Want to see books similar to the ones you’re reading? Head over to Yasiv, a site that uses Amazon data to create a flowchart of recommendations. Created by Andrei Kashcha, the site serves up a web of book covers that, when clicked, lead to information about those titles. There’s also a box on the left that lists the volumes by title.
Kashcha describes Yasiv as “a visual recommendation service that helps people to choose the right product from Amazon’s catalog.” In addition to books Yasiv can web other products carried by Amazon including video games, music and movies, although a search for broad clothing categories such as skirts and pants yields only a single image. Good for Grand Theft Auto. Not so good for Vera Bradley.
Yasiv recommendation web for 'House of Silk' by Anthony Horowitz
BtoB firms plan to follow their BtoC cousins and spend more on social marketing over the next three years, according to a white paper by the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
The study quotes Forrester in predicting that by 2014, BtoB spending in social media will reach $54 million, up from the $11 million spent in 2010. BtoB magazine’s survey, “Emerging Trends in BtoB Social Marketing: Insights from the Field,” found that 93% of B2B marketers are involved to some degree in social media. And in BtoB’s “2011 Outlook” survey, 62.6% of marketers reported plans to increase their spending in social media channels this year.
“Although B2C and B2B companies use social media differently, many of its functions, such as monitoring competition, gaining customer feedback and building brand awareness really do apply to the marketing goals of both types of companies,” the 4As wrote.
“Of particular importance to BtoB marketers is determining if their social media efforts are paying off.” Marketers are tracking leads by looking at click-through rates and number of downloads, among other metrics–although fewer than half measure their efforts, according to a survey by BtoB magazine.
Online retailer Amazon.com said today that it’s selling more electronic books than printed versions. The company says it sells 105 e-books for every 100 physical copies it sells.
Next Tuesday rival Barnes & Noble will ratchet up the competition when it introduces a new generation Nook e-reader to compete with Amazon’s Kindle.
B&N chief executive William Lynch told the Wall Street Journal that despite a late start his company has captured 25% of the digital books market. It has also grabbed a good chunk of the market for electronic magazine subscriptions. “We’ve also sold more than 1.5 million magazine subscription orders and single copy sales on the Nook newsstand.”
The irony of Tuesday’s announcement (or maybe the marketing strategy) is that it happens during the week of BookExpo America (BEA), which bills itself as the largest publishing event in North America. It has traditionally promoted paper copies. This year BEA will co-host a session on electronic publications with the IDPF Digital Book Conference 2011, at the Javits Center in New York City.
When Dobie Gray sang about being in with the in crowd in 1965, could he have imagined how mobile devices would turn the world into one big high school?
First there was messaging and texting, which allowed you to send your thoughts to a single person. Then there were location-based services like Foursquare, which allow you to broadcast your location to whoever will listen.
The latest to join the my-business-is-everybody’s-business trend is Beluga, a service that allows you to message groups of friends, all at once. You can transmit photos to the group without having to send individual messages. And you can spot their location on a map, eliminating the need to constantly check their availability.
Beluga is a cross-platform rival to Kik, GroupMe and Blackberry’s BBM. Whether it catches on is anyone’s guess but attendees at the uber-hip SXSW music and digital festival in Austin, Texas this week are burning up the wireless space about the service. Clue number two: Beluga’s been acquired by Facebook.
Writers and other creatives might want to use these services to extend their existing marketing tools. One application for group chat is your informal ambassador’s program, that coterie of friends and fans who evangelize for your brand. You might use Beluga to give the group some visibility, along with the cachet of exclusivity—join the group and be the first to receive information and invitations to private events.
Who knows, you might get to run with the in crowd. Or relive high school, one of Dante’s nine circles of young adulthood.
Eight percent of adult Internet users say they use Twitter. The greatest percentage of users are college-educated Hispanic women aged 18-29 who live in cities. Those are the results of a first-ever survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project that focuses exclusively on users of the microblogging service.
Twitters users differ on how frequently they check the service to monitor material from their networks. A little more than a third check daily while a comparable number say they rarely check the site.
Most users post a mix of personal and work-related information. A majority say that they post “humorous or philosophical observations.” And if your business is interested in tracking down these users to serve them messages and ads, the study reveals that 24% of respondents use the service to tweet their location, with 7% of them doing so on a daily basis.
First we had cavemen sitting around the fire telling stories. Then gossips and reporters. Then came chat and blogs and we cycled back to citizen journalists.
With the rise of social media we now have citizen publicists. Like volunteer journalist, they want to speak their mind. When they listen, they want to hear what their peers are saying, not just the company line. And through the really big amplifier called the Web they can have an outsized influence on our work.
As creatives, we want to reach them.
Our agency regularly counsels clients who want to join the social media wave but are afraid of getting swamped. There are too many networks and monitoring them is a time-sink. So for those clients who want to dip a toe into online communications, we’ve developed an approach called the Social Media Platform that allows organizations to engage their audiences as well as publish their ideas.
It’s a perfect fit for artists, photographers, writers and other creatives who can’t afford a publicist.
Here’s the strategy: Organizations need to monitor and influence what people are saying about their brands. So do creatives, with the added task of promoting their work far and wide. We social media because that’s where our future editors, clients and benefactors hang out. With a social media platform we can harness the power of peers, asking influentials who like our work to spread the word. The social media platform is no substitute for a full-blown marketing campaign that uses advertising, direct mail, media relations and microsites. But it offers creatives a turnkey operation that allows them to join, monitor and influence the online conversation.
Here’s how it works: The platform is an integrated collection of social media networks and tools. It includes the major social and business networks—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, SlideShare and YouTube—but has room for numerous sites, forums and communities. At the heart is a white-label blog without branding for an independent look and feel. With the blog creatives can manage reputations, disseminate key messages and establish expertise in the market—this might apply more to non-fiction than fiction writers. Creatives who’ve already built a reputation can use the platform to solve issues before they become wide-spread problems.
There are six parts in the process of establishing a social media platform:
Create. We start with a blog hosted on an independent site. Posts and comments radiate from the blog to the major social and business networks. The system notifies the blog administrator each time someone from the outside posts a comment. For your peace of mind, comments can be approved, edited or deleted before anyone on the ‘Net sees them. Tools: WordPress software, web host.
Listen. Tapping into the online conversation about our brand is essential. Specialized search engines allow us to listen to what people are saying about our work. PR people call it reputation management. Tools: Social Mention, Google Alerts, Gmail to verify social network accounts.
Contribute. Based on your expertise, you can contribute original text, slides, photos and video. Crowdsourcing allows you to obtain feedback on work. You can even use your network to float ideas for future projects. Tools: those listed above.
Publicize. Blogs are like parties. You have to invite the right people to achieve critical mass. We start with the internal audience, your friends and business associates, and add editors, writers and bloggers in traditional and digital media. Tools: LinkedIn, Twitter.
Monitor. The conversation is ongoing. The monitoring needs to be, too. But checking multiple sites dozens of times a day can get crazy. A dashboard can simplify the process: Tools: HootSuite, TweetDeck.
Evaluate. You’re not a major corporation. The goal isn’t to fill spreadsheets and generate charts that dazzle but yield no useful information. We measure the volume and tone of comments but take everything with two grains salt. Tools: Twitrratr (Twitter rater), Twendz (Twitter trends), Tweet Level.
Does the system work? Yes. Our agency is seeing a good adoption rate from editors and bloggers as well as retweets of original material. Why does it work? Because it leverages three potent forces in our society: the shift toward digital media, people’s desire to hear recommendations from peers rather than companies and journalists’ need to discover leads rather than waiting for pitches.
That’s almost as good as telling stories around the campfire.
Advertisers increasingly not only know who you are but what you buy and how you’ll vote. Today’s Wall Street Journal details how online tracking company RapLeaf Inc. accumulates personally identifying information about online users and sells the data to advertisers. Their goal is to serve up personalized ads when you visit various websites.
Behavioral advertising is getting attention lately because journalists found advertisers are telling web visitors one thing and doing the opposite. Most advertiser policies seem to forbid the transmission of personally identifying information–Facebook IDs or other data that could allow aggregators to piece together a picture of your life from financial and other records. The Journal found RapLeaf violated that policy. RapLeaf says it has since corrected the problem.
The scope of the issue is staggering. Counting RapLeaf there are 63 major advertising networks that collect data on users and sell it to advertisers.
Advertising is not the enemy, and we’re not against the online version. Marketers need a way to cut through the clutter; delivering relevant ads is one way to do that. And some online visitors may genuinely want to see ads that relate to their buying habits. But if you see behavioral advertising as intrusive, you can opt out of RapLeaf alone or the other 62 advertising networks from the Network Advertising Initiative page.
The Who once asked “Who are You?” an existential question couched in a pop-song wrapper. In the digital age the more pressing issue is who owns our data, both the information we buy and the data we create.
We face at least two issues: access and privacy.
Apple’s approach to digital rights management provides a nuanced example of the issue of access to the data we buy. When we purchase music on a CD we buy the right to listen to that music in any form on any device—instant access. When we buy a song from iTunes, Apple restricts the mobility of that material: we can synch our music collection with up to five computers but we can’t transfer the songs to an unauthorized computer.
Cloud computing—the process where the data and the application that creates and displays it reside on a computer somewhere in the ether—provides an example of both issues. Here we own the data and rent the application and server space, or get it for free thanks to advertiser support. But if we can’t connect to the Internet, if we don’t have continuous access, ownership means little. And if the data isn’t locked down on our servers, is it secure?
It’s the second issue, that thorny combination of privacy and security, that causes the most concern. If access to the data we buy or create is restricted by law or logistics, can we say that we fully control it? Who does? The people who sell the data, or the companies that house it?
A new service debuts today that could change the way writers publicize their work, and their areas of expertise.
NewsBasis is the communications equivalent of a matchmaker. Journalists issue requests for information and writers can respond. It’s a targeted way for both parties to find sources and promote their work, without a lot of waste.
In some ways NewsBasis is similar to Help a Reporter Out (HARO) and PR Newswire’s ProfNet. All three services allow journalists to post questions and search for expert sources. They also allow PR pros, companies and writers to search for questions from journalists or receive those queries via email. The idea is to allow journalists to cut through the clutter of unsolicited pitches and writers to better target their queries to the journalists who want the information.
NewsBasis differs from the competition with the introduction of real-time commentary on published articles. The service allows writers to embed their point of view or corrections directly in articles on the Internet. Journalists signed with the service will see those comments when they view the article online. They’re also notified by the service when a source leaves a comment.
Other features will look familiar to people using either HARO or ProfNet. The NewsBasis media notification tab allows users to type keywords into the search bar and read real-time activities by journalists. As with HARO, users also can receive email alerts.
With this week’s launch NewsBasis pits itself against some stiff competition. HARO brings nearly 30,000 reporters and bloggers, more than 100,000 news sources and thousands of small businesses together to exchange information. In addition to pumping out alerts to sources, ProfNet lets journalists search a database of more than 30,000 expert profiles.
HARO is free to PR pros, companies and writers. It also offers a free Twitter feed, especially helpful for communicators toting mobile devices. ProfNet is free to reporters but charges a fee to experts and their representatives. NewsBasis, which is in beta, is free at this point.
All of these services could change the face of publicity for authors, and not just because they provide a more efficient way to pitch their work. They give us the choice between active and passive publicity. Instead pf cold calling journalists, we’re now able to contact them directly about a topic in which they’re interested.
It can also allow authors to contribute to the news, rather than react to it through Google Alerts or other monitoring services. We can get the inside story about who’s writing what before journalists publish those articles and blogs. That should reduce the frustration so many authors feel when promoting their work.
