Your Measurement Reading List: Three Books About Blogging Reviewed

YOUR MEASUREMENT READING LIST
Book Your Ticket To Blogistan
Three books on blogging reviewed:

• The Corporate Blogging Book, by Debbie Weil


• Naked Conversations by Shel Israel and Robert Scoble


• Dispatches from Blogistan by Susan Stefanac

Book reviews by Katie Delahaye Paine

As blogging moves from fringe to center stage, bookstore shelves are filling up with books about blogging. Search Amazon.com's book section for "blog" and you get almost 5,000 results. Personally, I think reading a book about blogging is sort of silly. The art is evolving so quickly, you're better off reading blogs than reading a book about blogs...

Nonetheless, since I actually have read three of them, I thought I'd share my thoughts. (In the interest of transparency, both Shel Israel and Debbie Weil are friends of mine. I've never met Susan Stefanac.)

I picked up Naked Conversations at the last New Communications Forum in Palo Alto, where Shel and co-author Robert Scoble gave an entertaining presentation.

Now I have to tell you that I hate business books. (True confession: If you spot me on an airplane, I'm probably reading some trashy historical fiction with semi-naked women and tall dark handsome strangers on the cover.) But I started reading Naked Conversations and just couldn't put it down. I never wanted it to end. Like a really good wine that develops all kinds of interesting sensations on your pallet, this book kept bringing me tons of new ideas with every page. I still say it should be mandatory reading in every corporate marketing department in the country. It will forever change the way you go about developing relationships.

But while Scoble and Israel give some great guidelines about how to enter the world of social media properly (without stepping on toes or offending the blogerati), most corporate types will find their book to be more about evangelism and less about how to blog.

That's where Debbie Weil comes in, with her Corporate Blogging Book. I refer to it as "the Joy of Cooking for would-be corporate bloggers." It's a manual of dos and don'ts that any corporate type that is thinking about blogging should read. Like Naked Conversations, it's full of good examples of how companies have benefited from blogging. But it gets more into the nuts and bolts and detailed instructions. While it may not send your mind into the next century with possibilities, it will leave you grounded in today's reality – which is about 20 years ahead of where most PR people are thinking today.

Finally, there's Dispatches from Blogistan by Susan Stefanac. For an individual thinking about dipping a toe into this arena, it's a good introduction. The subtitle is "A travel guide for the modern blogger," and it provides very specific advice, like how to design your blog, and what to put in it. It also demystifies some of the terminology.

Mostly it is based on lengthy interviews with bloggers who provide their perspective on the process. If you agree with the particular blogger, it's great. But if you don't, there's not a lot of alternative perspective. To be honest, I wasn't really engaged by most of them. What I do like about Stefanac's approach is that it focuses on the blogger. And as we all know, corporations don't blog; people do.