Business Grad Students Rank 4 Social Media “text books”

There’s no text book out there (yet), but here are the books about social media that I assign to my grad students as part of our Communication Technology class. I took a quick survey of the class opinion on the rank order of usefulness to them:

1. Groundswell by Li and Bernoff (great book; Forrester web sites includes updates to the stats)
2. Inbound Marketing by Halligan and Shah
3. Trust Agents by Brogan and Smith
4. The Cluetrain Manifesto: 10th Anniversary Edition by Levine et al.

While The Cluetrain Manifesto ranked last, I think it is important nonetheless in establishing a “big picture” understanding of the changes in communication technology that have occurred during the past decade (it was published in 1999). The other books are certainly more “tactical” in nature, but I consider The Cluetrain Manifesto an important strategic grounding.

I’m thinking of replacing Trust Agents with Putting the Public Back in Public Relations by Brian Solis. Solis is a PR guy and I like his approach to new PR thinking.

I would like to hear anyone’s feedback on any of these books, or experience in general about teaching communication technology/social media.