Based on some very fine comments and my own struggle with saying just what this new book is about, I have done a major revision to the previous Overview. I have also added in a "Target Audience section and finally, I have inserted a subtitle to the book name.
I know it's the holiday break, but when you are between time with family and friends, please take a look at tell me what you think. You have already helped me to write a better book and I have not yet gotten to the actual book yet.
I have set a personal deadline of Jan. 15, to complete the full publisher's proposal and have it ready to send off. If you are an actual publisher and have some interest in this book, now would be a wonderful time to contact here. If you are so inclined, you can also just leave a comment and I assure you I will get back to you.
Title
Global Neighborhoods
--Lowering boundaries to almost everything
Overview
Global Neighborhoods examines the impact of social media and low-cost networks to business and culture. It examines the powerful changes that phenomena such as YouTube, MySpace, Bebo, SecondLife, Skype, text and multimedia blogging are having on business, politics and culture. It looks at other society-changing factors.
Central to the book is the argument that the inernet is dramatically lowering the barriers to where people hang out. Geography is becoming much less relevant as people everywhere use the internet to find others who share common interests. We no longer live in just one neighborhood, but in many, based on our mix of interests, whether they be religion, sex, hummingbirds or macramé.
From the business perspective, this turns the marketplace upside down. The power is moving from large incumbent organizations into communities where the people who are the most generous have the greatest influence. Companies can try to start their own communities, but unless they open it to competitors, they have little more than factory towns. Likewise, in the global neighborhoods, people making decision based on the advice on trusted friends. Big budget ad and branding campaigns are rendered impotent in these new neighborhoods.
To understand where the marketplace is headed, Global Neighborhoods takes a long, in-depth look at the habits of today’s teens and young adults. It tours some of the Internet places where young people hang out. This is a genration who does not watch television,listen to the radio or read newspapers, yet seem to be amazingly well-informed. Young people are voting in larger numbers than in recent memory and that may explain why a flood of elected officials and political aspirants are leaping into the social media, particularly blogging. They are simply following the voters as they have historically done.
Further, Global Neighborhoods looks at the impact of low cost airfare is empowering more people than ever before to sample new neighborhoods and meet each other, exchanging slivers of each other's culture along the way.
Primarily, a business book, Global Neighborhood focuses at the intersection of technology and culture, showing how people with similar interests all over the world, speaking different languages can find what they share in common and it offers hope for people bypassing their own governments to make peace with each other.
Alongside interviews with executives from numerous companies large and small, Global Neighborhoods examines a private community of Palestinian and Israel teenagers who discover how very much alike they are. It reports on Saudi kids using cell phone messaging to flirt while a stern chaperon looks on in blissful ignorance. It talks with a Scottish teenager who created a Japanese-language parody of the US TV Dating Game and ended up making friends with Japanese kids. It looks at the opportunities in virtual reality, not just for product placements, and virtual news conference, but in its success in engaging autistic students and potential for making history literally come to life.
The book will look at some of the threats and dangers found for young people in social media, but it will dwell more on the hope for an emerging global society that is able to bypass marketing messages to learn the truth about products and services and perhaps--just perhaps, bypass governments to make peace with each other.
By reading Global Neighborhoods, readers will understand how they need to recalibrate their existing businesses over the short-term future, why they have never had a better opportunity to start a successful global business from the comfort of their own homes. They will have a much clearer sense of the neighborhoods in which their children dwell and how those neighborhoods may contain some dangers, they overall pose greater hope and opportunity than perhaps any generation that has preceded it.
Target Audience
This book fits into three market categories: Business, General Interest and Current Affairs very much like recent best-sellers such as The World is Flat, The Wisdom of Crowds, Freakonomics and Blink.
Anyone in an established business trying to recalibrate strategy to survive fundamental marketplace changes will be interested in this book as well as business investors and entrepreneurs. Likewise parents, curious to see what their child’s world is likely to be like, will find this book valuable. Readers concerned with the impact of technology on world cultures will find this book useful and finally, people hoping the world might improve on any level if people can bypass large organizations and deal directly with each other will also find this book useful.
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I look forward to your thoughts and constructive criticism. Have yourself a wonderful holiday break and may the new year bring you only joy-filled things.
