The latest edition of the exciting collaborative Age of Conversation marketing book series is about to go on sale with the release of “Age of Conversation 3: Its time to get busy” now at the publishers.

Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton have had the monumental task of compiling and editing the contributions of around 170 authors from around the world and now the book is close to release.

Very soon you will be able to purchase it directly from Amazon or a number of other online book stores. The new cover was designed by Chris Wilson. And the new website was created by the hard working team at Sticky.

There are some extremely talented marketers contributing this book so I can’t wait to read it myself. Stay tuned for more announcements soon, but in the meantime you can meet the authors:

via: Mediahunter

I started to put together a list of books that should be a rough guideline for people that are interested in advertising or just started to work in an agency. My focus is on literature for strategic planners and accounts and not necessarily for creative departments, sorry. The collection should cover both classics about advertising but also the latest books especially from other related disciplines. I collected the following books over the last months, my source was mainly blogs of other planners or people working in the industry. If you have the feeling that I forgot an important book, please leave a comment.

Essential books for planners and account (10-03-08) work in progress

If you are bored and you want to read a brilliant book, buy L’egoiste romantique by Frederic Beigbeder. It’s a bit similar to 99 Francs which you know, if you work in advertising. A brilliant piece of work, with some very smart thoughts about life that made me laugh and think. The rest is about parties, drugs, sex and depression – great mixture. I don’t find an English version of the book at Amazon, but I think there must be one.
Keep searching or learn French or German – it’s worth.

In case you are looking for a book about viral marketing in German. Michaela Klinger explains the basics of viral marketing and presents some case studies (which you can find in a lot of other viral marketing books and papers too). If you haven’t read Tipping Point jet, Michaela also uses some thoughts from Malcom Gladwell to describe the spreading of content in social networks. For people that are familiar with some terms, thoughts or cases of viral marketing, I can’t recommend the book, you guys will be bored. Let’s rather take a look what Marting Oetting is doing on his new empowered involvement blog.

Today I found a lecture of Thomas Friedman on the MIT OpenCourseWare site. You can download the speech about his latest book “The world is flat” at iTunes U, check it out. Thanks to the MIT for sharing this lecture with the whole world… so is Chris Anderson right and we are in the age of free economy?

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Isn’t the world a great place?

Some weeks ago I finally managed it to read “the long tail” by Chris Anderson. I can really recommend you his book, because Chris explains very simple the shift in the demand/supply side due to trends of digitalization. There are no more superstars – the wide range of supply is the new hero and driver for demand. Even the theory is already some years old, I think it still has major influence on the way we structure and look at our business. Especially in combination with the democratization of technology, production, distribution and the new opportunities in digital networks it has the possibility to totally change the way we will make business in the future.

Some days ago I watched the keynote of Norbert Bolz at the Next07 Conference about “the future of interactive media”. He uses the Pareto distribution and the long tail theory to explain the power of niches in the new media context, which leads to like-mindedness among all involved parties and boost the power of blogs within this group. Take a look, it’s really interesting how he compares the traditional media and user generated content.

Link: sevenload.com