Stacey and I just announced our book deal to publish Social TV and I am ridiculously excited about this project. While my obsession for web + TV convergence formally goes back to my days at thoughtbubble productions, in actuality, I’ve always been fascinated by turning media on its side and making things better by connecting them together to create engaging experiences. (Maybe it’s why I loved the Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups TV spots from the 80s so much ;-) Hey, chocolate and peanut butter are both good by themselves but when combined, wow, something magical happens!
So how did this book come to be?
Creating, producing, and co-hosting Hill Holliday’s TVnext summit easily ranks in my top 3 most fulfilling career experiences, to-date. Having the chance to bring 19 industry thought leaders together to begin to tackle modern TV trends, head on, was simply awesome.
6 weeks later, I gave a presentation about the social TV trend at Radian6’s #Social2011 conference. The response to the presentation fueled me…and it made me realize there’s a lot more to be explored, discussed, and shared around this topic. Today’s TV landscape continues to become more complicated (yet crazy exciting). It’s become a giant playground for entrepreneurs driving rapid innovation. While there are a lot of great sources that are keeping up with TV industry & tech news /case studies (which are each awesome and useful), there really isn’t a single resource that’s connecting the dots to help marketers/TV advertisers make sense of it all.
After hearing a conversation between Mitch Joel and John Wall during the #Social2011 evening networking event about future plans for books, I asked John if he could connect me with Wiley – and he willingly did (thanks John :-). As I worked to develop the concept, proposal, and marketing plan for the book, I approached my colleague, Stacey Shepatin, about partnering with me on this project. She’s phenomenal and it’s an understatement to say she’s extremely well connected in the broadcast TV space. She was a terrific co-host and partner on TVnext and I couldn’t imagine the two of us not doing this together. (Thankfully she said “yes.”) And Hill Holliday has been both really supportive and an advocate for this book.
So we set up the book’s Facebook Page to share the development of the book as it unfolds, a bit of a sneak peak and insiders view and interesting things that are happening within the TV landscape with everyone. If this sounds at all interesting, it’d be awesome if you’d “like” the page.
What happens next?
The final manuscript is due to Wiley on October 23rd but the book doesn’t release until next February 28th. To account for the lag in between these dates, each chapter will end with a QR code that will link to the book’s companion (and mobile-friendly) Tumblr. Not only will examples and cases referenced in each chapter be brought to life, but it also gives Stacey and me an opportunity to update stats and other data points that will inevitably become outdated very quickly given the breakneck speed at which this space is moving.
So there you have it. Thanks for coming along on this project with me. I’ll be using this blog to share short weekly video excerpts from the background/input interviews that Stacey and I have been doing with TV & tech industry leaders. I hope you enjoy them.