use the tool, but the insights are rich and the tips easy to follow.

What’s Twitter great for?

• Sharing news and commentary
• Sharing breaking news and experiences
• Mind-reading the market

For experienced online marketers, here are a couple of ideas the book explores that might be useful:

• Tracking trends using TwitScoop and Twopular
• Advanced search and how to find what you want
• How to get the most from TweetGrid
• Sending smart replies with @

And along the way there are a few words of warning: why marketers shouldn’t sink into the depths of automatically direct messaging, the challenge about frequency ‘Twitter often…but not too often’, how to know your followers without being intrusive, and sound advice for a bunch of likely mistakes marketers new to Twitter will make.

The Twitter book also explores some of the etiquette in a young digital environment, such as how to tune out of a conversation politely, how to cite previous posts and the smart use of TinyURL et al to fit web addresses into 140 characters.

Reading between the lines and tweets, you come away with a stronger sense of what Twitter can do, and how to use it smartly. Teach new digital tool comes with its own processes, approaches and evolving rules. This gives the starting point for where Twitter is right now. Enjoy.

June 2008

In 'Don't Make Me Think', author Steve Krug, a professional web usability consultant demystifies the subject of how people use the web with clear, practical--and often amusing--common sense advice and succinct examples.

The basic design principle is that the consumer should not have to think. i.e.: Don't Make Me Think. All the various points and tips focus n the premise that the users should be able to navigate around a well thought out and well designed site with minimal pain or strain.

Buy Don't Make Me Think now | Read the Digital Book Club review

April 2008

Joseph Jaffe challenges the status quo of marketing, bringing a confrontational freshness to the channel mix and the nature of consumer engagement. In the digital landscape brands need to build awareness and image by taking part in conversations, and this book explains both why and how. Firms need to accept a step-change in their relationships with customers, and ‘Conversations’ is a great catalyst for encouraging them to dare to think of a taking leap beyond the standard media plan or campaign idea. Marketing is changing, but not all firms will adapt.

Download Join the Conversation

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