Back in March I wrote about the second project by Gavin Heaton and Drew McLellan - The Age of Conversation 2. At the time, we discussed the very premise of the book, which is why don't they get it? It remains to be defined who "they" is.
The new effort, which saw the collaboration of 237 professionals, is available for purchase now at Lulu.
Pricing for The Age of Conversation 2 is:
e-book: $12.50 ($10.00 going to charity)
paperback book: $19.95 ($8.02 to charity)
hardback book: $29.95 ($6.04 to charity)
I have written out the price breakdown for a reason - I want you to see how much of the funds go to Variety, the Children's Charity, after covering the cost of production.
The book is organized in sections:
- ManifestosÂ
- Keeping Secrets in the Age of Conversation
- Moving from Conversation to Action
- The Accidental Marketer
- A New Brand of CreativeÂ
- My Marketing Tragedy
- Business Model Evolution
- Life in the Conversation Lane
I contributed a one-pager on moving from conversation to action. The topics all sound very intriguing to me and I am heading over to order my copy. For a complete list of the authors see this post. There are all sorts of wonderful efforts around this project - from Gavin and Drew's herding cats (the authors) and getting them to meet deadlines, to Jay Eheret recording podcasts, to Cam Beck creating a widget, to David Reich and Nettie Hartsock leading the PR effort.
We've come thus far, these conversations are now taking place in companies - inside and outside the corporate conference rooms. Now that social media is being talked about and to some extent tried out by more and more people in a professional capacity, we are discovering that we're all in customer service, social capital and trust go hand in hand, our beloved logos are just symbols, and ROI means focused execution.
These are all excellent reasons for us to come together and take the conversation to what's next - connecting ideas and people. All this talk about conversation needs to be actualized. For brands to become social objects, as Paul Soldera put in a comment to my recent post on PepsiCo., they really need to be wrapped around a compelling reason to socialize. Let's start with that, or we might be just checking the box on conversation, and that would be a missed opportunity.
Conversation Agent
Connecting ideas and people - how talk can change our lives
by Valeria Maltoni