Why we wrote a book

I will never forget sitting outside the tube station in Canary Wharf with my business partner, Aly, planning the book we have just launched. It was this time last year, cold with a slight wind and we had to give up in the end as my hand was shaking whilst I wrote. Can’t for the life of me remember why we weren’t sitting inside a café! What I do remember is why we decided to write it.

Our business was in its very infancy – we hadn’t even signed our first client at that point. Over the previous few weeks we had been to a small number of meetings with very large companies and had found ourselves having the same business problems posed to us. Namely, businesses were interested in doing content marketing but did not know what was involved or what the business benefits would be.

From our perspective, we weren’t simply interested in helping businesses “do content marketing”. In fact, the entire premise of our business was that content marketing as was understood then and now was far too tactical and not commercial enough from an outcomes perspective. And these frustrations came from different directions. As a former PR man, I had been deeply frustrated by the limitations imposed on our content marketing campaigns by the remit of the brief – we could attract and engage audiences using content but what was then done with those audiences after that point fell out of our remit and, in all cases, led to nothing being done. On the flip-side, Aly has a technical marketing background and faced frustrations about the unstrategic use of content marketing and how the data from content analytics was not being integrated across all customer communications channels.

So we set out to solve these challenges. And that is what led us to write a book.

You see, by writing a book we HAD to think things through logically and fully otherwise it simply wouldn’t make sense for the reader. What was fascinating for us, though, was that the process of writing the book was a massive help in bringing our thinking together. It challenged us to get our thinking right. Indeed, it challenged us so much that after an initial productive flurry of drafting before and after Christmas last year, we took three or four months away from it to expand on our methodology. It was fascinating then to go back to the original text and see what had and had not changed in our approach – I am pleased to say that 90% of the time it was more about expanding our original thinking and providing additional clarity then having to make any radical changes.

We were also benefitting enormously from the fact that by this time we were implementing Intelligent Customer Engagement, as we call our methodology, for real. This meant that anything that had been somewhat theoretical when writing the book was now being applied in practice.

Of course, there were other reasons we wanted to write the book. It enables us to reach a wider audience with our thinking. It lends credibility to what we are saying. And yes, it serves as an excellent marketing vehicle.

But the journey to get there was not easy. Writing it turned out to be the easy part, dealing with the archaic vagaries of the self-publishing industry proved frustratingly challenging. The book was first ready and available to buy back in late August…but at utterly the wrong price, with no description and often listed as out of stock! – indeed, Waterstones still list it as out of stock because they haven’t set up their system to cater for print on demand which, by definition, is always out of stock until you buy one and it then gets printed for you.

On the flip-side, what you can achieve through self-publishing print on demand is remarkable. For all intents and purposes the book looks as perfect as any you would buy from a major publisher off the shelf in a book store…and a huge thank you to John Chandler of Chandler Design Associates Ltd for their brilliant work turning our reams of text into a professionally laid-out book.

And so it may have taken a lot longer to get it out there than we hoped for but it was well worth the wait. The reaction and feedback from those who have read it has made the whole process worthwhile. That alone has been enough from Aly and I but, of course, we also hope that it will set the ball rolling on Intelligent Customer Engagement as a paradigm for the way businesses become truly customer-centric. Only time will tell on that point!

Want to find out more about our book? – http://timihub.com/thought-leadership/book/

Want to buy our book? - http://amzn.to/1t9Qczx ...and if you have read it, please join those who are writing reviews!

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