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Business Book Reviews In 140 Characters (Or Less)

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"Tribes (Seth Godin): Tribe=social network. Anyone can lead a tribe. You should lead a tribe."

One glance at Twitter and you will note that we are moving from a snackable content society into something much smaller. In an effort to keep pace and to bridge Foreword Thinking – The Business and Motivational Book Review Podcast (which has been woefully silent for the past little while) for future plans, I am introducing a new project titled, BizBookReview, which you can view here: Twitter – BizBookReview. The idea is simple: use the existing Twitter platform as a place, community and location to post 140 character (or less) business and motivational book reviews. The one above was about the book, Tribes, by Seth Godin.

Anyone can (and should take part) – not just by following, but by creating reviews as well.

You can simply follow the BizBookReview feed to keep up-to-date on the reviews, or you can take part and write your own reviews. Those can be sent via email or "direct message" to either my personal Twitter account or to the BizBookReview one. Anybody who follows the BizBookReview account on Twitter will be followed back (unless it’s pure spam), but the real fun is in creating your own reviews.

This is an experiment.

There are no immediate plans for BizBookReview and there was even less up-front strategy about getting started. I’m still trying to sort out what Foreword Thinking is going to become in 2009 and, in the interest of full disclosure, if this becomes about me agonizing over what to post on a daily basis, it will fail. We all read great business and motivational books (and some not so great ones) and my hopes are that everyone (yes, you!) joins in and creates some (or many). How great would it be to see different reviews of the same books?

What are you waiting for? Head over to BizBookReview, follow along and try your hand at creating some content.

Happy quick reading and reviewing.

12 comments

  2. i remember when wired did the article on snack sized culture. not long after twitter showed up big on the scene. it really is a thing isn’t it.

  3. I like the concept, yet wonder how useful a 140-character comment can be. Can bearly list the title, author, and what it’s about, maybe squeeze in a like/dislike adjective. Will people read or not read something based on just that? Not sure.

  4. That’s a neat and innovative idea, Mitch. But here’s a question: If @BizBookReview adds a review and I add a different review of the same book, how will they be tracked? Do we use hashtags? Or some other system tracking reviews?
    What do people think?

  5. Helen – I don’t think any of us are kidding ourselves into thinking that you’re going to get a substantive review from this. The point is to try and get a book summed up into 140 characters or less. It’s more of a fun/entertainment thing than a challenge to the New York Times Book Review section.
    Ari – If someone sends it over to me as a DM or uses the @bizbookreview on their own, I will see it and post it. You can even email it to me 🙂 If you would like to set up a hashtag, I’m fine with that too. Would it be: #bbr?

  6. Nice idea! considering to Aris question: what about just putting “_” between the words: i.e. “secrets_of_social_media_marketing”
    or “tribes_”. and then use search.twitter.com and you get all the reviews made for BizBookReview.

  8. @mjay – I’m not a huge movie-goer and I’m not looking for more people… I’m looking for the *right* people 😉
    @Chris – I don’t like the idea of underscores… too weird to read and enjoy.

  9. Great idea. Experimented a while back in Twitter with the haiku form for movie reviews. Not too successful…but that could just be because I was being a lazy git and was generating the content myself. LOL.
    In contrast, this book review idea looks like it’s going to be very successful.

  11. Oh, I get it now. So, this is kind of like an elevator pitch type of summary. I love that idea. I guess I was taking it too serious at first. 🙂 I love books and I’m actually starting to read them now and not just ‘collect’ them. Great to have another place to participate. Hope the idea sticks around a bit!

  12. Twitter reviews are great when to start some buzz or when you want to quickly recommend a book, but I strongly agree that people should read more detailed book reviews/summaries to decide if they want to invest into a new business book.
    This is my opinion. Probably I sound biased because I own a business books reviews blog.
    The length of a review depends on how much attention you really want to give the pre-purchasing action of the book.
    Have a nice day. 🙂

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