Social Media for Publishers

Notes from a webinar with Chris Brogan, hosted by O'Reilly
December 16th, 2008

Examples of social media:

Blogging is good, can be instantaneous.

Facebook is also instant, good networking through groups
but it's important to write about more than just your own books.
(Hey, I'm doing this already http://www.readingart.ca/blog/)
It is said that on Facebook, businesses should do fan pages rather than profiles, which are for "real" people.

Twitter - most people don't like one way communications, but if you look people up, you can use like a research tool (find out who is talking about you), and people who are following you will watch what you are following... and can engage with people directly... a certain kind of bravado is entertaining, in the online world everyone is a publisher.

Somebody, whose name I didn't catch, called Twitter the "social phone"
(ha ha, in 2000 I dubbed it the "mirror phone," mirror borrowed from the research that showed that chimpanzees can identify themselves in mirrors, and because a lot of social media like blogging especially are about putting yourself up there whether or not anyone else is looking, there's a strong vanity aspect to all of it... and phone because all the online media are fundamentally call and respond, every click is a call for data, and then you want to relay that data on to others - the idea of interaction with data is perhaps overrated.)

O'Reilly said this is all about "first move" media, innovators lead.

The Secret power of Twitter:

search.twitter.com - e.g. "book and gift"
you can find people who are interested in the same things you are, or your authors are, or what your books are about, and start conversations with them... but it is very important not to overtly market to them, you have to have a "gentle" relationship with them

YouTube - book trailers
YouTube got 13 billion views last month - almost imaginable what that means.
But look at what author Scott Sigler did; he was not getting far in his writing career, but then he
made a podcast out of his book, serialized it, and that got a lot of downloads, so many that he was able to take that to publishers, show them how much interest there was in his work, and before long he had a publishing deal.
Now he is published in print but also giving away his work in PDF serialized form.
(About the image showed in the webinar slideshow of a Sigler YouTube trailer: I like the Häagen-Dazs product placement, did Sigler get paid for that?!)

LinkedIn
This is a business, professional network. Gives you a way to tap into networks like your college alumni; college graduates and professionals are big readers.

Strategy is The Diet

1. have a "home base", like a blog
- this can be "nightstand" (variety) or "niche" (specialized content, eg. business books); it can be one vertical, or it can be author specific, (there a lot of opportunity in the latter).

2. create "outposts" like Facebook, Twitter, podcasts
- be where the people are
- for marketing obviously, but also can find authors this way
- podcast book reviews

3. consider video trailers
- but be cautious about investing here: trailers are really for passionate readers
- and they are not very useful unless they are done well
- but if the tone is conversational, trailers can be done cheaply and can be effective (especially good for author personalities)

4. extend your content through giveaways
- the extra piece of stuff you can get, e.g. bought a book just so I could get a code and login and see this thing online (game?)
- "free prize inside"
- Seth Godin with his book Tribes created a social network site; it was exciting to be part of that, especially early on
- always do something outside the conventional print channels

5. put everything on paper
- consider how galleys are generally used: only go out to people who are working on the book, but the question is whether it could it be otherwise, using the text in development, drafts, partial scripts, create buzz, get people interested and involved
(We had a good experience using a wiki, we were able to develop the multi-author manuscript this way but also put some information about the book as it was developing on public pages within the wiki - but the maintenance of this was time-consuming, inho there's huge potential in wikis for publishers who have the means to invest in them.)

Kindle - (Hey, me too, I need to get one for the holidays :)

Listening is the new marketing

technorati, radiant6, Google alerts

Audio books

Chris Brogan want to get all publishing formats at once.

Somebody is going to bundle paper, audio, e-book, pdf all together for consumers.

The question is whether people would buy everything together and for how much more money; probably not twice as much, maybe 1/3.
(So there is an issue here of cost effectiveness - it's a lot of work to put out all those formats, possibly double the work - so there's a need for cost saving somewhere in the process - e.g. integration at the production level, where manuscript is xml-formatted and can flow out then into InDesign, Acrobat, web pages, etc.

Somebody is going to offer this first. You can be a "first mover" or you can end up being a "me too."

Google Reader
- excellent tool for listening
- can share your feeds with others

Outposts
- set up presence on different sites, but you have to actually be there, keep them updated

Publishers are now in the information exchange business.
- why wouldn't you buy a certain blog and find ways to monetize it?

Community
- activating people who are really active
- Google wiki within each book
- Seth Godin Tribe website
- companies that buy 50 copies of a book like Hedgehog (?)
- Would people pay per year to be part of a certain, exclusive conversation?
e.g. 24.95 for access to a social network with the author in it, book given away for free?

Print on Demand
blurb.com
lulu.com

$ COST - Really Expensive

How do you activate authors?
- especially so it isn't like you are heaping more work on them
- if you can show author that they can make the needle move, have a real impact on the numbers, then they get interested
- some authors don't like crowds, but will be socially comfortable online

Revenue
- comes out of marketing budget
- speaking of marketing, pics of covers are important, people collect them on their phones

You have to be prepared for the lonely mall effect... just because you build it doesn't mean they will necessarily come. But if you don't build it, no chance at all. Any kind of a following is good, e.g. 20,000 is a pretty decent number.

Can you get the author involved but not leading, letting the people drive the thing?

People - How do you staff this? Get someone to start one or two hours a day, with Twitter search feeding into a Google reader.

Competition - Someone's asked whether we can we do this together instead of competitively?
The answer seems to have been no, because no answer was given. Instead, Brogan mentioned that there are a lot of ways other people can come in and take your industry, then you have to work doubly hard to get it back. So the emphasis again was on first movers.

Tools - e.g. Hubspot... excellent platform for blogging with a mountain of analytics.
(And Brogan said if you buy 10m worth, he gets a pony or something :)

Small is the new big

We don't all want to eat at, shop at, go to... etc.
There's interest in the "craft" approach, e.g. microbrewers, some of whom are actually quite large.

How do you convert page views into money?
Equip people with information they need, and they will pay something for it.
But if people smell marketing, they won't go there.

--

My evaluation:

This was a great seminar, brief, to the point, well-presented.

I knew most of what was presented but I didn't know about Twitter search, so now Twitter makes sense to me.

I also liked the slogans used throughout. Expressions like "small is the new big" are entertaining and convey a lot of information.

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