Namaste Publishing is a small, financially successful Canadian publishing house with a worldwide presence. Known as the publisher for leading authors like Eckhart Tolle, Namaste has a solid reputation for publishing transformative, leading-edge books on self-help, spirituality, alternative health and personal transformation.
Namaste’s original website was built using flat HTML files and grew over the years as a disconnected collection of sites and blogs under Namastepublishing.com and various subdomains. Without standard navigation between interior pages, the site was difficult to navigate, and the key ecommerce functions required unnecessary steps to purchase products in the store.
Screenshot of the Original Design
Namaste’s online presence needed a radical reinvention and expansion. The team wanted a deeper long-term engagement with their community of fans, authors, spiritual leaders and staff. The project required a full re-branding and entire re-experience and re-interpretation of what publishing meant for the company.
Screenshot of the New Site Launched March 11, 2010
A re-design is more than just design.
Boxcar Marketing started with a month-long strategy session to convert Namaste Publishing’s business from a traditional publishing company to the leader of a global spiritual community. Jordan Behan of Tell Ten Friends Marketing Co. and Boris Mann of BMann Consulting and Bootup Labs contributed their expertise during the strategy sessions and subsequent social-media training sessions. Once the team established the goals of the project, we sent out an RFP to various vendors.
Namaste Publishing’s goals were:
To support and engage readers in an ongoing experience that deepens and adds richness to their understanding of the written materials.
To dispel the distance and ‘one to many’ dynamic between author and reader.
To distribute spiritual and inspirational information through new methods that are engaging, easy to understand, inspirational, fun and engage a wide audience.
To expand the commercial viability of the already-profitable online store without compromising the intentions and integrity of the informational and community aspects of the website.
As for technical requirements, Namaste wanted an easier system for publishing their content (events, blogs, store products), a more user-friendly online shopping experience, and support for online and offline groups that form around Namaste’s publications (book studies and interactive courses).
In order to reach these goals the project was divided into 3 distinct but interdependent phases:
Phase I: Re-Experience
Namaste Publishing and Boxcar Marketing worked with Todd Sieling of Corvus Consulting on the information architecture, user experience, and interface design. Key to this phase, and taking the design lead, was Lift Studios, who provided the brand redesign (logos, business cards and other identity) and worked closely with us on the website redesign and desired user experience.
Phase II: Store Renovation
Boxcar Marketing’s experience with publishers and online marketing primed us for taking the lead on the product page requirements that would remake the online store and improve usability for customers. (A separate case study on this phase is coming.)
Phase III: Community Expansion
Namaste Publishing’s connections to the global spiritual community are extensive and they wanted to build social web tools within the Namaste site, as well as actively participate in other online communities where their fans and customers gather.
Throughout the project Boxcar Marketing and Namaste Publishing established practices for building and managing online communities, handling digital and print online sales, establishing online courses, such as The Journey to Higher Consciousness, promoting events, such as Namaste Radio, and incorporating the publisher and author blogs.
Boxcar Marketing, along with our expert partners, did extensive workflow planning, which translated to detailed wireframes that drove design and development decisions. But, of course, we would be nowhere without the guidance and amazing work of our Drupal development team from Raincity Studios. Raincity Studios turned our designs and user experience requests into the dynamic, fully functioning website we launched this month.
Truly a group effort, thank you again to Todd of Corvus Consulting, the design team at Lift Studios (Haig, Cam, Frederick), the development team at Raincity Studios (Erik, Francis, and many other behind-the-scenes folks), and the inspiring team at Namaste Publishing (Constance, Howard, Mary, David, Lucinda, Nora and Kathy).
The accomplishments of this small Canadian publisher knows no bounds. The Namaste Publishing team are my inspiration. Thank you for a wonderful project!
(And like in any Oscar speech, any oversights in the shout-outs are mine alone. If I’ve missed you, please announce yourself!)
Socialnomics: How social media transforms our lives and the way we do business by Erik Qualman, published by Wiley Publishing, is in bookstores and on eReaders.
In the summer of 2008 I was invited to Dallas, TX, for Portus 2008, a Harry Potter symposium by HPEF. Below is part of my presentation as the Saturday Keynote Luncheon speaker. Portus special guests also included Jim Dale, Dr. Henry Jenkins, and Edmund M. Kern. It was a great time!
My talk was specifically on podcasting in the Harry Potter community, but before talking about that, I wanted to talk about how the changes in how we interact, particularly online, over the 10-course of the Harry Potter series really changed what was possible in terms of fan connections and hype.
In their introduction Gibson and Jagger stressed that they are not social media experts, social media enthusiasts maybe. Why the strong opposition? Because they recognize that there are no more marketing gurus, only customers with megaphones.
There were a couple of other great quotes throughout the morning (none credited so if you know the source, let me know).
“If you think you’re a leader and no one is following you—you’re actually just going for a walk.”
“Social media is not a video game. It’s not about the number of followers, it’s about the quality of those followers.”
“Common sense is uncommon.”
“It’s not about the tools, it’s about the rules (of engagement).”
Both Shane and Stephen quips can be followed on twitter.
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.
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.
We spend a lot of our time helping clients get social media marketing efforts and budgets approved by the decision makers—be it board members, CEOs or upper management. Social media is still new territory and many are hesitant to jump on the social media bandwagon.
What we tell our clients is this: Social media is not a fad. It’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. If you’re not participating in social media your brand is missing out on valuable opportunities to engage with your customers or clients.
Below are some videos (via Path Marketing) to help get your boss excited about social media. It’s here, it’s here to stay and companies are having real success with it.
NOTE: Be prepared. Don’t build excitement without having a plan to move your efforts forward. Read Mashable’s 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration and have a social media marketing plan ready before you sit down with your boss.
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.
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.”\
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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