With the vast majority of Facebook users caught in a frenzy of 'friending', 'liking' and 'commenting', at what point do we pause to grasp the consequences of our info-saturated lives? What compels us to engage so diligently with social networking systems? Networks Without a Cause examines our collective obsession with identity and self-management coupled with the fragmentation and information overload endemic to contemporary online culture. With a dearth of theory on the social and cultural ramifications of hugely popular online services, Lovink provides a path-breaking critical analysis of our over-hyped, networked world with case studies on search engines, online video, blogging, digital radio, media activism and the Wikileaks saga. This book offers a powerful message to media practitioners and theorists: let us collectively unleash our critical capacities to influence technology design and workspaces, otherwise we will disappear into the cloud. Probing but never pessimistic, Lovink draws from his long history in media research to offer a critique of the political structures and conceptual powers embedded in the technologies that shape our daily lives.

A one-stop source on the art and science of developing marketing content that people care about. This coverage is interwoven with case studies of companies successfully spreading their ideas online--and using them to establish credibility and build a loyal customer base.

"Bakan offers passionate argument and copious research in this compelling call for parents to stand up for their children."--Booklist (starred review) "Corporations have found a new resource to be mined for profit: our children. In this shocking and indelible behind-the-scenes journey, Joel Bakan, acclaimed author and award-winning maker of the renowned film and international bestselling book The Corporation, uncovers the astonishing degree to which companies exploit the special vulnerabilities of children, manipulate parents' fears, and operate with callous disregard for children's health and well-being. The number of children taking dangerous psychotropic drugs has skyrocketed as pharmaceutical companies employ insidious, often illegal tactics to inflate diagnoses of disorders and convince parents their children require medication. A highly sophisticated marketing industry deploys increasingly subtle and powerful tactics to play on children's intense emotions and desires and to lure them into obsessive consumerism. Computer game designers craft techniques to titillate children with sex and violence, while social media developers infiltrate and shape children's social and emotional worlds to compel them to spend more and more monetizable time online. America's schools are being transformed into profit centers while children are subjected to increasingly regimented teaching that thwarts curiosity and creativity, numbing the joy of learning. And children's chronic health problems, from asthma to cancer, autism, and birth defects, steadily escalate as thousands of new industrial chemicals are dumped into their environments. Nelson Mandela once sagely remarked that "there can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way it treats its children." The problem today, as Joel Bakan reveals, is that business interests have made protecting children extremely difficult. Corporations pump billions into rendering parents and governments powerless to shield children from an unrelenting commercial assault, with the result that after a century of progress, during which protective laws and regulations were widely promulgated, children are once again exposed to substantial harms at the hands of economic actors. Childhood Under Siege leaves no room for doubt that this assault on childhood is a major crisis of our time. A powerful manifesto for urgent change, it empowers us to shield our own children while offering concrete and realistic proposals for legal reforms that would protect all children from these predatory practices. "--Publisher's description

"The social media craze has, ironically, given birth to one of the biggest booms in recent book publishing. The gaping hole in this market, however, is B2B. Nearly every social media book that's been published either targets the consumer market or treats B2B as an afterthought. If you search for "B2B social media marketing" on Amazon, the results revealed not a single relevant title. In fact, Paul's own two social media books both turn up in the top 10 results, despite the fact that neither of them directly targets this market. This is a stunning gap, given that some of the earliest adopters of social media were B2B companies like IBM, Sun Microsystems and Cisco. There is also plentiful evidence that B2B marketers are hungry for information about this topic. At the recent Inbound Marketing Summit in Boston, a show of hands from the audience of 350 marketers revealed that about 70% identified themselves as B2B. The authors' own consulting and speaking engagements, which were principally to consumer audiences a couple of years ago, are now almost entirely to B2B companies and trade associations. The Business Marketing Association estimates B2B marketing spending at over $80 billion annually. Among the top 50 companies on the Fortune 500, nearly all have significant B2B sales. What's more, the B2B market tends to be less price sensitive than the consumer market, meaning that readers are more likely to pay a premium price for specialized guide and to buy in quantity. How Businesses Reach Businesses will build upon our extensive experience in this space, the authors' two successful social media books, and more than a decade of collective immersion in this topic. This will be a hands-on guide with plentiful examples, case studies and best practices. It will focus on the channels that are proving most effective for B2B marketers as well as on the topics that are unique to this segment, including prospecting for clients, long selling cycles and high-ticket items, using social media for long-term client relationships, corporate transparency and policies, etc"--

Engaged Leadership 2e addresses the challenge of employee disengagement. It will provide even more reasons for building a culture to overcome employee disengagement. Clint will address the impact high unemployment has had on employee engagement, and the impact it has had on those left behind doing the work of two people. He will also address the issues surrounding a lack of job security brought on by the global recession, and the growing impact of social media on employee engagement. And finally, Clint will update the fable to make it more current, and will add on additional sections to update readers on where certain characters have ended up as a result of the current economic impact on the organization in the fable. He will also tie the updated fable to closely to Living for the Weekday, with the ultimate goal of tying the two books together in all his speaking and consulting.