Last week was a week of presentations. On Thursday and Friday I met with WESTAF. And on Tuesday, I met with the students in the SFU summer workshop in book publishing.
I had an hour to give a presentation on online marketing (a little long to include all my notes, but again I want to post this content for my reference and in case it’s of interest to anyone else). Here we go ...
If you ask most people in publishing what business they are in, they’ll say book publishing or selling books. But you really have to look beyond that, selling books is the end result. What you’re actually involved in is telling stories. People don’t just buy books, they buy-into an author, a diet plan, a travel experience, a story. What drives them to buy the book is the promise of mental stimulation, of practical help advice, or cooking tips, of engagement with an author or experience. That’s what you need to get across online.
In the Writers to Readers Sessions at BookExpo Canada, speaker Michael Cader, who runs Publishers Lunch and Publishers Marketplace, said that you have to think of the Web as a platform for everything neat you have to say—not just about the book, but about the author and the content. The idea is to not focus only on the book, but to move beyond the covers, think about all the associations that might be interesting to a reader. Michael’s example was if you have a book about salmon fishing, put salmon recipes up on your site. Put a Guinness Book of World Record’s stat on the biggest salmon ever measured … Put a link to a great short story about fishing, etc. Not to mention an excerpt from the book, and every review you can find. [original post/report on BEC]
It’s kind of a corny idea, but if you step back from it and look at why people buy books and why and how people recommend books to their peers, it makes sense. Number one reason people cite for buying a book is peer recommendation. What is it about the recommendation?
1) it came from a trusted source
2) it was tailored specifically to their interests
3) there was something interesting about the author, the story behind the book, the actual story itself. When you listen to people talking about books and recommending a book to a friend they start with “well it’s a story about X,” but it’s really cool because the author wrote it on napkins in prison, or the story was found in an abandoned suitcase, or I heard the author reading on the radio and she has this great Jamaican accent.The book is just this cold, physical object. The warmth is the interaction you have with the book or author.
In online marketing and promotion you want find ways to
- Be a trusted source.
- Tailor suggestions to the user’s interests
- Indentify the anecdotes, the interesting elements of the story (or story behind the story) that people are likely to pass on or share with friends.You also want to look at your digital assets and find ways
- to make content PARTICIPATORY, both in its creation and its consumption.
- to make Web pages a place of ENGAGEMENT with your market.
- and to create a VIRAL effect. (The link is the currency of the Web.)Again we’re in the business of ideas, content and lifestyle—not just books. Books are just the beginning of what we’re selling. And when we talk about content as participatory and website being places for conversation and engagement, what we’re talking about is the basic concept of what users do online and how that’s different than what they did 5 years ago. The buzzword you usually hear at this point is Web 2.0.
The concept of “Web 2.0” began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International in 2001 [See O’Reilly, What is Web 2.0]. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having crashed, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up regularly. The other thing he noted was that the companies that survived the dotcom crash and the new companies emerging involved: good content, user participation, engagement, a viral effect. Examples include Flickr, delicious, Gmail, Google Adsense, eBay, Wikipedia, BitTorrent; and the buzz words are blogs, long tail, web as platform, user participation.
Why is this important?
It’s important because people’s attitudes towards the web have change, you want to manage the expectations of your users but you also want to provide them what they’re expecting.
[Then we looked at the basic steps of an online campaign and some examples. I would have liked to go through setting up an online ad campaign, understanding web stats better, monitoring the blogosphere and working with online media ... maybe next year. It was the first year I presented at the summer workshop program and definitely a positive experience but also a learning experience. Thank you Tom Best and SFU.]
