Rebranding And Announcing A New Book Deal

This blog quietly turned two years old about two weeks ago – and though it was tempting to do a post just about that, there was a good reason for waiting.  Today I have two announcements – one relatively small and one relatively big.  The first small one, is that I have rebranded this blog to drop the "Interactive" from the title.  Over the course of two years I have realized that my passion is writing about marketing ideas in all forms, not just marketing that happens online or fits into a category people might consider "interactive."  Those of you who have seen my business cards or email signature already know that the promotional URL I started using for the blog is www.influentialmarketingblog.com anyway (though I am still using http://rbarchive.flywheelsites.com/ as the primary link due to all the Technorati links that URL has now).  Rebranding to simplify also makes it a lot easier to include the blog in your blogroll without running over two lines – which I have had several complaints about!  If you are already linking to this blog and it’s not too much effort, I would appreciate if you could change your link to read "Influential Marketing" or "Influential Marketing Blog."  No need to update the URL.

The second announcement is somewhat larger.  I am going to be writing a book focused on marketing authenticity and social media and am thrilled to announce that McGraw-Hill has acquired the book and Herb Schaffner (Publisher in the Business Group at McGraw-Hill Professional) will be editing.  Aside from the chance to take my writing to the next level with a more ambitious project, there are a number of other things that excite me about this partnership.  McGraw-Hill is well known and respected as the company behind publishing BusinessWeek magazine as well as a large number of books for education, business, and many other categories.  They have a huge global operation and have marketing and sales people on the ground in more than 30 countries around the world.  In short, they are the perfect publisher for this project with a large distribution network and plenty of ability to promote the book in the market. 

I plan to solicit plenty of feedback over the next few months and hope to count on many of you who read this blog consistently for candid opinions (positive and negative) to help improve the final product.  Of course, I’ll be giving you full credit for any contributions you make (I believe blog karma extends to book karma).  Incidentally, if you are interested in the process behind getting a deal like this together, I would suggest checking out Tim Ferriss’ post about it on Noah’s blog.  Though I didn’t follow exactly the same road as Tim, I certainly hope to duplicate his success and he was a great help to me in getting this project together (also, we are both with the same smart agent – Steve Hanselman).  Over the next few months, I will be rolling out several other online companion efforts around the book.  Stay tuned for more details to come …