Engage! by Brian Solis

If the last books you read about the digital sector was Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, or Unleashing the Idea Virus by Seth Godin, then it is time to brush up on your knowledge with a summer reading list that will get you up to speed on what’s happening right now online.

Leading social media thinker Brian Solis’s new book Engage! is a must read this summer, for anyone who wants to better understand how to communicate for a brand, or to manage your own online reputation. He covers many tools, looks at very current case studies of what has worked and what has failed with social media. He shows how to approach online coversations without mis-stepping the boundaries, which aren’t always clear. The book answers a lot of questions that you may have had, such as whether to mix personal with professional discussion online (no!) and offers helpful advice on how to better manage, or “curate” online presence across many channels.

Solis lays out the case for brands to be present in social media, and shows how the medium tips conventional marketing and communications thinking on its head. His book is a key resource and road map for navigating the online world, and if you only read one book about the digital sector this summer, make this be the one.

Consider that every time you update your status, send a tweet or write a blog post you are leaving behind a trail of yourself, archived online, possibly forever, a prospect that is both amazing, but terrifying at the same time. In the book My Digital Footprint by Tony Fish, find out more about how to carefully manage your digital life to add value and avoid pitfalls. This book will help you take control of your digital life and make it work better for you.

For PR professionals who are seeking to get more digital with campaigns, Deirdre Breakenridge’s PR 2.0 offers a guide to the Web 2.0 landscape and how it can be effectively used for promotions. She covers tools in detail, including blogs, podcasts, RSS, online newsrooms and social media and how they can be linked to enhance public relations programmes.

If blogging still confuses you, add the book Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel to your summer reading list, and learn how real people, and businesses, are using blogs to powerfully change the face of business.

With nearly 10 titles under his belt, the latest book from marketer Seth Godin is Meatball Sundae, in which he lays out 14 trends that are remaking the business world, all with an eye toward YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the digital tools that are changing the rule of the business marketing game.

When it comes to marketing concepts, Malcolm Galdwell, the author of The Tipping Point and Blink, explores the extraordinary stories behind the most seemingly ordinary things, such as ketchup. While not necessarily digital, his new book What the Dog Saw will give you new insight to the world around you, and make you think differently about some of the most common everyday brands.

As you increase your Web 2.0 knowledge and new thinking toward marketing, don’t forget to read The Cluetrain Manifesto, now nearly a decade old, but still ringing true for what the Web 2.0 landscape means for businesses. it shows how the web is a place where marketing is about conversations, and those discussions are forcing businesses to re-think how to approach customers. Although written pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter, it is impressive how much of the ideas in this book have come true with the advent of social media.

The new digital is increasingly about accessing the internet through mobile devices, and the way this emerging space is changing the game is well worth exploring to get a sense of what our future may be like as digital consumers. To increase your knowledge in this area, top mobile expert Ajit Jaokar, who writes the Open Gardens blog, offers his book Open Mobile to help you understand the intersection between online and mobile and what it means for the Internet, social networking and content.

With this stack of books ready to sit by your side as you sunbathe on the beach or laze about poolside, you’ll be a digital guru come autumn and ready to take on the Web 2.0 world equipped with a better understanding about how it all works.