Note: This resource doesn’t exist anymore; the service on which it was built (CrispyNews) was acquired by Salesforce (and used for interesting things like Dell’s IdeaStorm). You can still find an archive of the page via the Internet Archive.
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The Wall Street Journal‘s OpinionJournal has published recently a list of what MWW’s president Michael Kempner presents as the five “ultimate books on public relation” (later edit: it was supposed to be “5 favorite books on spin”, not on PR, but the distinction was probably lost on the Journal’s editors :). Hm — it’s not exactly what I had in mind when I read the article’s title…
So how do I add my favorite PR books to Mr. Kempner’s “ultimate” list (you know, just in case The Journal is not that interested in my opinion)? Even more important: how do you add your favorites? :)
There’s a simple solution: we’ll “digg” them. Here’s how:
- Go to prbooks.crispynews.com
- Click on Suggest a book, and add a link to the Amazon page of your favorite book, write down its title and author, and submit it. (If you really care about the book you can include a link to its cover image, too.)
- Do the same thing for your other favorite PR books — but please don’t submit more than 3 or 4 books; let’s leave some space for other people, too.
- Add a comment or a review, explaining what makes the book so special (we’ll find a way to recognize the best reviews).
- Vote on the books submitted by other people (no, there’s no way to prevent you from voting on books that you didn’t read, but I’m counting on your honesty) and comment on or review their entries (to agree or disagree in a civil manner).
If you takePlease take a minute to register with the website, so that your suggestions and votes will receive 10 points (otherwise they’ll get just 3). Plus, your (user) name will get displayed on the entries that you submit.- The books with most votes will be showed on the homepage. There’s also a page for new entries, and an RSS feed that will keep you updated on the books added recently.
Right now there are only a couple of books posted on the website — Michael Kempner’s list, Phil Gomes’s favorites, and mine. Let’s see your favorites :)
* Fine prints : Sure, there’s no such thing as “the best PR book”, and voting will not help us finding it anyway. But we can see what are the most popular/recommended PR books by the people who care enough to submit their favorites and to vote on other’s people favorites. Worth a try, IMO.
Comments 8
Interesting project, with a little drawback: At the moment only books of US-american origin seem to be listed (nothing wrong with US PR literature, of course), but it might be helpful to provide a language segmentation (the market for e.g. pr-books in german language is comparatively smaller than in English or in Spanish). Thus differences in practical PR-culture could/should show.
Posted 29 Nov 2006 at 5:31 am ¶Great idea Constantin, I just added a few books. Markus, why don’t you add a few in other languages? It would be interesting.
Posted 29 Nov 2006 at 1:05 pm ¶Markus, I’d love to have a more diverse list of books and see what PR practitioners worldwide are reading; the only problem is that CrispyNews doesn’t offer a solution for doing language segmentation, but maybe we can use the categories feature for that, so books in Spanish, for example, will be tagged with “En Espanol” and featured both on the category’s page, and on the general list. What do you think?
If you think that will work, I’ll create the categories — or, even better, give you admin rights to set it up :)
Posted 29 Nov 2006 at 1:31 pm ¶Thank you for participating, Kami! I just voted for one of the books you submitted, Don Stack’s “Primer of Public Relations Research” :)
Disclosure: Dr. Stacks was my faculty adviser at the University of Miami.
Posted 29 Nov 2006 at 1:35 pm ¶Thank you for starting that list, Constantin. I thought Mr. Kempner’s list was a little heavy on the political spin angle of PR, so it’s good to see some other books out there.
My addition: Boorstin’s The Image.
Posted 30 Nov 2006 at 11:37 am ¶Yes, I love the Stacks book, it is full of sticky notes here on my desk. ;-)
Posted 30 Nov 2006 at 4:52 pm ¶Yet another great idea, Constantin. Thanks for sharing it.
Let us not forget the PR Books Wiki from Richard Bailey, too. I’m sure he’d appreciate further involvement in developing that resource.
http://prbooks.pbwiki.com/
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Trackbacks & Pingbacks 5
[...] … muss erst noch geschrieben werden. Bis dahin können Interessierte aber schon mal ihre Favoriten vorschlagen. In einem gerade gestarteten Projekt können aber nicht nur Vorschläge eingereicht werden, sondern auch die von anderen eingetragenen Titel bewertet werden – also in schönster Digg-Manier. Wie es genau geht, steht auf dem Weblog von Constantin Basturea. Derzeit findet sich auf der Projektwebsite überwiegend (ausschließlich?) USA-amerikanische PR-Literatur, aber das können wir ja ändern, oder? [...]
[...] [addendum: more to that - here] [...]
[...] PR meets the WWW » Digg the best* PR books Another great idea: Constantin Basturea started a crispynews page with the best PR books. Anyone can submit and vote. Non-English books are also welcome, Constantin suggests to start seperate categories for the languages. (tags: education books pr science) [...]
Five Favorite Books
A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal featured my 5 favorite books on public relations in its weekly Saturday Journal column. While it was actually supposed to be my 5 favorite books on “spin,” a subtle but important distinction,…
[...] On a completely seperate topic, there’s a great example of how the online world can provide a really useful resource. Following on from Michael Kemper’s selection of the five best PR books, Constantin, Kami and the rest of the online PR crew have pulled together a site where you can suggest and vote for your favourite PR book. If you are interested in some professional reading material – it’s not a bad place to start. [...]