In Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business, Erik Qualman depicts how social media is transforming the way we live our lives and do business – and backs it up with real world statistics, social media success stories as well as failures, and adds in his own opinions and commentary.

Most of the books written about social media that I’ve read are either basic reference guides to social media terms and platforms or are after-the-fact accounts of social media case studies. Qualman’s book combines these approaches and takes them to the next level with applied thinking as to what businesses should be doing to adapt to this shift in communication and the importance of interaction between businesses and individual consumers.

In my opinion, this is one of the best books currently written about social media. It’s a quick read, incorporates great case studies and statistics, arms those of us who work in social media with information to help make the case for social media to clients, addresses the always popular question of social media and ROI, and most importantly, gets readers thinking about new ways to employ the powerful social media platforms that already exist.

For more information about the author, check out his blog, or even better, go buy and read his book.

Check out the below video from Qualman’s blog for some interesting statistics illustrating the power of social media:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8&feature=player_embedded]

Highlights from the video:

1. By 2010 Generation Y will out populate Baby Boomers….and 96% of Generation Y has joined a social network
2. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
3. Years to Reach 50 million Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
4. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
5. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
6. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
7. 80% of Twitter usage is outside of the Twitter.com domain.
8. Generation Y and Z don’t consider email to be important…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
9. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
10. Current existing number of blogs: over 200,000,000
11. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
12. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
13. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone
14. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
15. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared daily on Facebook.