This is the core driving value of 24PageBooks: Our time is too valuable to waste with filler.

BTW, if you’re not familiar with HARO, check it out. He is reinventing the PR business. And watch for an upcoming 24 book called Fire Your PR Agency: Required Reading For PR Professionals.

The reasons it stood out include:

• I could see the entire structure in front of me, made clear by the changes in the eBook world, driven by Apple and Amazon, in particular their generous terms for indie publishers.
• It leverages my core faculty- the ability to explain things succinctly in a compelling way, in writing
• I could partner with someone I’ve done a lot of projects with whose skills are a great fit with mine, Mike Johnson.
• The company could be run from anywhere with no employees, no distribution or inventory and no need for any infrastructure
• It has the potential of being very profitable while remaining manageable
• The products I’m making add value to people’s lives

The last bullet goes to Chris’s point. Whether I’m helping people make new connections, learn business skills, understand emerging networks or use a charcoal grill like a master, in each case I’m adding value to their lives and I’m not requiring a lot of their valuable time to do it. Knowing this makes building the business a completely exciting non-job, which what any start-up should be.

Franke is a designer who started out blogging a few years ago when she and her husband decided to sell their SUV and go carless. Her blog posts combine great illustrations with an almost comic-like personal story backed by the facts. The blog started to get a lot of attention which led to a book, Bothered By My Green Conscience (New Society Publishers 2009) and a growing reputation as an environmentalist.

Franke’s use of personal experience to tell stories and distribute them via social media demonstrates the power of viral story telling to drive change on a global basis. As I write this, Franke is in Copenhagen for the World Climate Summit.

I’ve been looking for a start-up to get involved with in 2010. I’ve also been working on a book proposal. It dawned on me that the book proposal is my start-up. The proposal is a business plan. The literary agent is a business development person. The publisher is both an investor and the distributor. I am the founder, developer and chief marketing officer.

The book is called The Experience Architects: How Social Media Visionaries Are Redesigning the Way We Do Business. It is about people and companies that understand the positive potential of social media and are using that potential to completely revamp the way their businesses operate- on all levels. It is not about companies stumbling into social media because of some PR catastrophe nor is it about self-described social media gurus who have never actually changed a company with their knowledge.

Because the book is about entrepreneurs, it made sense to me to treat it and its related ‘products and services’ as a business. Once this concept clarified in my mind it made putting the proposal together a much more intuitive process. It also made me realize that my marketing plan consisted of a simple concept: Drink The Koolaid. In other words, use the Experience Architecture concept to build buzz about the book, to research resources and people to talk to, and to virally get others excited. So you’ll be seeing a lot of social media activity around this subject.

In addition to the proposal (business plan) I have written a social media ‘blueprint’ consisting of a set of 30 action items that will build a fully integrated social engagement for the ‘business’. I’ll be sharing that plan, open source style, here over the next month.

If you know someone who has redesigned their business (any size, any type, any location) because of social media please connect with me via MartinEdic.com.

Money quote:

“I’m going to quote a competitor to Mediapost, Advertising Age, but its packaged-goods reporter, Jack Neff, said it best: “BlogHer helps solve the mystery of how marketers will manage to spend money on social media despite showing relatively little interest in ads on Facebook or MySpace and the numerous free opportunities available everywhere.”

Neff than goes on to quote Jill Beraud, the Global Chief Marketing Officer of PepsiCo, who explains that wooing the mommy bloggers is a long-term ROI effort. As for the entire roster of advertisers at BlogHer, it reads like a who’s-who of the blue chip: Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, General Motors, Gymboree, Unilever, Kodak.”

At this point? Yes, because there is certainly some overlap going on. I could blog on LinkedIn and I could use Facebook to microblog instead of Twitter. Eventually one of these platforms is going to absorb the full capability of one or more of the others. However, right now there are very good reasons for keeping them separate. Here’s how I use each for different things:

Twitter for business

Twitter is a business tool. My followers follow me because I have a shared interest in marketing and social media. I don’t follow people that don’t share that interest (especially those incredibly annoying multi-level marketing people!). I am strict about this because I need to stay on a focused message in my Tweets to keep my reputation strong. I don’t have thousands of followers because of this focus. If you share these business interests please follow me and I’ll follow you.

Facebook for friends

Facebook is just what is says it is: a social network. FB for me is a place to unwind, joke around and learn what my social friends are doing. Sometimes I hear about a death or illness, a relationship change or find a friend I haven’t heard from in years so it’s not all fun and games. I don’t do any business here at all- in fact I’m guessing a lot of my friends don’t even know what I do for a living. Facebook’s revenue model is going to be dictated by this aspect and I think they should treat groups of friends from a geo-localized perspective, serving up local entertainment or restaurant ads for instance. Otherwise advertising on FB will not work.

LinkedIn for experience, references and referrals

LinkedIn is an entirely different thing. It is a resume/reference source, i.e. Who is this guy and what do other people think of him? Who is he connected to and is he willing to make an introduction? Business networking, in other words. I’m all for relevant conections on LinkedIn because bigger networks increase its value as a tool. Connect with me and mention this blog post.

WordPress for publishing

WordPress is a content management platform. It enable a non-programmer like myself to publish my ideas. User-generated content is the heart and soul of social media, in fact it defines social media. I’m a writer by background so having a powerful tool like WordPress is amazing. To be able to instantly publish to a global audience is any writer’s dream.

Do we need another social media platform?

My platforms help me communicate in different ways. At this point I don’t need another platform. I could see myself adding YouTube at some point and I have used Slideshare in the past, however I can easily embed those items in my blog, on my LinkIn Profile, in Facebook and point to their URLs on Twitter. I see them as plug-ins rather than standalone platforms. What I don’t need is another platform that duplicates the functionality of those I currently use. Plaxo, for example, duplicates too many things that FB and LinkedIn do well. No Plaxo for me, no offense Plaxo people.

There are lots of attempts to link all these platforms together with one centralized dashboard. I haven’t seen that works they way I’d want it to yet but I’m certainly open to the concept. If you’ve found one that works well let me know in the comments (which in themselves constitute another platform if you’re using Disqus, Backtype or Intense Debate- another post for that one!).