(This is part three in a series on How To Be (Internet) Famous. You can check out the previous installments here.)

The truth about marketing books is that 99.9 percent of them are crap. You know it. I know it. Heck, even the authors of those books know it. There are many reasons for this, but in the interest of time, I’ll give you the big one: Many marketing books exist under the guise as being written for “you”, but they’re actually being written in the hopes of garnering the attention of an advertising agency like WPP plc’s Ogilvy & Mather or a large brand like Nike, Inc.

An agency or company that size wouldn’t blink at paying the author $25,000 (or more) to hear their expertise on the subject they’ve written about. That’s one of the reasons so many marketing books are filled to the brim with case studies involving large multinational corporations and not scrappy startups. The other reason? Because those case studies are slam dunks. Of course the big social media push from Ford Motor Company worked. Ford had enough money to continue throwing at it, no matter how poorly the campaigns actually performed, until it got the metrics they wanted.

And it’s not like a company like Ford  is going to come out and tell you the campaign was a failure either. None of these companies or agencies will. Since nobody is looking that closely at the numbers Ford or their agency massaged to make everyone feel good about themselves, the marketing book authors happily regurgitate the case study without knowing what actually went down in the campaign they’re talking about.

It’s like Shaq. You remember Shaq? I’m a Lakers fan, so I remember the big lug. Of course Shaq is going to dunk on you. He may have been terrible at the free throw line, but he was large enough to where no one could keep him from getting the result that he wanted on the court, and so are the large agencies and brands whose case studies get repeated by the marketing authors. They’re all the marketing equivalents of Shaq.

I guess Mark Twain was right, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story”, and that’s what those authors do, by omitting key facts that are inconvenient to the narrative they want to sell you because again, “you” are not their target.

Now, I am not saying every marketing book ever made sucks. Nor am I saying that all marketing consultants are trying to scam you. There are some great books out there that you should read, and there are some great people out there worthy of your time to work with.  It doesn’t matter if you live in Moscow, London, or even Glens Falls, New York. In the world we live in, we all have to be good at marketing. You want to know why? Because it doesn’t matter where you live or what language you speak. Marketing is a basic human function and it’s one that’s critical to our very survival as a species.

For example, we pick our mates almost entirely based on how well we sell ourselves to each other. That’s all dating is. It’s an elaborate marketing campaign. That makes these marketing books more important than you might think, and why it’s such a big deal that so many of them suck. Being good at marketing is a universal skill that can be applied to any and all situations in life. Whether you’re looking for a job, looking to get that first date, or trying to draw attention to a cause you believe in. It doesn’t have to be applied only in situations when you have a product to sell. How you market yourself, and your cause or product, will almost always be the determining factor in your success, all other things being equal. (Of course, things often aren’t equal, especially on the Internet, but we’ll get to that later in this series.)

The only 11 marketing books you should read

For that reason, let me give you the eleven books I’ve been recommending to college students interested in marketing across North America and the United Kingdom for the past few years. And in honor of the criminally underrated Ben Stiller movie, “Zoolander”, this list is titled: “The B.J. Mendelson Book List for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Like Marketing Good Too”.

1. “Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age” by Dr. Duncan J. Watts
2. “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less” by Dr. Barry Schwartz
3. “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” by Dr. Jonah Berger
4. “Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind” by Al Ries and Dr. Philip Kotler
5. “Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die” by Dr. Chip Heath and Dan Heath
6. “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” Dr. Robert Cialdini
7. “Comedy Writing Secrets”:  By Melvin Helitzer and Dr. Mark Shatz
8. “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach To Web Usability” by Steve Krug
9. “How To Win Friends & Influence People” by Dale Carnegie
10. “On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft” by Stephen King
11. “Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping” by Paco Underhill

These are the books you want to own and know backward and forward to be awesome at marketing. Buy a couple of copies of each of them in print, too. One for you to lend out to a friend or colleague, and another to markup with your notes. Having that second copy to lend out helps ensure that you don’t lose all your notes. Especially when your friend borrows it and places it behind her toilet inside a basket filled with “Prevention Magazine” and “Fitness” for three months. (She knows who she is.) You can do the highlighting on your tablet too, but I found I’m more focused when I’m reading an important book in print, and that I retain what I read better than if I were reading it on the tablet. Maybe that’s just me, but maybe it’s not. There are a number of studies that have come out in recent years that indicate readers can recall content better if it’s read in print than if it’s read on a screen. So if you want to do what I do and use an app or program to save articles to be read later, that’s fine, but for the important stuff? The stuff that could make all the difference in your life if you do it correctly? Get it in print.

These books, taken together, get to the core of what will make your marketing efforts successful: Being able to communicate an idea or product in such a way that people will buy it, understand it, use it, and share it. What these books I mentioned won’t do, that this column will, is show you how to do that in a structured way that’ll get you as close to the finish line as possible. That’s the whole “Probability Of Success” thing I keep talking about in this series.

Not all of these books I recommended are perfect. “Six Degrees” is important to read but kind of dense. “Contagious” is overly simplistic in places, but it’s easier for me to recommend that book then the usual twelve word of mouth marketing books you’d have to read in lieu of it. And “Influence” suffers from the same problem another great book, “Predictably Irrational”, does where a lot of the experiments were done on college students on college campuses. So while what those two books talk about is important, you also have to take it with a little grain of salt because college campuses are unique environments and are rarely representative of the larger population that surrounds them. Which is a bummer because if college campuses were reflective of the larger population, that’d mean we’d all be liberal, educated, and able to enjoy the music of Guster without any irony. And speaking of irony, my book list’s title, and the fact that the first seven entries on it are written, or co-written, by people with Ph.D.’s shouldn’t be lost on anyone. You may have noticed a distinct lack of gurus, except for Dale Carnegie. He gets a pass from me because “How To Win Friends And Influence People” is written like he took all the good advice from The Bible and then took the religion out of it. And as a liberal heathen, I approve of this.

What about “Social Media Is Bullshit”?

Speaking of books, now is a good as time as any to mention that I don’t include my book on this list when professors and students request it. Unprompted, and unexpectedly, “Social Media Is Bullshit” somehow found its way into courses everywhere between the University of Southern California, New York University, and the University of Westminster in London. Plugging yourself is  a sleazy thing to do when people ask for an objective recommendation. You should never hesitate to promote yourself, given the opportunity, but only in appropriate circumstances. When someone asks for a recommendation? That’s not an appropriate circumstance. You didn’t see Santa in “Miracle on 34th Street” plugging Macy’s did you? He didn’t! There are two separate instances in the 1947 classic where Santa sends parents to other stores without ever plugging Macy’s in the process. This practices was so popular that Macy’s, the fictional version in the film, even started putting books together for their employees to do the same thing Santa was doing to help their customers. That’s how a good recommendation works. You take your self-interest completely out of it, so my book has never appeared on one of these lists.

Also, you should never watch the remake of “Miracle on 34th Street” with Dylan McDermott. Much like a lot of the marketing books that have come out since 1937 that ripped off Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends And Influence People”, like pretty much all the “Personal Branding” books, “The Miracle on 34th Street” remake is not that awful, but it is completely forgettable. Watch the original instead like I do every December 24th. You won’t regret it.