This is the modern Godin vs the marketing guru Godin.
Here he aims to do more than inspire but get us to move. Now.
The book is composed of chapters. They build throughout and reach a pinnacle.
Each chapter is its own thoughtful piece and could be read stand alone.

Unless you’re ready to be moved, read the book slowly and savor it.

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Geoff hits it out of the ballpark on this one.

Quick points:
1) End of chapter summaries spotlighting key points
2) Lead ins for each chapter – setting the expectations and goal
3) Focused on business
4) Motivational

The tone this time is serious. Geoff is calling on you, the business mogul and the small business man/woman to take the online world seriously.

Breaking down first who that community is, The Fifth Estate, and why they’re important, Geoff builds it into a business case for using Twitter, Facebook, and blogs.

This isn’t just a checklist though. Geoff hits on effective strategies, and one key point – don’t forget your business brain. Facebook isn’t the yellow pages, it’s another place to meet, greet, and schmooze your customers.

Geoff doesn’t come at this from a ‘passionate guru’ perspective but that of fellow businessman and entrepreneur. His work with nonprofits and corporations gives him real world experience, not just numbers and rhetoric. A highlight of this is each chapter contains real stories of success and failures by companies big and small. Not just obscure ones either, but ones from the headlines.

Any downsides? The book was just a little slow for me. Mostly because I’m already in the choir and could skip the intro chapters (but didn’t!).

Also check out Now Is Gone: A Primer on New Media for Executives and Entrepreneurs.

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The Scaredy Cat Guide to Social Media is for you, the person too scared to jump in.

Scaredy Cat Guide introduces the reader to three branches of social media: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Readers get easy to follow steps for each, with some common ideas running throughout.

• how to sign up
• who to connect with
• built in connections to the Scaredy Cat team

Follow the instructions in this book to go from scaredy cat to confident cat in short order.

Learn more about the Scaredy Cat Guide to Social Media.

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Quick video review of Michael Daehn’s book, Internet Marketing for Newbies.

This book targets those just getting started with online networking and marketing. It’s based on Michael’s expertise in marketing, a straight forward approach to the subject matter.

I hope you enjoy the video.

You can buy this book on Lulu, Internet Marketing for Newbies.

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Understanding Exposure – considered a definitive book on use of a DSLR and getting exposure down to a science.

I’ve owned the Canon 400D (XTi) for several years. Thousands of photos behind me, it seems I’ve still got lots to learn. This is where Understanding Exposure and the South by SouthWest (SxSW) conference came to my rescue.

Amazon had been recommending Understanding Exposure to me for a while now. It was only recently I noticed a Kindle version. Heading to SxSW, Canon in tow, I downloaded Chapter 1 and started reading.

Hundreds of photos later, and capping out with the one above, I was sold on getting the whole book.

Bryan Peterson, the author, updated the book in August 2010, with a fresh look at digital SLRs. It’s an easy read, but you have to wade through trying some things with  your camera before he reveals why this or that combination worked well or didn’t. Readers are encouraged to follow along with camera in hand, as Bryan walks through camera settings, where to find them, and what they mean.

I may not take a perfect picture every time, but this book has already led to  my best work to date.

If you like the photo above, or some of the other shots in my Flickr stream, do consider purchasing Understanding Exposure*.

* – affiliate link

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Gamestorming isn’t about gaming, at least not in the traditional sense.
It’s a book dedicated to using a gaming model to solve problems and move projects forward in a work environment. Gamestorming provides the reader with a non-traditional tool set, relying heavily on the visual side of working with questions, ideas, and answers.

Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, and James Macanufo begin the journey into gamestorming by defining just what games are, how we interact with and in them, and how games resolve. Mapping problem solving onto a game setting gives the reader a way to take ideas, questions, and possible solutions out of the purely head space and make it visual and tactile.

Dave Gray’s influence is strong in this book, with constant visual focus. Taking the game visual leads to the concept of artifacts, from simple sticky notes to full blow constructs of paper and other materials.

Describing the book doesn’t give it enough credit for being useful. OFten we fall into the rapid exchange of emails, or even just long phone conversations. If we move beyond that to webinars and desktop demonstrations we still find ourselves trapped in the confines of those environments.

Dave, Sunni and James challenge us to remove the constraints and tackle things with an open mind, even playful. Start by opening the discussion to as many thoughts about it as possible. Then, rather than plodding through how a screen or app is broken and trying to patch it, the gamestorming approach has us take an uninhibited look at what would be ideal.

Wrapping up a session would be the closing questions. These questions are the where do we go from here, or how do we implement type. Note that during the experimental middle ground the focus isn’t on the details of how to make it work but on how it would work in an ideal world.

I’d recommend this book for managers and their teams.

Purchase Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers, affiliate link.

(Disclaimer: I received a free evaluation copy of this book and was asked to give an honest review, good or bad.)

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Not for me. I missed sleep over this book. I kept finding myself up at 2AM, reading rapidly to get to the next part, and I would then realize I had to pee, at night, in the dark, after having devoured many pages of a book where bad things happen in the dark. That’s how good it was.

Quote from Chris Brogan’s review of The Passage, Justin Cronin’s The Passage. (affiliate link)

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Purchased via Amazon. What I expected was a short book dedicated to the history of the brewery, brand, and beer.

Guinness has a legacy in the beer community. This book takes the reader back to the beginning.

We find out who the original Guinness was and are told a story of why it was a single brew brewery. Also told us how various elements affected the growth and changes to the company.

The book provides a fair amount of history however it spends an equal amount of time dedicated the process details. Explained is how the beer is brewed, how it’s delivered, and more.

Interesting tome are the transitions from old traditions to the new. From wood barrels to metal, from horse drawn carts to trucks and from brewing only in Dublin to worldwide bottling, the growth is amazing.

You really see how the family and descendants cared for keeping the brewery running like a family for all employees. Makes me glad I’ve found Guinness as a favorite.

Permalink to Amazon Review

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Chris reviews his friend Stever Robbins’ book, Get-It-Done Guy’s 9 Steps to Work Less and Do More (Quick & Dirty Tips).

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An Absence So Great is Jane Kirkpatrick’s second in this series. It’s a fictionalized biography of Jessie Gaebele, one of Jane’s ancestors.

Jessie is a young woman setting out to become an independent studio photographer. She’s not shy about this being her dream but none around her except an estranged fellow photographer support this dream.

Jessie struggles not only with a lack of faith by family and friends; she constantly deals wit the inner pain of a brief romantic involvement with a previous mentor, a married man.

As we follow along with Jessie, we get not just a fictional recounting of her life, there are also actual photographs taken by Jesse included in the book as well as her thoughts about them. This feature really drove my rating up from 2 stars.

In my opinion, the story moves too slowly to keep the reader’s interest. There is also little sense of climax at the end of the chapters nor most scenes. Jessie herself is a thoughtful individual who rarely overreacts either emotionally or by her actions.

The book tends to tell as much as show, with often recounting of events in flashbacks. Yet, some critical flashbacks which might help are left out, such as the relationships before she ventured off on her own.

Plusses beyond the historical photos include a well researched view into that era of history, especially as it relates to women and their roles and place in society. Independent women were still a new thing in those times. A very class level society is also evident, which the author does a fine job of explaining.

Painting a picture of the heart of a photographer is another plus in this book. Kirkpatrick takes us inside the mind of not just Jessie but other photographers as well. As a an amateur photographer myself, i was given some inspiration from seeing into the heart of Jessie’s love of the art.

I’d recommend this book to those who love biographical fiction and photography. That’s why I chose this book to read.

Disclaimer: This book was provided for review by the WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group.
To learn more about or purchase these books at RandomHouse.com:
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781578569816Similar Posts:

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