Friday, January 22, 2010
Julien Smith, co-author of Trust Agents with Chris Brogan, spoke at Third Tuesday Vancouver this week about the nature of social capital and building tribes.
While I was expecting a bland presentation on the importance of building community within social networks, I was pleasantly surprised. The talk was less on why online communities are important and more about how now is the time to take control, get over our own fears and become leaders of our own social channels. All in all, it was an inspiring talk.
These were Julien’s main points (thanks to Hummingbird604 for live blogging the event):
Touch the burner.
When we’re children we do things that are dangerous (like touching the burner, playing with the electrical socket, etc.). We do this to make sense of the world around us and, once you touch the burner and understand it, your world gets a little bigger. It hurts to touch the burner so we eventually stop, but when we stop, the world stops getting bigger.
We need to continue to explore the world around us—even if it hurts—in order for our world to grow.
Connections matter.
There’s a study that shows that once we get to a certain level of financial gain—$50,000 a year—we are no longer made happier by the next $1,000 or even $10,000 a year. What makes us happy is the amount of connections we have and how central we are to the network.
Building tribes, bringing people together and facilitating the exchange of social capital is one of the best things you can do either personally or for your business.
If you can build the church (the place that people gather by default), you get to be in charge of the channel and the connections that are made there.
Break the pattern.
Breaking the pattern of interaction challenges people to really engage. Never let anybody turn themselves off. Great interviewers, like Larry King, excel at this.
Become the lead goose.
The lead goose reduces the wind resistance for all of the other geese. If you become an experimenter, if you try new things and break the pattern, you’re making it easier for everybody else in your network to break the pattern and develop meaningful connections. Once you establish yourself as a leader, you become invaluable to your tribe.
We will never need more advertising.
We will never need more advertising but we will always need more community and tighter links between those we care about. Learning to build tribes and understanding social capital has never been more valuable.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
The beginning of the year is a great time to reflect on the tools we use and to experiment with new ones that will help make our jobs easier for the next 12 months. These are the online marketing tools that we recommend for 2010.
Listening Tools
At the heart of any online marketing campaign is listening to what your competitors are doing and what others are saying about you. If you don’t know what’s going on in the online space, how can you manage your brand?
In addition, it’s important to know what conversations are already happening before you take the plunge and join in.
1. Google Alerts
Google Alerts are simple to set up and are effective for monitoring what’s going on online. Create alerts for your brand name, your competitors’ names, and top keywords that you want to rank for in search results. In the words of Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo, Google Alerts are “an oldie but a goodie.”\
2. Yahoo Pipes
Yahoo Pipes is a RSS feed aggregator that allows you to monitor mentions of your brand throughout the web. You build a pipe by combining RSS feeds (Learn How to Build a Pipe in Just a Few Minutes) and then you can sort and filter what’s being said about you online.
3. Twitter Lists
With everyone on Twitter these days, how you are supposed to keep up with what everyone’s talking about? To help us, Twitter has Lists, which allow people to group tweeters by subject or theme. Want to know what’s going on in the technology sector, for example? Follow the Most Influential People in Tech List.
To find lists, go to Listorious.
Conversation Tools
Once you have an understanding of what’s going on, it’s time to start talking.
4. Hootsuite
With Hootsuite, you can manage multiple twitter accounts, schedule your tweets and get valuable stats on your twitter activities; like how many people are clicking on your tweets, or your most popular tweets for the last month.
Watch out for the Twitter for Business Handbook coming soon from Boxcar Marketing.
5. LinkedIn’s Questions & Answers
LinkedIn is the equivalent of an online business conference. Asking and answering questions on LinkedIn is a great way to build up your reputation among peers in your industry. This leads to more opportunities for someone to recognize your authority and contact you for something further.
Sharing Tools
Once you start having conversations, it’s important to establish your value to the community by sharing content and useful information.
6. Google Reader
Use Google Reader to start building a community around your feeds and the feeds you follow. Once you fill out your Google Profile, start following people, share your items, comment and bundle your RSS feeds together.
7. Slideshare
This is a great tool for sharing your slideshow presentations and videos. You can upload your PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Adobe PDFs, share publicly or privately and add audio to make a webinar.
Take a tour of slideshare.
8. Blog
When you have lots of interesting things to share on an ongoing basis, it’s time for a blog. Participating in social networks is like renting space, whereas blogging is owning your own space. If you have the resources to own, then do it. Copyblogger.com offers copy writing and content tips for online marketing success.
Conclusion
It’s important to note that online tools do not equal an online strategy. Before adding social media to your marketing mix, make sure you know what you want to give and what you expect to get from participating. Knowing these basics allows you to then properly plan how you’ll measure success and how you’ll determine whether the investment in people, time and technology is worth continuing. Plan so you can measure, measure so you can improve.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
If you’re like us, you subscribe to blogs with the full intention of reading every post but, as your email or RSS reader fills up, you never get around to reading all (if any) of them. If you’re looking to narrow down your reading list for 2010, these are the blogs we always make time to read - and recommend that you should, too.
Seth’s Blog
Marketing and business guru Seth Godin shares his thoughts on marketing, spreading ideas and standing out from the crowd.
MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog
A great blog for online marketing resources, marketing articles, online seminars, case studies, conferences and events.
Mequoda Daily
A blog that focuses on online publishing, information marketing and make money online.
Get Elastic The Ecommerce Blog
The #1 ecommerce blog in the world, covering SEO, usability, analytics, email, shopping cart abandonment, and social media.
VKI Studios
Internet marketing and website usability blog to help you get more traffic and higher conversation rates.
Monday, January 04, 2010
On December 30, my article “Use Clay to Shape the Future of Publishing” was posted on the BookNet Canada blog. The original is missing the proper links and some blockquotes so I’m going to post it again here.
Use Clay to Shape the Future of Publishing
As I reflect on 2009, there is one author who continually comes to mind as a thought leader for the publishing industry, and that is Clay Shirky.
In March, I attended the South by Southwest Interactive conference (SXSW) in Austin, TX. SXSW is an uber-geek fest where the best of the best come to geek it up and muse on the state of the internet, culture, and technology. Us plebs listen intently, take notes and then report back to the unwashed masses via our blogs, Facebook and twitter streams.
Ok, it’s not as stuck up as that, but it is an expensive conference to attend and, as an attendee, one expects a certain, exalted level of thinking.
The panel that disappointed me the most, and which let to a firestorm amongst the online book geeks, was New Thinking for Old Publishers.
This panel was nicknamed “No Thinking for Old Publishers.” As much as Clay Shirky was the heavy weight on the panel, he was not the main attraction. The audience was full of bloggers and book lovers intent on spreading the word about exciting developments in the publishing industry, intent on hearing directly from the editors, publicists and publishers who they so rarely have access to.
But to say that it was a disappointment is an understatement. It was a disaster.
What resulted from the disaster of that panel was a grassroots movement to create a better dialogue on the future of publishing. I experienced that better dialogue at BookCamp Vancouver, a self-organizing conference on books and technology.
Here’s a little about how BookCamp Vancouver originated.
In my post-SXSW rant, I vowed to organize a panel in Vancouver. That panel quickly became a full conference. With generous sponsorship from SFU and BookNet Canada, the organizers were able to offer free registration to 300 people. (Organizers included me, John Maxwell from SFU Master of Publishing program, Morgan Cowie from BNC, Sean Cranbury from Books on the Radio and Nick Bouton from Protagonize.)
We wanted a different conversation than what we usually heard at book conferences. As an internet marketing consultant, the last couple of years have no longer been about convincing publishers that digital is here. It made no sense to have any rah-rah “ebook” conversations or to bring in big headline speakers. What made sense was to bring together the book geeks and the tech geeks to talk directly about the problems.
The sessions at BookCamp Vancouver included such topics as “Using Open Source Models in Publishing”, “The Optimal Use of Social Media for Authors and Publishers”, “The State of the Electronic Book,” and “Making Content King.”
It was my first book conference that was attended by people in the book industry as well as those in the technology industry. And I was thrilled.
But back to Clay Shirky.
The problem with the SXSW panel was that there was too little Shirky. This was also the case with the former BEC conference: there were too few people involved outside of the publishing industry to offer insights into where the industry could go in terms of technology.
As publishers scramble to catch up, to figure out ebooks, to work with ONIX, others have been steaming ahead—readers, in particular.
In January 2005 while working at Raincoast, I attended the Blogging for Business Summit in Seattle. At that time, I felt that the publishing industry was behind.
In April of 2005, I started SoMisguided.com to talk about books, online marketing and technology. It took me until November 2005 to launch the Raincoast blog and podcast program. Desperately trying to ride at least the tail of the online crest, in retrospect we were ahead, Raincoast became 1 of 3 publishers internationally who were podcasting and blogging.
We all have our Cassandra moments.
Since 1997 when I got my first hotmail account, and then signed up my friends, I have been watching the culture of reading change. I was, and continue to be, obsessed with reading culture and the information revolution. Such is the case with Clay Shirky, and it is particularly evident in his March 13 blog post called “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable.” It was Shirky’s post that led me to buy his book Here Comes Everyone and to attend that SXSW panel.
In “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” Shirky manages to take 20 years of conversation about the digital nature of our culture and distill it into something that people in the newspaper industry are willing to hear and understand. Book publishing folks, please read this article.
Why? Because book publishers, like newspapers, are content producers and we have taken similar approaches to digital copies and electronic sharing of content.
The curious thing about the various plans hatched in the ‘90s is that they were, at base, all the same plan: “Here’s how we’re going to preserve the old forms of organization in a world of cheap perfect copies!” The details differed, but the core assumption behind all imagined outcomes (save the unthinkable one) was that the organizational form of the newspaper, as a general-purpose vehicle for publishing a variety of news and opinion, was basically sound, and only needed a digital facelift. As a result, the conversation has degenerated into the enthusiastic grasping at straws, pursued by skeptical responses.
There is no general model for newspapers, or books to follow. The internet has broken the model and there is no one-size-fits-all fix.
Print and the web are alternate modes of distributing information. We have internalized that this is happening, but what’s missing is for each house to create an individual, cohesive plan. Publishers need to go back to their business models and create new plans and new models for new realities.
A few folks in the publishing crowd are sentinels. They have been saying for years, “Hey look what’s going on, people are sharing, participating, writing and publishing their own books.”
“These people are crazy, are you seeing this?”
“Don’t they know how much work is involved in writing and editing and producing a book, and then distributing it to stores.”
This type of response to those observations is part of the problem.
Industrial production destroyed the viability of scribes. Such is the case with digital, it has destroyed the old economics that worked for how books are produced, distributed, sold and read. We need new models because the core problem publishing solves—“the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public—has stopped being a problem” (Shirky).
Instead of investigating how to drastically change and adapt, we’ve stuck to our old business models, which has left us arguing about what Google can and cannot index, what the price of ebooks should or should not be, and whether we should or should not have someone on staff dedicated to Facebook and Twitter.
Yes, old systems are going to break before new systems are in place. Such is the case with revolutions. We are publishing in a time of experimentation where nothing will work, but anything might.
Whether it’s keeping our nose to the grindstone, burying our heads or navel gazing, we have forgotten to look up.
Look up now, to that to top left corner of ceiling and think about all the “yes, buts ...” you’ve said over this conversation. Where are the “yes, ands ...” How can we work this year on creative planning and reinventing our businesses?
Jay Rosen recently interviewed Clay Shirky and one of the discussion topics was of research done in the 70s and 80s by social scientists who studied how newspapers, such as Time, Newsweek, CBS, NBC, made decisions.
Their common observation was that the sociology of the newsroom was based, not on the best way or the journalistic way to do something but rather, on what the production process demanded.
They discovered that as newsrooms internalized the production routine, their decisions accommodated that routine. They eventually believed that they were doing things that were required or necessary rather than recognizing that they were making decisions on what the production routine demanded.
In publishing we have reps selling in the books from tip sheets and advances, we produce catalogues seasons in advance, we store and ship products between warehouses, the number of pages in a book is divisible by 4 to accommodate printing presses.
What happens when the production routine changes?
If the entire business is shifting and the nature of how the public informs itself and acquires reading material is changing, then why are we not changing at the same speed?
What if you had to start from scratch? How would you make more money than you spend (yes, on every book)?
This is a new year. A time for new beginnings. We can’t reverse the flow of time. Micropayments, subscriptions are not the answer. Set aside ebooks.
Stare at that top left corner of the ceiling more often this year.
Innovate. Read some Clay Shirky. Create your own future.
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