Entries tagged with “social networks” from Tools of Change for Publishing

NaNoWriMo Now Underway

Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

One of my favorite keynotes from TOC 2009 was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) founder Chris Baty. It's November, which means the annual event is now underway. Check out the website for ways to support and participate.

Twitter Scorecard for Publishers

Mike Hendrickson
May 21, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (12) | Listen

Recently Publisher's Weekly published an article The Twitter Scorecard that showed which Publishers were using Twitter. I found the piece missing key elements that would provide more insight to their question "So who is twittering, and how effectively?" I believe that if you are asking how effectively we are using Twitter, there is considerable more data needed than was presented. In my opinion, the number of Followers is not a complete measure of effectiveness. In fairness, PW did not say they were attempting to be comprehensive or complete in their scorecard, so I thought I would provide the data that is available mixed with some of my own obtained by scraping. So, I'll attempt to fill-in the scorecard a bit more.

First a note on who is behind the publisher accounts. O'Reilly as a company has oodles of Tweeters who blog about work, life, interests, etc., including @timoreilly who is nearing the half-million followers threshold. I suspect other publishers have the same army of tweeters too, but the data below is is just for the publisher account only. Oftentimes, these sort of accounts are run by PR groups in a Publishing company.

Below, you will find the same list of publishers contained in the original article with the addition of the following column headers and data:

Pub_Twitter is the Publisher account on Twitter. This list was created by PW and am not sure what the criteria was. Followers is the number of people that are following the publisher. These numbers are already off as many of these publishers have added many new followers since the original writing. I kept the same number that PW reported. Following is how many users the publisher follows. Updates is how many tweets the publisher has posted since the account was created. Content is the most popular words the publisher uses in their tweets. Url is a link to a wordle that visualizes the corpus of tweets for the publisher. At the bottom of the table, you will see All Publishers which shows averages and the link includes all words in a visual wordle.

I am thinking of making this a quarterly scorecard for 2009. Before I do that, are there meaningful and obtainable measures you would like to see added to the scorecard? What are the real measures: Sales increases? Information disseminated more efficiently and targeted? Increasing the feeling of community? What elements do you think should be measured in a Twitter Scorecard? Finally, if you are a publisher using Twitter and want to be included in future scorecards, let me know. I am mikeh {at} oreilly {dot} com or @mikehatora on Twitter.

[TOC Webcast] Social Media for Publishers

Mac Slocum
December 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Tools of Change for Publishing will host "Social Media for Publishers," a free webcast with presenter Chris Brogan, on Tuesday, Dec. 16 at 1 p.m. eastern (10 a.m. pacific).

Webcast Overview

So much of what we hear about blogging, podcasting, social networks, and the rest of the social media toolkit seems to be arbitrary, overly time-consuming, pie-in-the-sky. We might hear the occasional good strategy, but rarely do we understand how to put it into action. And how much will any of this cost you in resources and money? Meet with Chris Brogan for a not-too-techy and not-too-light dive into the world of social media from the mindset of a publisher.

Register for free.

Related:

• Why Blogging and Social Media Shouldn't be Ignored
• How Should Authors Promote Themselves Online?
• Web Publicity Grows Up, Learns the Value of Conversation
• Gaping Void: "The Porous Membrane: Why Corporate Blogging Works"

Publishers Need to Get In on the Conversation

Peter Brantley
November 19, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Kassia Krozser has a Cluetrain-like manifesto for publishers. From Booksquare:

It's time to get your hands dirty, to dig into the real-world conversation. It's a weird thing, and sometimes awkward and uncomfortable, especially if you're accustomed to public relations-speak and the cheerleader behavior that accompanies marketing messages. When you talk directly to real people who read and buy books, they tune you out when you try to stay on message. If they wanted to rehash cover copy, they'd read the back of the book.

Related Stories:

• The Cluetrain Manifesto
• Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
• Web Publicity Grows Up, Learns the Value of Conversation
• Why Blogging and Social Media Shouldn't be Ignored
• How Should Authors Promote Themselves Online?
• Target, Serve and Adapt: A Simple Model for Audience Development

Web Publicity Grows Up, Learns the Value of Conversation

Mac Slocum
October 20, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, co-authors of the upcoming book Trust Agents, share a few ideas for drumming up pre-publication interest in a title. Some of their suggestions are straight from the Web publicity playbook (ebook previews, blogging during the writing process), but they're also exploring engagement through online events and workshops -- two things that usually happen after publication.

I hadn't considered this until reading Brogan's blog post, but many social media publicity techniques aren't particularly social. Podcasts, blog posts and Facebook groups are technologically progressive, but there's a significant difference between a publicity update and an open invitation.

Twitter serves as an example here: The best Twitter users engage their audience through curated links, retweets, commentary and discussion. This stands in contrast to the auto-generated Twitter blasts employed by many media organizations (they're easy to spot -- look for the abrupt truncations).

Brogan's post -- and efforts from people like Seth Godin -- show that Web-based publicity is following the same developmental trajectory as blogging (and Twitter, although it hasn't reached puberty just yet). The top-down messaging that marks the early days of a Web effort eventually matures into a two-way conversation -- and that's when things get interesting.

Related Stories:

• Web Publicity + Free = A Fighting Chance
• Index // mb: "Why Book Publishers Should Twitter"
• What Authors Can Learn from Silicon Valley
• Podcasts and Web Promotion Boost Authors

TOC Recommended Reading

Mac Slocum
July 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Ebooks and the Iphone (Publishing Frontier)

So by selling books as $5 iPhone books instead of $7 paperbacks, the publisher makes $0.90 per book. And, of course, if the publisher charged $6.99 for the iPhone book, the numbers would be $4.89 received from Apple - $0.70 royalty - $0.05 PPB [printing, paper, binding] - $0.40 art, promotion, etc = $3.74, or a profit of $2.09 over the paper book.

Wikipedia gets fictional (Seth's Blog)

A consistent rule on Wikipedia has been to rely on edited print publications (the mainstream media) as well as physical or unchanging materials (like the DVD of a TV show). This made sense five years ago, but as the world abandons print reference (which Wikipedia largely relies on for verification), are we biasing the entries in favor of Abraham Lincoln (plenty of printed facts available) and TV series characters (we can prove that George [Costanza] worked for Vandalay Industries)?

The difference between media and comms (The Equity Kicker)

The challenge for socnets [social networks] is that people are getting bored of accumulating friends and profile hopping and there is no obvious new entertainment service to build. Hence the platform strategy.

Related:

• TOC News
• TOC Analysis and Opinion