Welcome (back) to the Age of Conversation

Thankfully, the Age of Mass Marketing, in which each of us was converted into a fraction of a Nielsen rating point, is pretty much a memory.

Marketing is no longer a one way street. It no longer happens to us. It happens with us. Voices carry across the Internet as they once did across town squares.

Welcome to the Age of Conversation, or more precisely, welcome back. The 19th and 20th century was largely an aberration – growth of our population outstripped our technological ability to retain the most fundamentally human characteristic of the marketplace – the ability for individuals to talk to each other and have their voices heard.

Are you looking for a great read?

Over 100 individual voices from different perspectives in marketing have come together from around the world to share their thoughts about this new era, what it means and how to flourish within it. The result is The Age of Conversation.

The icing on the cake is the whole thing is for charity. All proceeds after printing and shipping costs go direct to Variety, the Children’s Charity to support children in peril around the world.

The Age of Conversation started from a blog conversation between Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton. They’ve made a Herculean effort over the past few months to gather contributing authors together and to produce a really unique compilation. I’m not more than a couple dozen pages into it so far and I already feel the inspiration has been well worth the $9.99 for the eBook and then some.

You can find out a lot more about how The Age of Conversation came to be on the blog, and you can buy the book here.

P.S. – My contribution to The Age of Conversation is on page 11 and is called “Speaking Through Action” If you decide to pick up a copy, I’d love to hear what you think of it in the comments here.