Blogs into Books

Since publishing my first book, Firebrands: Building Brand Loyalty in the Internet Age, I have long mulled over in my mind what kind of book or books should I next write.

However, three things compounded my consideration:

1. My likely and intended readers probably don’t read more than one or two books a year
2. I would need to author a truly exceptional book, addressing real and unserved needs of a large group of business readers and students
3. I would need to demonstrate to a publisher that they could find the tens of thousands of buyers, easily and within their ability to market a book in an already crowded and cluttered market

Two years ago, I started to read about networked books or open-systems thinking–how a small but growing number of authors now compose their books online within a community of peers and practitioners.

Permit me to summarize this as an operational strategy for any subject matter expert, pundit, public speaker, or aspiring author:

• Start with a big, spacious insight about something that affects a large number of people or firms: the Google Singularity
• Frame that insight in a novel, approachable way, such as What’s Your Google Strategy?
• Name the chapters and, later, subchapters, creating enumerated categories of the blog
• Collect a massive amount of interesting quotations, reading five newspapers and 10 magazines per day plus another hour online
• Post attributed quotations — pithy, cogent insights that often represent the summarizing point or points of a hour-long interview by a journalist — to the appropriate chapter or subchapter
• Create a massive tag cloud of keywords that will become, much later, individual citations in a related Webopedia
• Interview really smart, accomplished, and articulate “master practitioners” and innovation leaders in fields related to the big insight and substance of the blog
• Use these posted interviews as a social context for the deep insight of the blog, calling attention to the underlying ideas and emotional resonance of how to apply these insights in a practical manner
• Develop presentation graphics and an inventory of poignant, teaching-point anecdotes, delivering public presentations around the world
• Use these public presentations as an opportunity to discover how best to introduce the big insight and related ideas, imbuing the overall story with the tone, timbre, cadence, and rhythm of the Great Oral Tradition from Homer, Jesus,Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and George Carlin
• Record and transcribe my public presentations on the big insight — what’s your google strategy? — or related topics, creating a 5000 to 9000 word transcript
• Edit the presentation transcripts into self-contained monographs, introducing ONE complex idea with an effective story, use-case anecdote, and visual explanation
• Join an ad-network (I think), accepting ad words and sponsored content in areas clearly identified as paid or sponsored stuff, thus generating a little cash to pay for stuff
• Achieve a critical mass of attributed quotations, filling out all the chapters and subchapters with four to 19 quotations
• Rearrange those quotations in a chapter or subchapter, placing them in a more logical “it then follows” order of argumentation
• Compose bridging text-passages between each quotation, integrating the copy-text and graphics of the monographs and snippets from interviews
• Post the newly minted chapters and subchapters to a wiki, inviting a community of readers and practitioners to refine, refute, or amplify each idea put forth
• Cross-link our blog and wiki to other bloggers and social networks with related and cogent things to say, creating a word-of-mouse “army of many”
• Create a multimedia Webcast theater, delivering each subchapter or monograph as an on-demand Flash stream and downloadable podcast from iTunes
• Travel the world delivering even better, more useful, and inspiring keynotes, workshops, and innovation academies
• Publish a monthly newsletter summarizing the newest additions, public events, interviews, and cool downloads
• Launch a members-only forum where members can put questions to the community of practitioners and get really good answers and pointers
• Sign with a publisher for a series of books, worldwide tour, and settle back into a 4-hour workweek.

With the understanding that my interests or the world may change in ways unknowable at this time, I submit the following as working titles that I intend to turn into into books:

More Concrete Than Stones: Why Customers Love Brands and What Every CEO Needs to Know About Engagement and Building a Brand Franchise Platform

Armies of Many: Manifesto for Mobilizing Customer Evangelism with User-Generated Media, Viral Videos, and Stakeholder Blog-wikis

McLuhan’s Ghost: The Rise of Neo-tribalism, Trust Networks of Know-how, Multimedia Storytellers, and Peer-learning Systems

Satisfaction: What Customers Say They Want From Brands and Vendors, and What They Really Want But Lack the Words or Context to Say