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237 Top Marketing Minds. 1 Brilliant Book.
By Rohit Bhargava
Last week 236 of my fellow marketing bloggers and I launched a very ambitious project. The second of its kind, it was a collaborative effort to write a book about the new world of media we are all living in, which the book aptly calls the "Age of Conversation."
Going further, the book engagingly asks with its subtitle, "why don't they get it?" You see, in the world of marketing, there is a temptation to make things just this black and white. You either get it or you don't. The real world, of course, is filled with business people who are skilled at their particular job and using media as much as they can to help promote what they do. But for the most part, that challenge has never really involved having real conversations. It's been about a big creative idea, or a stunt, or strong and consistent messaging. Conversation, on the other hand, has been relegated to focus groups and something that only customer support/services teams should handle. God forbid a marketer should actually have to talk to a customer!
That time is gone.
So when it came time to answer the question of what comes next, Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton (the editors and creators of the project) did what comes naturally to social media focused marketing pros: they turned to the community. Their first effort (The Age of Conversation) was a unique collaborative book that brought together over 100 marketing minds to all share their thoughts in one place. The proceeds for that book went to a very worthy charity called Variety - The Children's Charity.
Building on that success and answering a call from many to do the project again, Gavin and Drew managed to recruit more than twice as many participants in the second book (including me) and structured it into eight big topics:
* Manifestos
* Keeping Secrets in the Age of Conversation
* Moving from Conversation to Action?
* The Accidental Marketer
* A New Brand of Creative
* My Marketing Tragedy
* Business Model Evolution
* Life in the Conversation Lane
The result is an engaging CONVERSATION about the future of marketing and a collection of voices that every businessperson or marketer should be reading.
My contribution is about something I call the "control myth"--one of the biggest mistaken assumptions in marketing today--and how to avoid making it. I realize that I'm part of the effort and therefore biased, but the collection of articles in AOC2 is quite simply one of the best value of any book you can buy today whether you measure it by CPA (Cost Per Author--I'm hoping to coin a new term here!) or sheer volume of insights. And the icing on the cake is that you can help a worthy cause. None of the authors are getting paid to be part of this effort, but looking at the finished product and quality of the thoughts - I probably would have PAID to be part of it.
Buy Age Of Conversation 2 today!
Comments (0)November 5, 2008 10:10 AM
