I discovered Goodreads a couple years ago and found it instantly addictive. It’s a social network for sharing, organizing, and commenting on books. You can create your own shelves on which to hang books you’ve read, are currently reading, or mark to read. You can also invite your friends to join the service and opt in to see what’s new in their streams. So if they write a review or rate a certain book, it will pop up in your stream, you can decide if you want to check it out or not, and add it to one of your own shelves.

I bring Goodreads up for a number of reasons. The first is that when I first started using it, I had to go back in my mind and think about ALL the books I’ve read. This was a hard job for and English major who’s forgotten more books than he cares to admit. I’m still woefully behind in adding things to my library. Still, this is a great mental exercise that forced me to organize my reading for the first time ever. I could now see how many non-fiction versus fiction books I had read, for example, or if I was missing a certain book in a series or family of writers. The task of cataloguing puts a lot of things in perspective for me, and I find that I am recognizing patterns in this volume of data that I once had not previously seen. This is a GREAT exercise that will help you measure your pattern recognition abilities, something which futurist Venessa Miemis calls an essential skill for 21st century thinking.

Courtesy of an-inkling.com

Secondly, as a social animal, I am finding all kinds of value in the connections I make on Goodreads. In many cases, these connections are very different from the ones I have on other social media. For example, I don’t have a relationship with the guy I buy comic books from, Don Alsafi of G-Mart Comics in Chicago. Well, at least our relationship has been defined simply by my buying comics from him. However, once we became connected on Goodreads, we’ve exchanged quite a few different ideas about books we’ve either read or want to read. Most of this happens without us having an actual conversation, or at least the conversation is marked simply by signifiers in one of our ratings or reviews of the books we read. But these signifiers are not directed at any one connections. They are free and open to the community. So I’m basically getting a free window into Don’s mind regarding the books he’s read. We skip the conversation and get right to the information: PLANETARY is fucking AWESOME. Got it. Moving on. I like the elegance of this network, which is not to say there’s not plenty of interactive conversation in Goodreads’ network of groups. Plus, you can always make a comment on someone’s review or rating.

Finally, the last reason I bring up Goodreads is that one of my AWESOME readers recently asked me why I don’t do more book reviews on Must. Be. AWESOME!!! The answer’s pretty simple: I review every book I read on Goodreads. The writeups can range from a paragraph to more detailed to only a rating, but I find that for books, it’s easier for me to put my thoughts into a single space that has already been catalogued, tagged and organized rather than creating new content for this space.

So if you’re looking for my thoughts on any number of books, feel free to follow me on Goodreads. I’m still working out how I can get a good Goodreads widget set up to flow my content there to my blog (most of the WordPress plugins are dismal), so if you have any good ideas on that, let me know. Otherwise, I do have my Goodreads feed connected to Twitter and Facebook too, so reviews and ratings will occasionally pop into those streams as well (sporadically, though, because of the unevenness of the interfaces).

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{I’ve been thinking a lot on how to best approach book reviews here at Must. Be. AWESOME!!! I maintain a separate space on Goodreads for managing and reviewing books. However, some of those books do cross the threshold into true expressions of AWESOME, and I’ll be sharing some of those here on the blog. For everything else I’m reading (or about to read), check me out under username “Dufour” on Goodreads.}

I respond well to influencers who surprise me. I get bored easily by “normal” content, and I yearn for batshit insane, crazy GONZO stuff that will both entertain me and feed my head. Earlier this year, Andy Nulman wrote a book that totally did that: POW! Right Between the Eyes: Profiting from the Power of Surprise.

Nulman really speaks to me. He’s loud. He dresses funny. He comes from a comedy background. He’s irreverent to the point of annoyance. But he’s wily enough to have figured out that there’s something to this surprise marketing thing, and through his book (and accompanying blog), he’s staked a claim as the purveyor of all things Surprise.

The book itself contains plenty of hardcore, actionable lessons that marketers, PR peeps, social business strategists, and others can use to inject a little craziness into their otherwise boring, stale, or usual campaigns. Nulman even spends a little time dissecting what surprise is on the emotional register and how the physical displays of surprise make one more susceptible to suggestion. He’s not a scientist by any means, and I believe from his stated research that it’s probably only Google-deep, but such an understanding of the science of surprise is just enough background for the reader. This is not an academic or scholarly read. It is an AWESOME one. Nulman wisely spends most of his print time focusing on the fun stuff.

Nulman uses his background in comedy as a launching point to analyze why traditional marketing sucks so bad and why crazy, gonzo tactics of the type he describes are so effective. I have long maintained that entertainment is the most effective way into a person’s good graces, and Nulman entertains the crap outta his readers. His writing style is fun, provocative, and completely in line with his stated purpose. I respect an author who so brazenly ignores many of the common rules of writing and blazes his own trail with his own voice. Nulman surprises you on every page, whether it’s a pithy remark about a competitor’s shit-ass marketing scheme or an entertaining analysis of a certain brand’s methods in surprise. Plus, in keeping with his theme, Nulman pulls out the stops with a really cool surprise ending to the book that catapults its engagement from the printed page to other media.

Some of Nulman’s passages may come off as self-aggrandizing and downright egotistical. That’s OK. Be ready for it. Embrace it. You have to accept that the guy who lives by The Art of Surprise is going to be a little shameless in the self-promotion department. While it can be tiring reading about all the cool things that have happened to Nulman that put him on this path, you will still learn some valuable lessons from his overhyped hyperbole.

One of the more interesting aspects of Nulman’s roll-out for POW! involved his blog, on which he wrote about Surprise and presented examples of Surprise marketing in action. For quite a while leading up to the book’s release, the blog was a great place to get real world studies (albeit brief ones) of what makes something an effective mechanism for Surprise. However, shortly after the book’s publication, Nulman began posting less… and less… until finally his regular content dried up to virtually nothing. He has since admitted that he was unable to maintain the blog to any degree of regular value for his audience and thus decided to close up shop. This became an interesting and value-laden lesson for me: using a blog as an experimentation ground for book content and then a marketing vehicle for that book has its advantages and disadvantages. Nulman sits at the other end of the spectrum from blogger-turned-author guys like Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, who not only developed multiple social media streams to promote and market their book Trust Agents but also continue to engage with people on those new and preexisting networks.

That criticism aside, POW! Right Between the Eyes is still an AWESOME book, business or otherwise. It’s filled full of good ideas to use if you’re a dirty influence peddler like myself, and it’s entertaining and fun to read if you’re not.