Brass Tack Thinking - The Now Revolution by Amber Naslund and Jay Baer

In some ways, this post feels like it’s been ages in the making. In others, these last few months have absolutely flown by. In all ways, I’m incredibly excited to share that The Now Revolution – the book I’ve co-authored with Jay Baer – is available for pre-order.

For those of you who have cheered us on, pushed us hard, helped us come up with the title, looked at the early drafts, asked the tough questions and told us we weren’t crazy (or assured us that we were), thank you. I believe we’ve written something that’s useful to you, and that will make you happy to buy it, read it, and pass it along.

What’s It About?

Instead of writing about how to “do” social media – lots of people have written that book already, and many have done it really well – we wrote about how businesses need to adapt their people, systems, and processes in response to what social media has brought about. We’ve broken it into seven Shifts that we think companies need to make:

  • Engineer a New Bedrock: Strip away silos and overgrown business process, and create a culture that supports open communication
  • Find Talent You Can Trust: Hire and empower a new type of employee who is adept at pattern recognition, human relations, and immediate analysis
  • Organize Your Armies: Assemble internal teams for maximum external impact, and empower every employee as a marketer, even if they aren’t
  • Answer the New Telephone: Listen at the point of need and answer the new calls your customers are making
  • Emphasize Response-Ability: Travel the Humanization Highway, and respond effectively and persuasively to customer inquiries
  • Build a Fire Extinguisher: Plan for, find and manage real-time crises
  • Make a Calculator: Redesign success metrics in a business world that’s increasingly instantaneous

It’s about addressing social media from the inside. After all, in order to do this stuff well on the outside, you’ve got to be equipped and engineer your business around a new set of considerations for speed, responsiveness, and the intent behind your communication.

The Geeky Stuff

So of course, we’ve got a shiny new website for the book where you can pre-order The Now Revolution, download a free chapter, read a bit more about the book, and hire us to come and talk about it with your company or group. Special thanks to Jason Amunwa, an outstanding small business marketing consultant in San Diego who pulled the site together for us. He really made it easy, and we couldn’t be more grateful for that.

Brass Tack Thinking - Microsoft Tag for The Now RevolutionWe also did something different with The Now Revolution. Throughout the book, we’ve embedded Microsoft Tag Technology. You can download the app for your phone at http://gettag.mobi, and snap the codes we’ve placed among the text. Those codes unlock additional downloadable content like some of the information graphics that Chris Siestema of Teach To Fish Digital helped us create. Pretty cool, huh? Give it a try with the code to the left which will magically transport you to our Facebook page.

On that front, we’ve been working with the great team at North Social to customize the page and enable some of their handy and easy to use apps. They’ve been generous enough to donate their time and talent to our project (thanks, guys!) and we’re looking forward to having great conversations with all of you over there, too.

Oh, and if you’re at BlogWorld Expo this week in Las Vegas, stop by on Thursday morning. We’ll be talking about the 7 Shifts in a brand spankin’ new presentation.

Read On.

If you’ve been part of Brass Tack Thinking or its predecessor, Altitude Branding, you’ll know I’m pretty passionate about the world of new communication. I’m also determined to approach it as practically and realistically as I can, because that’s what I think the business world needs from all of us. Thankfully, I’ve been fortunate enough to team up with a co-author that is every bit as passionate, but also fiercely pragmatic and business-minded. So I’d be remiss if I finished this post without thanking Jay for teaming up with me these last few months. He makes me better.

Thank you also to my amazing colleagues at Radian6 who gave me the freedom and trust to work on this project, and to my brilliant blog co-Tack Tamsen who has made BTT shine.

If  the seismic shifts we’re experiencing in today’s business world drive you, I’d be delighted if you’d order a copy of The Now Revolution in advance. If you know more people that need to understand how social media is changing our work, buy a handful (and we’ve got some fun promotions if you do).

The real, live book hits shelves on February 21st, thanks to our fantastic publishing team at Wiley. But you want to be sure and reserve yours early, don’t you?

My gratitude again to all of you. Not only did you make the book possible, but you helped me understand why it needed to be written and what needed to be in it. I can’t wait to share it with you, sign a copy or six, have a beer, hear what you think.

The Now Revolution is here. Literally. Let’s do this thing.