Four Modern Classics That Matter if You Want to Engage Your Membership
Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
by Steven Johnson. Published by Riverhead.
This book uses popular culture with which we are all familiar to explain how content has become more compelling by engaging us more deeply. Content that achieves greater engagement produces loyalty and has positive economic consequences.
Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
by Steven Johnson. Published by Scribner.
This book explores how from the coming together of individual elements new intelligence emerges. Engaging content produces communities out of which new intelligence and greater engagement emerges. Collaborative communities take on a life of their own.
Curation Nation: How to Win in a World Where Consumers are Creators
by Steven Rosenbaum. Published by McGraw-Hill
This book makes the convincing argument that curation is the future of content. Imagine a museum that not only collects works of art but also creates them. The watchwords are “Aggregate. Curate. Create.” Huffington Post and Google News are examples from the consumer world. Every association is a natural curator.
Contagious: Why Things Catch On
by Jonah Berger. Published by Simon & Schuster
This book is a manual for creating compelling content – information that people find interesting enough to pass on to others. The author devotes 200 pages to the detailed presentation of six characteristics that make content “contagious.”