Ensight - Jeremy Wright

Okay, the book proposal is off to half a dozen publishers. Some I’m very excited about (if I get published by O’Reilly, can I go to FOO Camp? ;-)).

The current working title of the book is… Are you ready for this mouthful?

Through the Looking Glass: The Business of Blogging & Awareness Publishing

Awareness Publishing is one of the “communication gems” I’m coining for the book. Personal Publishing was the revolution which brought about all the “diarists” and eventually evolved into the high quality topical blogs we see today. To me, Awareness Publishing stands to do the same thing to corporate blogging.

Topics covered will include:

• History of blogging
• The medium versus the message
• Strengths and weaknesses of the current models
• Corporate blogging & blog evolution
• The Cluetrain factor (Customers aren’t “consumers” they are “contributors”)
• The conversation that’s happening with or without you
• Permission & open source marketing / word of mouth & guerilla marketing
• Conference vs “in your home” communication: blogs allow you to interact 1 on 1 with hundreds of thousands of customers.
• External vs internal corporate blogging
• External types of blogs: Marketing / PR, branding, sales, building relationships, becoming a thought leader, search engine benefits, participating in the conversation
• Internal types of blogs: Innovation tools, collaboration tools, corporate culture, knowledge management
• Tracking the conversation: tools, services and principles of conversation tracking
• Influencing the conversation: blog’s effect on the conversation, trust & authority and commenting on what is happening in the conversation (i.e.: spot a negative comment? handle it publicly)
• Policies to encourage growth, blogging and protect your company’s safety
• Tips for success and mistakes to avoid in corporate blogging (internal and external)
• Bringing in customers
• Affecting mindshare
• Helping customers value your brand (broadcasting your values & principles through your blogs)
• The future of blogging: communication & networking over security & accuracy
• The future of corporate blogging: communication & customer relationships
• The future of awareness publishing: customer interaction, 1-1 communication on a mass scale

Give or take anyways What do you think? I wonder if Scoble and Shel will publish their Table of Contents soon?

One thing I’ve come to realise is that book proposals are a pain in the ass. This is the second one I’ve developed in the last month. The other was a quickie (several publishers wanted a PodCasting book) which I didn’t end up getting. This one is more of a “my book” type of project. The other would have been for the community.

I admire authors who write books professionally, especially if they need to continuously write these 10,000 word monsters for every book, refining it dozens of times before it gets picked up.

Fingers crossed that mine’ll actually get picked up, eh?

If any publishers (or anyone) wants a copy of the (currently final) proposal, drop me an email.