There's nothing wrong with a bit of old media now and again and over the years I have ploughed through a fair number of good and not-so-good books. I hope the reviews prove useful in helping you discern the great from the good from the average and mean you can spend the least time with moveable type and more time on-line!
Avinash Kaushik: Web Analytics 2.0
Avinash Kaushik has been de-mistyfying the world of web analytics for years through his excellent blog Occam's Razor. He took us deeper into the murky world of Java-script tagging and standard reports with his comprehensive "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day" in 2007. (see Review below). Now he has written a book that all digital marketers should buy, read and leave on their desk to refer back to on a regular basis. Web Analytics 2.0 shows us how to move from shovelling buckets of meaningless "click-stream" data around our organisations to developing a love for true insight. In short he encourages us to move towards adding qualitative data to our limitless supply of quantitative data in order to really understand what people are doing on our sites. We must learn to use our hearts as well as our minds. It takes you from thinking differently to doing better, packed with explanations about the things we ought to know about (or showing us how wrong we have been!). It comes with a CD brimming with Podcasts, Video and Powerpoint material as well as lists of additional resources. He even finds time on page 400 to mention Non-line Blogging as a resource people may want to use! It's taken me 2 weeks to work from the start of the book to the end but it's been a fantastic journey...and at over 450 pages you may want to pack a lunch before you set off!
Seth Godin: Meatball Sundae
Despite the cheezy title I found this a really rewarding book. Godin has a gentle conversational style and has managed to write a book that identifies the problems many companies have integrating the "new stuff" with traditional business techniques. Organisations continue to think and behave in "traditional" ways (making meatballs), yet hope that by sprinkling some blogging, some user-generated content and forums into their marketing (cream toppings and decorations) they will transform their business. Yet all they succeed in doing is creating the "Meatball Sundae" with the result that neither customers nor businesses are well-served. The book moves between the business and organisational challenges of digital marketing through to techniques of marketing execution, with plenty of top tips about the why's and how's of blogging, UCG and so on. For a more detailed study of how to implement all the Web 2.0 stuff you may prefer David Meerman Scott's book, but if you want your management team to "get" all this new marketing, then I'd recommend you buy them a copy!
Avinask Kaushik: Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
Although this book has been out for over a year it is still regarded by many as one of the internet marketing books of the decade. The concentration of content is impressive enough, but what Avinash has managed to do is guide people through the web analytics maze from a humble starting point (the basics of web serving and tracking) through to the latest thinking in the application of analytics. In the past year or so we have seen big changes in the vendor landscape, with many companies being gobbled up by larger players, yet this book remains so "supplier agnostic" as to stand the test of time. Indeed, most of what Avinash recommends is about getting the analytics fundaments in place, and they work across the board from Google Analytics to Omniture. For people who have a nagging doubt that they are probably not getting as much out of their analytics as they should be, this is a great book to have near to hand. It leads you through all the key challenges in a day-by-day format, but you can certainly dive into specific sections without feeling you have missed out on some of the story. He even manages to squeeze a mention in for Non-Line Marketing for the section on tracking on-to-off-line campaigns! Will be required reading for a few more years to come, I would say.
David Merman Scott: The New Rules of Marketing and PR
Digital Marketing has provided PR with a new lease of life; for years it lived a lonely life 
as the Cinderella of the marketing disciplines...unable to justify itself with any meaningful ROI and falling out of favour whenever the PR Team could not deliver the column inches and broadcast soundbites the Chief Exec demanded. But now? Boy, is it cool to be in On-line PR! Suddenly you can take control of the social media space, commission video and audio podcasts, set the agenda for corporate blogging and Twittering, and even claim some success in the fusion of PR and mighty SEO. David Meerman Scott breathlessly claims that "the internet has made public relations public again" and goes into great detail about the implications of this shift for marketers. The book gives us some pretty comprehensive summaries of the key on-line PR tools and then goes on to share case studies in each area to bring the technique to life. He goes through all the techniques - blogs, news releases, audio and video content, forums, wikis, viral campaigns and spends time addressing the content your site should hold and how it should be written. He finishes with a series of pretty "actionable" action plans for putting some of this into practice. Although the world of social media especially has moved on a little since this book was published, it is still a commanding and respected overview of what on-line PR should be all about and why we need to get good at it.
