How Much Has Really Changed in Nearly 30 Years?

Jerry Maguire debuted in theaters in 1996, the same year I started working in digital marketing as a content writer. It's a romantic comedy about a sports agent who has a crisis of conscience and writes a mission statement calling for more personal client relationships and less focus on money. After being fired, he starts his own agency with just one loyal client. It's famous for the line "Show me the money!" I used his heroes journey to kick off my last book. "Everybody loved him. Everybody disappeared. The journey is everything." It's still so relevant 30 years later.

I wrote my first book more than a decade ago. That book, When Everybody Clicks: Sustainable Digitial Marketing is a 100-page PDF and a labor of love. I wanted to better understand the mechanics of exceptional client and vendor relationships. I interviewed lots of brilliant folks who were Marketers either in-house or agencies for (mostly) big brands, I learned so much and I'm excited to be working on a new edition of that book with some notable changes:

1. This time I'm focusing less on big brands and more on mission-driven businesses including healthcare, sports, fashion, and non-profit organizations.

2. This time I'm focusing less on the intersection of good relationships between marketers and the businesses they serve, and more on how good gets done by smart marketers working collaboratively with the businesses they serve and demonstrating how that work impacts their customers. I believe marketing can help solve real problems so I'm focusing on those case studies.

3. This time I'm ditching "Digital Marketing" for just "Marketing". Often times, calling our work Digital Marketing makes it feel separate or siloed from Traditional Marketing or Brand Marketing or Content Marketing or Search Marketing or Social Media Marketing or...you know what I mean.

4. This time I'm bringing in some smart folks to help with things I'm not great at including:

   1. Editor - to refine my writing for clarity and precision.

   2. Illustrator - to develop the art and creative.

   3. Data Analyst - to help pull, understand, and simplify complex data sets into easy-to-understand formats.

   4. Public Relations or Audience Researcher or Media Buyer or Marketing Generalist or Digital Marketer - to help find an audience and promote the book. (I'm not being cheeky here, I'm truly not certain about the right skills I need for this work because the T-Shaped Marketer is a thing.)

5. This time my byline isn't Lisa Williams, it's Lisa Williams-Scott because I married my best friend from Greeneville, Tennessee in 2023.

6. This time I'm not so scared because I've been here before and I realize I CAN do it, but I DON'T HAVE TO do it alone. I need guidance from folks who have been there and excelled. This list isn't complete, but sharing a few:

   1. Joe Pulizzi - Thank you for writing, "Burn the Playbook". And for meeting up with me for coffee in Cleveland in 2012. Your generosity knows no bounds.

   2. Rand Fishkin & Amanda Natividad - Thank you for hosting a conference I didn't know i needed. Spark Together has helped push out my inner critic and embrace the truly messy, enlightening, thrilling process of being authentically yourself and sharing your ideas without fear. To be clear, I don't mean zero fear, just less.

   3. Joe Acunzo - Thank you for capturing the soul of what it means to be a content creator with a purpose. A real purpose that goes beyond money, one that inspires excitement for pouring my heart, soul, and (what will be for quite awhile) unpaid hours into something that feels like me.

   4. Amanda Nusland - Thank you for being brave enough to say all the stuff out loud that I hadn't had the courage to share beyond my own family and best friends. You shattered everything I used for excuses and showed me what's on the other side of my fear.

   5. Wil Reynolds - Thank you for always sharing all you're learning so graciously and for your reminder that enough, truly is enough.

   6. Kirsty Hulse - Thank you for demonstrating how we use our unique upbringings to bear on our professional lives. And for making me laugh so hard milk came out of my nose and I wasn't even drinking milk..

   7. Claudette John - Thank you for being my ride or day in all things from this book, to my professional life, to my healthcare, to my stunning inability to fix my hair or apply makeup. I have pressed powder now and I've learned the finer points of layering lip products, baby steps:)

About once a year, I go back and read what I Iearned from writing When Everybody Clicks: Sustainable Digital Marketing. It is still quite good guidance, but surprisingly many of the issues defined—lack of prioritization, siloing of humans and teams that need to work more closely, big gaps between marketing, tech, operations, and finance—are still true.

Thank you to the many people who let me conduct their interviews so I could learn. I am so grateful for your time and expertise. I can't wait to share my book with you when it's complete. It won't be perfect, but it will be enough.