Book Selection: The New Rules of Marketing and PR

In picking a book for this course I looked for a title that would give me a general overview of new media tools, the marketing opportunities within this new framework, and the new consumer climate emerging from the use of new media. I was less interested in a book that would give me specific ideas for online marketing projects or a book that focused on one online marketing tool. With that in mind, I narrowed down the reading list to ten potential titles before I even began my online research.

The best place to find comprehensive information on the ten titles I was interested in was Amazon.com. This website lists the product description, specifications, reviews, and comparable reading on a single page. In addition to the information available on the book’s page, all of the books I researched had the Amazon.com “Search Inside” feature, which allowed me to browse each of the books just as if I had picked it up off the shelf.

There were a number of reasons why I eventually eliminated all but one book. I placed a lot of trust in the reviews posted on Amazon.com. All of the books had more positive reviews than negative (probably because the author’s acquaintances, or the author himself, contributed to the reviews) but books that did not have as many people commenting, or that had a mixture of positive and negative reviews, did not seem as reputable to me.

I also spent a lot of time using the “Search Inside” feature. Even after reading the jacket copy and reviewers comments, I found the table of contents to be a huge decision making factor for me. Even if everything on the Amazon.com site made the book look intriguing, a table of contents that seemed dull or inconsistent with the other information I read about the book led me to eliminate the title.

After reviewing the books on Amazon.com, I narrowed down my options to three titles: The New Rules of Marketing and PR, Groundswell, and DigiMarketing. Each of these titles had strong reviews, intriguing contents, and the general approach to new media and marketing I was interested in. At this point I moved my search to Powells.com. Because I am not using my credit card right now, I knew I would have to go to a bookstore to purchase the book. I figured the availability through Powell’s would be my ultimate deciding factor.        

I have never purchased a book from Powells.com, and I was really impressed with the information I found there. Not only did they have the product description, table of contents, and reviews for the titles I was considering, they also had a list of where the book was available through their stores and the quantity in stock. This made it so easy to quickly eliminate two of my options and decide to purchase The New Rules of Marketing and PR (available at the Burnside store, in the Business: Marketing section, in paperback, with eight copies to choose from).