Love business books? Wondering what in the heck all this hype about Facebook, My Space, You Tube and blogs is all about? Thinking that it’s just a bunch of crap for teenagers?Well I was with you until just recently. My 16 year-old finally put enough pressure on me to join Facebook and I now have a “WhatDianes Reading” page. Do I know what to do with it? Not really. I suspect that it will only serve to prove just how wildly unpopular I am (I knew that was true offline, did I need to know it was true online?). My husband got me onto Twitter (username: whatdianesread) so that people could follow what books I’m reading. I read a lot of books and, believe it or not, I don’t manage to write reviews on all of them.

But I digress.

“Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies” by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff is to blame for all of this. This book is targeted at business groups on how to effectively use blogs, wikis, social media, etc. to actually do business.

Let’s face it, most stuffy corporate types don’t even allow their employees to access Facebook or You Tube at work, much less embrace the technology. Li and Burnoff give some pretty compelling evidence for why they should. People are going to the web in droves. Some are lurkers, others are content creators, other just like to critique products (like me). If you’re not at least listening to your customers, they argue, you’re losing out.

If you work at a corporation and want to convince upper management to at least hear you out on this stuff, “Groundswell” is an excellent place to start. There’s a lot of Forrester Research to back up their assertions and tons of great case studies that will have even the stuffiest CEO itching to start a blog (well, not really).

For more ammunition, check out “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything“.