Help me help you. I need your input for my book.


Please take this survey www.contentconnections.com/socialmedia2007 to help me with my book – keep reading to find out why…
The Social Media PlaybookThere is a lot going on these days and a lot of different books being written about what’s happening, with an apparent emphasis on social media, communities and user generated content. As the founder of Social Media Club, it should be obvious that I am writing a book focused on the rise and importance of social media – to a large extent, I am writing that book, but as Doc Searls says, there is something of greater significance happening beneath the meme.
While I am still torn on the title of my book, it is now being envisioned as “The Social Media Playbook.” The goal for me is to help people understand the era we are now entering and enable professionals to maximize the effectiveness of their participation on behalf of the organizations they represent. For me, this is best seen through the framework of Look, Listen, Join, Lead. In that it is as much art as it is science though, the book will be peppered with PURPOSE – or rather, illustrating the answer to WHY through metaphor and real world stories.  Ultimately, social media is the spark that has ignited the movement towards the HUMANIZATION OF THE ENTERPRISE, which I will illuminate better over the coming weeks.
There is quite a bit to get done in the next 3 months, which is not a lot of time for 60,000 words – especially considering the problems I have with Repetitive Stress Injury, but it will be done. I will be revealing more details of the book very soon (within the week) along with my plans for leveraging the best practices of “social publishing” I have been researching, but I am torn on a few decisions we need to make, so would love to hear what you think is the most effective way to leverage social media in creating the book here in the comments, or even call me 408.834.0884
More urgently though, I am participating in a survey put together by David Brake of Content Connection together with entrepreneur extraordinaire Lon Safko to determine what you really know about Social Media and what you would like to understand more deeply. Receiving the gift of your time to take the survey, and better still, to pass it forward to others, would be a huge help in getting the right information into the book. There are a few iPod nano’s being given away as prizes, your responses/personal information will be kept private and your participation will be recognized appropriately.

Please take the survey here www.contentconnections.com/socialmedia2007. Please note that Lon is a friend, but not a co-author of my book – he is writing his own book on the subject from a different angle. It is an interesting situation, to be collaborating in this way on market research, but to essentially be competing for attention in the market once the books are published – I think of it as an experiment in co-creation and co-opetition, which in and of itself makes for an interesting case study…  Then again, this is just a more explicit expression of support similar to what I have been giving to others such as Paul Gillen, Geoff Livingston, David Meerman Scott, Shel Israel/Robert Scoble, David Weinbergber and Debie Weil.  I expect I will be doing the same with Charlene Li and Tara Hunt’s upcoming books – each of whom has a valuable perspective to be considered that helps us all move along in the right direction, which is my ultimate goal – to help make the world a better place by sharing what we know.
More to come very soon…

  1. #1 by Krista Neher - November 19th, 2007 at 17:54

    Hi Chris

    The book sounds interesting – I can’t wait to hear more! I just finished the survey and was thinking – isn’t it ironic that you are writing a BOOK (very un-social media) to teach people about SOCIAL MEDIA? Wouldn’t it be great if you could teach and spread the concept through social media vehicles?

    The obvious problem is that those who need to learn about social media are not engaged in it…it would be cool to find a way to integrate social media vehicles and experiences into the book or as a suplement…..

    Good luck with the book and I can’t wait to hear more!

  2. #2 by Rob La Gesse - November 19th, 2007 at 18:02

    Just ook the survey. Interesting. I’m not a PR person – I’m a developer/consultant. I have different motivators for entering this conversation…

    I am interested in knowing what tools you need to use Social Media that do not yet exist. What doesn’t work, and why? What doesn’t exist? What is hard to measure?

    What costs too much – is there an opportunity to discrupt something in your food chaing? (I love disruptive!)

    Rob

  3. #3 by Chris Heuer - November 19th, 2007 at 18:34

    Thank you both for taking the survey!

    Krista – you are spot on – the idea is to reach people who are not using these tools we use everyday to communicate and collaborate – all aspects of the book will reference back to social media, and once published, those who buy the book will receive access to other materials online (source interviews etc…)

    Rob – really good questions – I suspect we will get some inclination of that in the feedback, but really it will take the technology companies shifting to co-creation strategies as we are seeing with so many of the mature Web 2.0 sites out today. The thing that costs too much today is time – find ways to save it for me and everyone else and you can have a real winner that people will pay for instead of expecting to have free.

  4. #4 by Tara Hunt - November 26th, 2007 at 14:55

    I love the idea of the Playbook…and you should really take that as far as it will go…sort of like Jay Conrad Levinson did years ago with the Guerilla Marketing book…lots of examples and exercises and diagrams…Something that people can write in and mark up and keep a diary with.

    Good luck, Chris! I know it will be awesome! 🙂

  5. #5 by Des Walsh - January 20th, 2008 at 20:24

    Chris
    I know I’m late to the party, but just now I went to do the survey, noted with relief that the close of the survey was not till “Sunday, February 3, 12:00 Midnight (Pacific)”. Went to proceed and found that the survey was now closed.

Comments are closed.