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.

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

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

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.

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