You can't swing a dead fad without hitting a WOM/Viral/Buzz Book.

"The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion." veteran reporter John Lawton so famously quipped.

Seems these days you can't spit without hitting a book about Viral, Buzz and/or WOM marketing. It doesn't start out to bad with Connected Marketing rom Dr Paul Marsden social psychologist and viral marketing researcher and Justin Kirby, founder of DMC London released last year, then there's Grapevine: The New Art of Word-of-Mouth Marketing by David Balter president of BzzAgent and sidekick John Butman, The Anatomy of Buzz: How to Create Word of Mouth Marketing by Emanuel Rosen who comes from the copywriting side of advertising. Soon we're down to the for dummies books, Buzz Marketing with Blogs For Dummies , by Susannah Gardner co-founder and creative director of Hop Studios Internet Consultants

And now Andy Sernovitz, CEO of WOMMA, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association has released Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking book in hardcover on Amazon. Is it just me or are there now officially more books about the phenomena of WOM viral and buzz than there are people actually practicing it?

Now which would I recommend you to pick up? Brand Hijack by Alex Wipperfürth and the above mentioned connected marketing - one lends the big picture which you'll always need to keep in mind no matter what part of marketing you practice and the other many practitioners essays on the topic. Why buy ten books when you can buy one? Yeah, I'm stingy.