Not Just Talk Anymore

It’s here – the Age of Conversation 3 book.  171 Authors go from just talk, to print and then it’s up to you to put it into action.

Almost three years ago, an online conversation between two marketing pros—an American and an Australian—evolved into a collaborative writing effort by more than 100 bloggers from nine countries, and was aptly titled The Age of Conversation.  Fast forward to today and the abstract experiment is now a concrete treatise on the state of social media and marketing best practices as a whole. With Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton still firmly at the helm, the third book in the Age of Conversation series has become a veritable “who’s who” of the world’s leading marketing bloggers.  Age of Conversation 3 (202 pages; hardcover; paperback; Kindle; ePub) was published by new digital publishing company Channel V Books (www.ChannelVBooks.com), and is now available through all major online retailers, as a Kindle e-book, and will soon be available as an ePub for other digital readers.

“I was asked to contribute and write about getting to work.  After all, small businesses need to know how to practically apply social media tools” Deb Brown of Debworks in Franklin County Iowa said.

Age of Conversation 3 captures the distinct shift from social media as a hypothetical consumer loyalty tool, as it was considered only a little more than a year ago, to its current state as a staple in the modern marketing toolbox.  Although the book covers more than just social media, the topic is ubiquitous among the book’s 10 sections: At the Coalface; Identities, Friends and Trusted Strangers; Conversational Branding; Measurement; Corporate Conversations; In the Boardroom; Innovation and Execution; Influence; Getting to Work; and Pitching Social Media.

“We have seen an incredible shift in the role of social media over the past three years. It has moved from an outlier in the marketing mix to one of the strategic pillars of any corporate marketing or branding exercise,” said Drew McLellan. “And it doesn’t end there,” adds Gavin Heaton. “As the many authors of this new book explain, the focus may be on conversation, but you can’t participate in a conversation from the sidelines. It’s all about participation. And this book provides you with 171 lessons in this new art”.

The genesis for the series itself has all the makings of a thrilling read: regular correspondence between people around the world; a proactive collaboration between 15 countries; and two marketing professionals who have never met each other face to face, scrambling to learn how to publish a book from the ground up.

It all started when McLellan blogged about a similar collaborative book effort and Heaton wrote to him to suggest they get a few fellow bloggers to produce a marketing book in the same vain. Three emails later, and they had named the book and set what they thought would be an impossible goal: 100 bloggers.  Within seven days they had commitments from 103. Back then, the marketing industry was abuzz about how citizen marketers were changing the landscape, whereas the second two editions have revolved primarily around the growing field of social media and how its methodologies have affected marketing as a whole. What all three books have in common is that they each capture a uniquely global vantage point.

The first Age of Conversation raised nearly $15,000 for Variety, the international children’s charity, and the Age of Conversation 2 raised a further $10,000 for Variety. This year’s proceeds will be donated to an international children’s charity of our authors’ choosing.

McLellan, who heads McLellan Marketing Group, a Des Moines, Iowa advertising agency, has been writing DrewsMarketingMinute.com for several years. Heaton, who works for global software giant, SAP, writes ServantofChaos.com from Sydney, Australia. McLellan and Heaton have used their blogs to promote each book’s crop of contributors.

Needless to say, an ambitious online marketing book will be paired with an ambitious online marketing campaign. All 171 bloggers will use their respective online platforms—their blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other social media profiles, and websites—to promote their co-authors and book sales.

(this was the press release submitted to local papers)