The Boxcar Marketing RSS feed is run through Feedburner.com, which allows readers to subscribe by RSS or email, which is super handy. For an unspecified period of time, those of you using Google Reader were unable to click on the blog post title without getting an Invalid GET data error.
I was stumped.
Until today when I dedicated 30 minutes to figuring this out. Let me save you 30 minutes.
Log into Feedburner.
Analyze > Configure Stats
Customize ... Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics
Remove the parenthesis in the Campaign field.
Feed: ${feedUri} (${feedName})
to
Feed: ${feedUri} ${feedName}
Instant fix (if you know what you’re doing).
Posted by Monique Trottier | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
How do digital sales affect how books are published and promoted?
My day job here at Boxcar Marketing is about helping companies understand what they can do on the web to promote themselves, to build their customer base and to interact with their customers effectively.
A lot of that work has to do with words. Writing and editing content for webpages, press releases, email newsletters, blog posts, tweets, surveys, downloadable PDFs, search ads, banner ads, and Facebook event invitations, to name a few.
When I worked in the book publishing industry (1996 to 2006), these items (if they existed) were part of the later phases of the publishing cycle. The author wrote the book, the agent sold the book to a publisher, the editor and author worked on refining the book, it went to production, sales and marketing started talking about the book, the book went to the printer, the sales reps sold the book to stores, the publicists pitched the book to reviewers, printers shipped the books to stores, the reviews came out in newspapers and magazines, the book appeared on book shelves, marketing and promotion kicked in, sales occurred, publicity continued for 3 months, more sales were made and/or unsold copies were returned to the publisher. Wash and repeat.
Digital sales changed the publishing world, not just in how we write online content, but how we sell online.
In the industry, we talk about the impact of Amazon discounts, we talk about price points for physical vs. ebook, we fret over making those ebooks,and we talk about DRM. But few people talk about how digital sales has affected every facet of the publishing process.
As an online marketing strategist, this is what I see.
Editorial Phase
Knowledge acquisition and audience interest.
What happens at the editorial stage positions the book through the entire sales process. The keyword choices made for the book title, subtitle, description and author bio determine whether readers will be able to easily find that book when searching Amazon, and search engines such as Google.
Acquiring search engine marketing skills has served many publishers well.
Production Phase
Branding, layout and design.
Digital sales brings a whole new set of requirements to the production phase. Just the cover design alone presents new challenges. For physical books, there’s the font size, colour choices, imagery, and how to make all the required elements look good for books face out on the shelf, spine out, placed on a table, seen close up or recognizable from afar.
Digital sales brings us thumbnail versions of the book for display on Amazon and other websites, plus icons for Facebook and Twitter, and black and white versions for ebook readers.
Have a look at Amazon (find the book section). What covers are distinct? Which stand out? Why?
Compare this set of designs:
To this set of designs:
You’ll see that high contrast and large fonts work best, so that, when reduced, the cover is still recognizable and legible.
Sales Phase
Awareness and availability to buy.
Traditionally publishers saw themselves in a B2B role. Business to Business.
Publishers worked with teachers, librarians, media and booksellers. The marketing model was built around educating that group of people so that they could go out and recommend or sell the books to readers.
Digital sales put publishers in a B2C role. Business to Consumer.
Publisher websites, blogs, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds all contribute to the online conversation about books and authors. This conversation between publishers and book readers is really important, even for publishers who are not selling books directly from their website.
By fostering conversation early and showing interest in a new book, the sales folks are in a better position to negotiate with their B2B partners.
Booksellers such as Amazon stock almost everything, but they decide through advertising dollars, partnerships and mathematical algorithms what books will appear in their newsletters, on the homepage or browse pages, and even what appears in the search results and the order in which titles are displayed in those results.
Amazon is looking for titles that can break away from the pack. These are the ones they are interested in promoting because the audience size and interest is clear. (You can bet that they’re reviewing sales history, search history, keyword research, and PPC conversions.)
Sales & Returns: Inventory
A subset of sales is inventory management, which is completely changed by digital sales. Forget about the challenges of digital downloads, let’s just look at physical inventory sold digitally.
Bibliographic data (all the info you see about a book online) is fed to retailers through xml feeds that contain this data. Someone needs to manage all of that in an incredibly precise way. Information on title, author, publication date, and inventory stock levels affects what people see online. The data is traded daily, even hourly, to ensure that what you see online is the best reflection of availability and shipping time.
Making a mistake here could mean that your book appears on Amazon with a delivery time of 3-5 weeks. Imagine how that affects the impulse buy!
Marketing & Publicity Phase
Awareness, outreach, and engagement.
Marketing is the process of promoting and selling a product or service. This traditional definition is true. But what does promoting and selling mean in a digital world? A clearer definition might be:
Marketing is any way that you engage with people to generate exposure, opportunity and sales.
In the case of marketing and publicity, this includes writing content that is remarkable, unique and newsworthy. And it likely means you’re publishing that material in the form of blogs, press releases, newsletters, tweets, and ads.
Back to keyword research, right?
If people are buying digitally, it means they are also discovering digitally. This changes what keywords publishers choose to use in blog headings, press releases, newsletter articles, tweets, twitter hashtags and on-page optimization elements (filenames, page titles, headings, text).
Behind the scenes, this also affects the sales materials publishers create, such as catalogues. Print catalogues were (and still are) produced each season to profile upcoming books. The book descriptions used in the catalogue are typically the same description that appears on Amazon and the publisher’s website.
But is the B2B copy the best copy for a B2C audience?
Traditionally sales copy is written for the bookseller whereas jacket copy is written for the book reader. Both are meant to entice, but the intended audience is different.
Even publishers who upload jacket copy should consider whether copy intended for a print audience translates well to an online reading experience. Large blocks of prose don’t work well online whereas shorter sentences, bulleted lists, highlight colors and bolded text help online readers scan and understand information quickly.
Digital sales should have completely altered this copywriting process, but publishers are still in transition.
This transition period means that in addition to needing good writing, editing, production, promotion and sales skills, digital sales are forcing publishers to acquire email marketing, search marketing, content creation and asset management skills that are reminiscent of traditional approaches yet have a whole new set of considerations.
What changes have you seen to copywriting, book design or promotion as a result of digital sales?
Posted by Monique Trottier | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
Clay Shirky fascinates me because he thinks about the world within the context of thinking that has gone before him. In his recent post, The Collapse of Complex Business Models he references Joseph Tainter’s 1988 book called The Collapse of Complex Societies.
Shirky is able to take Tainter’s work, on how several societies (such as the Romans and Mayans) arrived at a remarkable level of sophistication only to suddenly collapse, and apply those lessons to media’s plight today. The media industry being the complex, sophisticated system on the verge of collapse that is under his examination.
Tainter’s argument, as introduced by Shirky, follows that, as a direct result of complexity and sophistication, we see systems fall because the elite at the top are unable to see a different path. Shirky points to how this plays out in the business models of mass media, where the elite cannot foresee a scenario where users don’t pay for what they consumer. Spelled out, Shirky says big media’s argument for who pays for what would sound something like this:
“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”
The ecosystem of our planet is perhaps trapped in the same dire circumstances, where the burden of change drives our collapse. But in the less frightening scenario of what happens to old media, Shirky champions ingenuity by saying:
“But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.”
If you’ve signed into Facebook in the last couple of days, you’ve probably seen this message
It seems innocent enough, but as this librarian found out, it’s more complicated (and, in our opinion, invasive) than it seems.
There are two parts to this new feature. One, is that Facebook’s “Like” button is now available across the web. This means that you can be on a website, “like” something, and the link to that page is added to both your Facebook profile and your friends’ newsfeed.
The next part is that Facebook now has “select partners” that can access your personal information when you’re on their sites. Currently, these partners are Microsoft Docs.com, Pandora, and Yelp but more websites are expected to join. As Facebook says,
When you visit a Facebook-enhanced application or website, it may access any information you have made visible to Everyone (Edit Profile Privacy) as well as your publicly available information. This includes your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages. The application will request your permission to access any additional information it needs.
Don’t use these partner sites? You should still be concerned because if your friends visit these sites, the partners can still pull in your information.
If this wasn’t invasive enough, Facebook users have to manually opt out of this feature and then block the applications if users don’t want their information shared by their friends.
We recommend opting out. Here’s how:
Sign into your Facebook Account.
Click on Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites
Here, you have to do two things.
First, unclick Allow next to Instant Personalization. You’ll getting a warning message - click Confirm.
Then you have to manually prevent your friends from sharing your information by clicking Learn More under Instant Personalization. Scroll down on this page to How do I opt-out of instant personalization? and click on the heading link. You’ll see this
Click on each application individually and disallow them by clicking Block Application on the left hand side of the page.
You’ll getting another warning message - click Block Docs.
Note: Facebook will most likely be adding more “personalization partners” in the future. You’ll need to check back periodically to manually disallow them from accessing your information.
Revision: Easier Way to to Stop Your Friends From Sharing Information About You
Go to Privacy Settings > What Your Friends Can Share About You > Edit Settings, uncheck all the checked boxes and click save. This way also keeps future Applications from accessing your information. Thanks to James for pointing this out.
Posted by Crissy | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
Earlier this month we looked at how to make sense of a Google Analytics report. Now we’re going to take a step further and explore Analytics’ Advanced Segments tool. This tool allows you to segment your website users into separate, defined channels to see how different audience groups are interacting with your site. Advanced Segments was released about a year and half ago but many still aren’t taking advantage of its functionality.
Why Audience Segments?
The ability to analyze your reports by particular user groups and compare one traffic channel to another is extremely useful and helps to make your Analytics reports more meaningful.
If you’re running a social media campaign, for example, the ability to compare traffic coming from Twitter to traffic from Facebook can give you insight into how these different groups are interacting with your site. Once you have this information, you can see where your efforts should be focused. For instance, if your segmented report shows you that your site gets most of its traffic from Facebook but traffic from Twitter spikes on the weekends, you may want to focus most of your marketing outreach on Facebook but do some Twitter outreach on the weekends.
How to Set up Advanced Segments
Sign in to Google Analytics.
In the Dashboard screen, above the date range, there’s an Advanced Segments tab.
By default, this is set to All Visits. To set user segments, click on the arrow next to All Visits and this will open up the Advanced Segments screen.
From here, you can select from predefined segments like “Search Traffic” and “Referral Traffic” or you can create your own custom segments, by clicking on “Create a new advanced segment.”
Once you’re in this screen you can drag and drop to build your own segments. To create a segment for Facebook traffic, under Dimensions choose Traffic Sources and drag “Source” to the dimension or source box. Under condition choose “Contains” and in value type in “facebook.com”. Next, name your segment (if you don’t the segment won’t work). Note: choosing “add ‘or’ statement” will segment visitors from Facebook with another variable.
You can use these steps to set up segments for traffic coming from all of your social media channels.
Click Test Segment to see if you’ve set this up correctly and then click Save Segment.
This will take you back to the Dashboard. To apply your custom segment to your report, go back to the Advanced Segments screen. Here, you can choose to compare regular visitors to Facebook visitors by clicking on your new segment (under Custom Segments). Note: by default, all reports will include All Visits. Click Apply.
Your Analytics report now compares your regular traffic to your Facebook traffic. The blue line represents All Visits and the yellow line represents Facebook visits. In this case, Facebook represents a small minority of the site’s traffic.
For further instructions on how to set up Advanced Segments, Google has a video.
And if you’re an advanced user with a Drupal site, this video shows you how to take the functionality of Advanced Segments even further.
Posted by Crissy | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
Todd Sieling of Corvus Consulting is a Boxcar Marketing officemate with an iPad. We covet the iPad. Todd kindly let us play with it. Then he polished our mucky finger prints off the screen.
Things I like about Apple’s iPad:
Amazingly crisp screen
I already know how to use it (I’m an iPhone user)
The apps are cool, especially Epicurious
It’s in colour vs. Kindle which is black and white
Size and shape is lovely. Apple really gets this right
How would I use it?
Client meetings where I didn’t want to bring a computer but need more than a notebook and pen.
Showing people docs and diagrams. It’s easy to put down flat on the table and gather around.
Watching TV and movies at home and on airplanes
Taunting geeks without an iPad.
Reading ebooks and pdfs.
Playing.
Overall, the iPad is lovely, it’s cool, I want it. I don’t mind waiting for the 3G version and iBookstore Canada so I shall defer my purchase until all the players are in place. I’m looking forward to seeing how people discover the iPad and how they will incorporate it into their lives. Will it be the game changer everyone says it will be?
Posted by Monique Trottier | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
Back in January, Monique was asked to impart her social media wisdom on Monica Hamburg’s blog, Me Like the Interweb. Monique’s lesson was this:
Talking to clients about social media is always an exercise in metaphors for me: Social networking is a digital cocktail party. LinkedIn is a business conference. Twitter is your individual headline news ticker. YouTube is your private tv station. In many ways the metaphors are silly and don’t fully explain the platform, but the point is that social media is nothing new. Social media is simply a set of tools that let us do things that are harder to do in real life, such as keeping up to date on what all of our colleagues, friends and family members are doing, exchanging business contacts and making friend-of-a-friend introductions.
The skeptical comments I often hear from clients are, “why do people spend time on this?” and “how can I benefit?” Any active social media user knows that these are the wrong questions. The answer is that people spend time on this stuff because it improves their ability to network offline, to gather information quickly and to establish relationships and to stay in touch.
The basis of a good social strategy is answering the questions, “what are my clients doing online,” “what makes their chosen social networks attractive to them,” “what social failure or real life challenge does this network solve,” and “how can I participate here in a way that adds value, that establishes a closer relationship to my customers, that let’s me stay in touch with their needs, and that, ultimately, is a reciprocal relationship?”
What’s a lesson without homework? Here are some excellent articles that will help you put Monique’s advice into action and get you started on your social media strategy.
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Vancouver internet marketing strategists James Sherrett and Monique Trottier are experts in online marketing strategy. Talk to us about internet marketing, web design, search marketing
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