“I started where I think a good marketer should start, by asking some people to read the book and give me their feedback.”
Luan Wise, a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing with over 20 years of experience in B2B and B2C sectors, is an expert on all things social media. She’s also become something of an expert on writing and publishing business books over the last few years, and in this week’s conversation we talk not just about social media, but about the difficulty of writing about a topic that won’t stand still, the value of collaborating with academia for research, the difficulty of fitting the writing around the day job, and advanced procrastination strategies.
With insights into both traditional and self-publishing, this is a classic Extraordinary Business Book Club cocktail of practical inspiration.
Luan’s site: https://luanwise.co.uk/
Luan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/luanwise/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: http://proposalchallenge.com/
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Substack: https://extraordinarybusinessbooks.substack.com/
‘Kickstart Your Writing’ Workshop January 2024: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/666359076937
WriteBrained: A 28-day exploratory writing adventure: https://pi-q.learnworlds.com/course?courseid=writebrainedcourse
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Alison Jones:
I’m here today with Luan Wise, who is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing with over 20 years experience across a wide range of B2B and B2C sectors, higher education, manufacturing, learning and development and more. She’s a specialist in social media, a course instructor for LinkedIn’s Only Learning Platform, an accredited lead trainer for Facebook and Instagram, and a coach for Google’s Digital Garage initiative. I think that is like bingo, isn’t it? Social media. Tick, tick, tick. Her books include the award winning Relax It’s Only Social Media, which was published in 2016, Planning For Success: A practical guide to setting and achieving your social media marketing goals, which she self published in October 2023, and a new title for Bloomsbury Business, which will be published in September 24. And, yes, I am going to ask her how the hell she does this. Don’t worry, I’m on it.
So, first of all, welcome, Luan. Great to have you here.
Luan Wise:
Thank you for having me.
Alison Jones:
So much to talk about there. But I’m going to start with the sort of philosophy, your philosophy of marketing. And I know that you have described yourself as a T shaped marketer, which I think is a lovely phrase. I think I know what it means, but I’m not sure. Tell me.
Luan Wise:
Yes, it’s always hard to describe yourself, isn’t it? Which is wonderful when someone else does the intro for you and you’re like, oh, yes, that sounds quite good, doesn’t it? I came across the term T shaped marketer and I kind of just really resonated with it because having done this for 20 years, I did study marketing as part of my business studies degree. I’ve done postgraduate qualifications. I started off working in advertising agencies, went client side before setting up my own business twelve years ago. And while I am a specialist in social media now, it didn’t exist when I studied, started my career. So I feel quite fortunate in that in many ways, in that I had a very kind of general background, a very broad background of marketing, traditional techniques, almost anything and everything from radio to posters to flyers and print. So the concept of a T shaped marketer is actually having that kind of general, across the board experience. And then, as any business owner or further into your career knows, we’re kind of encouraged to specialize and find a deep dive area. And for me, that kind of happened quite naturally or organically.
It wasn’t specifically planned. So if we look at the T, I would say I’m a very generalist marketer with a background across different industries and sectors. But the strut of the T as such is the social media specialism.
Alison Jones:
And it’s quite a dynamic strut, isn’t it? Perhaps it’s why having that breadth beforehand helps.
Luan Wise:
I think so, because it is dynamic, it’s ever changing. And having the breadth actually is my approach to social media. And what I talk about in the book of needing to have the basics, the absolute marketing fundamentals instead of diving straight into the tactics of social media and posting and what a post looks like or how to create a reel. In actual fact, if you don’t know the fundamentals of what you’re selling, what your product is, what pains it solves, who your target audience are, what you’re trying to achieve as a business, you will be really challenged by it. So that’s why I feel fortunate to have kind of had the breadth of career and narrowed down later on, I guess.
Alison Jones:
And that I think is interesting from a book writing perspective as well, which is what I’ve always got in the back of my head. Because if you’re writing a post as a marketeer, selling yourself as a marketeer, it can be very of the moment and very kind of responsive to what’s going around and using the latest, for example, the latest TikTok song, the sound that’s going out. If you’re writing a book, it’s really hard to know the context in which people are going to be reading it, a year, two years, five years from now. And so how does that affect the way that you write about things that are actually really now and really happening and you want to be abreast of?
Luan Wise:
I think, yes, writing about social media. And I can’t tell you how many times I changed the section about Twitter now X, how many times that changed through the last year of Elon Musk buying it to the point of then just as I was about to finish, then threads launched. And so there is kind of a few sentences in there of like ‘at the time of writing’ and ‘you may be reading this as the rebrand has happened, but I’m going to stick with the term Twitter and Tweet et cetera, because that’s what you understand’. So that in itself is a challenge. But what I really wanted to make sure was that it wasn’t really a ‘how to’ book because I don’t think you could print a ‘how to’ book on social media because it changes so quickly. That’s what online content is about, that’s what webinars and blogs are about. I wanted it to be about those fundamentals. And what I’ve discovered over working in social media for many years is that everyone is at a different stage, a different stage of their use, a different stage of how they feel about social media and for business, they are very much influenced by their personal use and their personal experiences and that tends to translate into business.
How they feel about Facebook personally affects how they might use it for work and Twitter. And so there’s these kind of mixed feelings that are very kind of personal led and fears around technology and even in business there’s then this challenge of people thinking they’re at one place with their use and experience of social media. And dare I say if I was to have a conversation with them, I might respond and say, you think you’re here? I think we need to take a couple of steps back and get these things right first and then I can take you up above it. So focusing on the fundamentals is really important and that’s why I took that approach with the book and writing and also tried to add in a bit of history as well about social media and I’ll come on to share that I did do research and focus group.
Alison Jones:
Yes, let’s talk about that.
Luan Wise:
But one of those was like, oh, why do people need to know the history of social media? And I was like, well, I’ve lived it and actually I think it is important because things do come round in cycles or we can learn and we can see patterns and things like that as well. So that’s the approach I’ve taken is not a ‘how to’, but is a framework, a way of thinking, the questions to ask, but make sure you get those fundamentals right first.
Alison Jones:
Yes. And when you say about people’s distinctive personal kind of reaction to social media as well, one thing that I notice in myself, and I think other people are the same is that you are both yourself as an individual and yourself as a representative of your business on social media.
And that feels really confusing as well, doesn’t it?
Luan Wise:
Yes, and that’s also a huge challenge of how you use it for work and I think it’s different challenges for different people. So both you and I, we run our own businesses, so some people may say, oh, that’s really easy because you can be perhaps more yourself or you’re more in control versus someone who’s perhaps an employee of a larger organization and kind of that balance. I don’t think it’s any easier. I think it’s just different and we have to, I’ve come across the approach of almost like putting your professional hat on and almost like trying to take out some of it feeling quite so personal and it being your role. So it is your role as a marketing director or a financial director and you are doing it as that role if you are using social media for business and then it kind of takes away that element of it feeling perhaps a little bit too personal.
Alison Jones:
Yes, yes, and it’s very hard to get your head into the right space when you come to the same platform with two different hats on. Now, you mentioned the research a minute ago and I want to come back to that because it is really fascinating. And I know you did a lot of research with Warwick Business School around this, so just tell us how it came about and how it translates into the book and basically why you think, that’s if you do, which I’m guessing you do, why you think that’s a really good basis for starting a book.
Luan Wise:
Yes, I guess there was kind of two levels of research to the second book in that I’d written the first book, Relax, It’s Only Social Media, in 2016. At the time, that was kind of where I was at, where I was at with my consultancy work, with my teaching work. And I had always had in my head there was going to be a second version. And I started with that second version in 2020.
Alison Jones:
Sorry, whenever anyone says that, I always kind of hollow laugh now.
Luan Wise:
Yes, I know. So it has taken three years, but I started thinking about it in 2020, that I wanted to do a second version. And so I started where I think a good marketer should start, by asking some people to read the book and give me their feedback. So I did some focus groups with people who were my intended target audience to see what they wanted from a book and what their feedback was. Which I hadn’t done the first time around. I’d just kind of written what I wanted to write, but now it was understanding what other books they read, what did they want from a book, and things like that. So I knew where I wanted to go and what I needed to do with the book. And then I have an amazing friend, an academic professor, Laura Chamberlain, at Warwick Business School, who I’ve known for about eight years, and I went to meet her on campus. We had a cup of coffee.
We were both talking about what we were doing. And I said, you know, I’m thinking about this second version. And she kind of opened her laptop and went, right, what are we going to research and how are we going to do it and make it robust? And we’re both kind of really passionate learners. And our relationship is that we always talk about what’s happening in academia, what are students asking, what’s happening in the real world, and case studies. So it grew out of a coffee conversation, let’s do some research. And we put all of that together. That research was ready after it had been prepped, gone through ethics committees, approval, and we were ready to start the questionnaire in March 2020, what do we do and actually, we went ahead with it. We decided that, why stop? Let’s go ahead with it.
And it was a mixture of an online questionnaire and qualitative interviews as well. So we did that and actually added on an additional question of what have you done differently in the last two or three weeks? Which in hindsight, gave us a really wonderful snapshot of a point in time of what people were thinking and doing and activity then. Did I carry on with the book? Did I get it done in 2020? No other things happened, business changes. So kind of parked the writing for a little bit and returned to it probably mid 2022. Like, I’ve got to get this done now. Caught up with Laura. She said, oh, why don’t we do another round of the research? The same questionnaire, some more quals, and see what’s moved, what’s changed? So we then had this 2020 snapshot, kind of two and a half years later, post pandemic. And while I would say the book does include research, it is not a research paper.
It was more this is what we explored based on academic literature, our experiences, our own kind of hypotheses. And then the results of the research shaped my thinking of where to go with the book. What do people need to know? Matched that up with the focus groups, where people said, we want a framework, we want something really actionable, and to do lists almost. So kind of was able to put all of that together.
Alison Jones:
It’s so fascinating. So many things come out of that. One, the inadvertent trend analysis, because you had to. But that’s true, isn’t it? Because if you have one set of research results, as you say, you have a snapshot, if you have two, two years apart, suddenly you can actually look at trends and you can look what’s changing it. So that’s fascinating. The second thing is, I sort of feel that every business book writer should be partnered up with, buddied up with, an academic.
Luan Wise:
We could absolutely sort it, I think.
Alison Jones:
But the benefits go both ways, don’t they?
Luan Wise:
They do. And there is the rigor behind it. It is challenging. And Laura will smile if she listens to this. She challenged me along the way around the questions we were writing, the format of the questions, how we presented the research. But you know what? I actually feel really confident in it, because I know that an academic has read it, right? And I’ve had other academics read it and support it as well, as well as marketing practitioners, early career consultants. So I kind of feel that I’ve done the full spectrum of practitioners and academics to get feedback and bring that in. Yes, I would recommend it.
Alison Jones:
And you could have so much more confidence in the findings. But you’re right. I think an awful lot of people who would say, oh, I’ve done some research, what they mean is they put out a LinkedIn questionnaire. But actually, research methods is a whole field in itself. And the ethics of it, as you say and the psychology behind how you phrase questions. So that’s really interesting. Yes. And how do you think Warwick Business School will use the results of this?
Luan Wise:
I know that Laura will use it in her work, in her teaching. I know some other academics there who are on board with it as well. I’ve been talking to students. I’m due to go and talk to the Marketing Society students in a few weeks time as well. So I think it is bridging that gap.
Alison Jones:
It’s brilliant. And I think that’s a really good action point for anybody listening. Go and find, go and make friends in your local university. Find out what yes, Because we can’t all have Laura as our best mate for eight years, we can start to cultivate those contacts, can’t we? It’s terrific, terrific learning.
Luan Wise:
And I think the thing about presenting to students, so I have presented the content of the book to some other students at the University of the West of England and others along the way as well, is that students love to ask you questions. That is what they’re designed to do, what academics are designed to do in a really robust way. So it’s kind of practicing your content before you publish.
Alison Jones:
Yes, stress testing it. Love that. Now, you’ve been very self deprecating and saying, oh, I did this thing in 2020, and then I just basically lounged around until 2022 when I picked it up again. This is not true, is it, Luan? Because I know when I was talking to you before, you were saying I got sort of three books on the go at the moment and I was a bit, okay, I’m more of a kind of one book every three years kind of girl, so I want to know how you do that.
Luan Wise:
Yes, well, I think the thing is trying not to think about what you do and you’re absorbed in it. So, yes, I am writing books alongside consulting for clients, teaching and training as well. The other books came along as an opportunity and actually a really good opportunity, because I can share that because I’ve been working on the second version and it’s more than a second version, it’s a completely new book, hence a different title. I did hit a wall a few times writing that book in that it just didn’t feel like it was working, or the chapters weren’t in the right order, or I actually got to a point and I was reading it back and I went, this just feels like a complete brain dump of everything I know. And almost it just wasn’t working. And then I was in the middle of conversations with Bloomsbury about a book and I was kind of sharing where I was at with my own book.
So I started having a conversation with Bloomsbury, which was amazing, talking to them about where I was at with my book that I was intending to self publish, whether it was a fit for them and I didn’t think it was in terms of the focus of it and the timings that I was working to. So we talked about what they had in mind and the book for them is going to be part of another series. So as I was putting together the proposals for them, actually it gave me real clarity around my book is this and for this audience. And actually there is a second book half in here that could be for this purpose and this audience. So it actually really helped me to have some focus in what was different about the two books, that they are for two very different audiences. So how do I do it? I kind of think I’d written a book and a half first and now have the other one. And it was kind of on that momentum of like, well, I’m in the zone, I’ve got my consultancy work at a level where I can have time to write, which was a challenge and something I had to address.
So I’ll just keep going, I’ll just keep writing.
Alison Jones:
And really interesting as well because I think not many people are in the position where they’ve got a publisher talking about another book, book two, and so on. But actually you can have the book two file open and even just that mindset that you don’t have to fit everything you’ve ever discovered about your subject into the one book and sort of fire hose the reader. That’s a really important thing to take on board, isn’t it?
Luan Wise:
Yes and I think actually, as I was doing the work in progress and the new proposal, I think I edited almost 10,000 words out of my self published book to kind of go stop brain dumping, keep this focused, focus, focus. And so I actually have this document of about 10,000 words that hopefully most of it can go into the next book or maybe somewhere else.
Alison Jones:
Yes. And that’s it, nothing’s ever wasted, is it? Especially now. Because even if it doesn’t go into other book, it could be a LinkedIn article or it can be a newsletter, but yes, and that’s really important. And Cathy Rentzenbrink has got this lovely phrase, kitchen sinking, which you said is something that most authors do first time, which try and put everything in that’s really helpful. I want to talk about the publishing thing as well, actually, because it is interesting that you’ve had the self publishing experience and now you’re publishing in a series with Bloomsbury. Are there any kind of AHA moments there? Any things that surprised you or interested you?
Luan Wise:
I’ve been thinking about this and pondering and I think at the stage that I’m at as we record this, I’m so relieved to not be self publishing again and to be having the support of a team with all the production work of it. I have self published before, so I kind of knew what was involved. Thought it would be easier second time round. My experience of working in the advertising agency world, I have got experience of working with artwork and typesetting and editors and print production, so I kind of felt okay with it. But the writing of the words is just such a small part of a book. The editing process takes so much longer than you think. And talking to the publishers about timescales and how much time they’re allowing between when I submit my manuscript and publishing, at first I was like, oh, that’s ages. And now I’m like, no, that’s actually really sensible.
There’s such a timeline involved with this.
Alison Jones:
Yes, honestly, it’s not even just the production timeline. That’s the easy bit. It’s the sales timeline because the sales reps are selling in six months in advance and they need all the assets, so that once you’re into the book supply chain proper, the timescales just get ridiculously long. I don’t quite know why that is, but there we are.
Luan Wise:
But another thing that I was reflecting on was for my own book, obviously, I thought it was going to be an updated version, so I thought the structure was there and that changed over time, but I did keep changing it because I felt it wasn’t working. Whereas with the book that I’m writing for, Bloomsbury, I’ve submitted my proposal, I’ve submitted my chapters and my structure. I’ve probably done more work in the planning and I feel really comfortable with that. And also I feel like I need to stick to that because that’s what’s gone through a massive approvals process and planning. And I’ve got a deadline, a publisher’s deadline versus my own.
Alison Jones:
We’ll see how it goes. And there’s real benefits to that and there’s also disbenefits on there because having that, being forced to front load the work and do all that planning is super helpful. It makes it easy to write the book, I find. But actually, as you write, sometimes your ideas are evolving and you think, oh, it’d be better if I could do this. It’s a dance, isn’t it? A dance between sort of the discipline and the freedom. Fascinating. So, you know, because I know you’ve listened to the podcast, you know I always ask my guests for their one best tip. What would you say if somebody is just about to start their first business book? I guess I’m asking, what do you wish you’d known before you started?
Luan Wise:
I think you really need to find your zone for this and your process for writing. And I know we were going to talk about procrastination, and that is absolutely a phase that I’ve been through and spent a long time on, a long time on thinking about the book and saying, oh, it’s in my head. It just hasn’t come out through my fingers and onto a screen yet. I think it’s about finding your zone and how you work and how you write. And I read a lot about this of like, some people get up early and do an hour every morning. That just didn’t work for me. It wasn’t how I wanted to work, and too many other things were going to happen later in the day for me to kind of have that focus.
So I realized, probably through trial and error, that what I need to do is block complete days out. And then when I got into the writing, it just flowed. So if you were to say, how long did it take you to write? It could be years, it could be well, actually about four days of solid, actual writing.
Alison Jones:
Yes, of actual writing.
Luan Wise:
So I think it’s about really working out how to get into the zone of writing and production and what works for you. And yes, there was a lot of trial and error around that, but now I know, I’m not worried about the deadline I’ve got coming up because I know if I’ve cleared my diary and I’m ready, that the words will come.
Alison Jones:
That’s interesting because that feels like a great productivity tip and a sense of what works for you. I’m not sure that fully addresses the procrastination issue. You’re saying once you’re in the zone, it’s all great, but we can invent so many ways of not putting ourselves in the zone. So what were your strategies for overcoming that resistance?
Luan Wise:
I think it’s having clear headspace to think and know that, is it a luxury to say, I can clear some days to just write. And I just felt like I needed to get everything else done. Like, my cutlery drawer is perfect. We have no junk drawer that is full of stuff. My books are in perfectly colour coordinated.
Alison Jones:
I was on the deadline to deliver my manuscript when I did this. I mean, it’s real.
Luan Wise:
Yes. It’s almost like maybe I just felt like I had to clear everything else to allow myself time to do what I was really enjoying doing of writing. Yes and then I watched Ted Talks on Procrastination.
Alison Jones:
That’s very meta, isn’t it?
Luan Wise:
I was reassured that this was completely normal, and it was fine, and it was all part of the process. So again, I think it’s finding how you work, whether you are someone that does full drafts, whether you do notes, whether you work to a deadline, whether you work at 04:00 a.m. or midnight. And I think that’s something about working for yourself as well. I haven’t been tied to a nine to five office job for twelve years. I know how I work and what times of day I work best and what I need to do and clear my mind to be able to do that really deep, focused work.
Alison Jones:
And the exchange we just had was completely useless to anybody listening to the audio version of the podcast. It’d be fine if you were on YouTube, but if you were wondering why we were pausing and laughing, it’s because I just moved to show everybody my beautiful, colour coordinated bookshelves behind me, which were done when I was on deadline to deliver the manuscript for Exploratory Writing, we’d love to hear your high level procrastination techniques, listeners.
Luan Wise:
I’ve been through colour coding versus height order versus authors together, every version. But I settled on colour coding for nonfiction and author categories for fiction.
Alison Jones:
Yes. These are only business. I think you can only do it with one genre. Yes, absolutely. What book would you recommend that listeners should read if they haven’t? It’s usually a business book, but it doesn’t have to be.
Luan Wise:
Yes. This is also a challenge to pick one. Yes, yes. But I was having a look and it is orange in my colour coded section, I’ll add I’m a huge fan of Seth Godin, American author. He has written many books and he had a new book out in June 2023 called The Song of Significance. And what I love about his writing and his work is that it’s not a textbook, it’s not a ‘how to’, it’s not even particularly case study led. It’s very much getting you to think about things differently and kind of challenging you. And The Song Of Significance is he calls it a manifesto for leaders facing unprecedented challenges in a rapidly changing workplace and poses questions and then says, actually, the real question is this.
So, out of all of his books, this one really hit me and I think it’s my favourite one.
Alison Jones:
Wow. And, you know, I haven’t actually read it yet. Isn’t that terrible? I’m a huge Seth Godin fan, I just haven’t got around to reading that one yet. But thank you. Yes. Great recommendation. And, Luan, if people want to find out more about you, more about all the books, more about the work you do, where should they go?
Luan Wise:
Well, you can find me on social media. Get away. I need to be there. But I enjoy it as well. And I’m lucky in having a slightly unique name that I can have all the handles. So, Luanwise on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X and TikTok, and also my website, Luanwise.co.uk.
Alison Jones:
Fantastic. I will put those links up on the show notes at extraordinarybusinessbooks.com. Such pleasure talking to you today, Luan. Thank you for your time.
Luan Wise:
Thank you.