As regular readers know, we’ve been slaving away at a book on social media marketing for about a year now. It’s coming out in August of this year, and after much negotiation, we finally have a title. Wait for it:
Friends With Benefits: Online Marketing with Blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and More
We went back and forth with the publisher for a long time. We even convened a brainstorming group of our peers to devise the perfect one. The publisher seemed to want something mundane, and we wanted something, perhaps, overly clever. We eventually agreed on this one, which I’m pretty happy with. It’s a little cheeky and memorable without trying too hard.
And Now, a Cover Image
We’ll have some input into what goes on the cover of the book. Do you have any great ideas? The publisher, No Starch Press, seems a little edgy in their cover designs, so that’s encouraging.
Let me put the kibosh on any “you and Julie in bed” ideas right now. That’s not on.
We can try out some cover ideas on FriendsWithBenefitsBook.com, which is currently just a ported version of SocialMediaReady.com, our ebook site. We’re going to leave it that way for a couple more months (to sell a few more ebooks), and then change the design to reflect our forthcoming book.
As regular readers will recall, last winter we wrote and self-published a 100-page ebook on social media marketing. In terms of our goals for the project, it’s been a success.
Thanks to Kris, we kind of accidentally met a literary agent who liked the ebook and wanted to shop it around. We wrote a (mercifully short) book proposal and the agent went to work.
Two weeks later, we had interest from No Starch Press, a San Francisco publisher with the slogan, “the finest in geek entertainment”. They have American distribution through O’Reilly Media, one of the giants of tech publishing.
We’ve since signed a contract, and have until the early fall to basically double the length of our ebook manuscript. It’s going to be a busy summer, but it’ll be cool to have a real dead-tree edition to wave around.
We’re going to change the title of the book, though we haven’t decided on the new title quite yet. We’ll probably blog more regularly on our ebook blog, writing about the process of expanding the book and possibly posting new draft material.
Last month I was contacted by the awesomely-named Shelly Banjo, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. She wanted to talk about our ebook (more news about that in the coming weeks, incidentally) and some of the other blogger relations work that Capulet has done. We had a couple of chats, and today we were included in an article about social media marketing for small businesses.
You can only see a preview without a WSJ subscription. I picked up a copy of the dead-tree edition. I’d take a photo, but I’m currently living a camera-free existence. Here’s the section that concerns us:
Others say personalizing a pitch can sometimes win a mention without participation in blog discussions. Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo recently co-authored an online book called “Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook”. To promote the book, they played to the romantic angle of the title by sending personal, hand-written letters asking 10 influential bloggers to review the book.
They enclosed each letter in a sticker-studded, perfume-scented pink envelope. In each letter, they included the address of a Web site set up just for the recipient, where the blogger would find a two-minute video message welcoming him or her to read the book. The idea was a hit: Almost every blogger wrote about the experience.
Mr. Barefoot and Ms. Szabo took another creative approach to promote a new line of printers for Brothre International Corp. (Canada) Ltd., one of their clients. To ask bloggers to review the printers, they created pitches in the form of comic strips customized for each blogger. The duo found pictures of the bloggers online and pasted the images into the strip.
“You want to be creative, but play to your strengths,” says Mr. Barefoot. “If you are a T-shirt vendor, for example, creative personalized T-shirts for each blogger.”
The article also features a slightly-tweaked version of the comic we sent to John and Rebecca. Thanks to Kris, Rebecca and Derek for their permission to use their photos (they’re credited in the article).
If you’ll forgive a little cross-promotion, I wanted to point to some recent posts on our social media marketing ebook blog. We’ve been trying to blog regularly there over the past month or two. That won’t last forever, but I wanted to build up a bit of an audience and some fodder for the search engines:
Amazon’s Top Reviewers are Influencers, Too: “If you’ve got a book on terriers, for example, don’t necessarily pitch the top reviewers. Pitch the top reviewers of pet books instead.”
Bad Blogger Relations Etiquette Misses the Target: You may have seen this hilarious Target ad before. I like how the Target PR people say that the model is “making a snow angel”. When there’s no snow, and it’s a still photo, ‘making a snow angel’ rapidly becomes ’splayed provocatively on a bullseye’.
As a follow-up report to our social media marketing ebook, I’m considering writing a report that would evaluate and compare the current social media and brand monitoring tools for the enterprise (Radian6, BuzzLogic and so forth). I need to learn more about these tools anyway, so this would be a systematic approach to a bit of professional development.
My initial research indicates that there are two sets of information about these tools: free (which is often incomplete, hard to find and shoddy) and analyst reports from Forrester and the like (very thorough, but also quite expensive).
I’m thinking of devising a 40-to-50 page ‘cheap and cheerful’ report, pricing it at about $99 and marketing it to small to medium-sized marketing agencies, and larger companies that might not have a Forrester or Gartner subscription.
What do you think? Are you aware of any such reports? Do you figure there’s a sufficient market for such a document? Any and all comments welcome.
On a personal note, I have very mixed feelings about Twitter. I’ve found that it’s kind of an Ego Distillery. Blog posts, obviously, tend to be pretty self-centered. But because Twitter is restricted to 140-characters per post, it really seems to bring out the self-importance in everyone.
Twitter asks the question “what are you doing?” I find that the answer is too often “something really important”.
That’s why I only post quotations from songs and poems in my own Twitter account. It ensures that I don’t add to my already burgeoning self-centered online presence, and my Twitter followers probably enjoy a break from the banalities of their friends and colleagues lives.
It’s slightly odd to quote myself quoting Vanessa, but I’ve been meaning to express my uneasiness with Twitter outputs on this site, and this was a handy way to do so.
Am I alone in thinking of Twitter as an Ego Distillery?
You might rightfully ask why I’m using the tool at all. And you’d be right too. Simply put, I need to keep an eye on Twitter for professional purposes. Plus, it’s a fun game to think of good quotes.
We wrote each of them a hand-written letter on pink note cards and decorated them with stickers. We used one of those silver pens that were really popular with girls when I was in elementary school. When you shake the pens, they rattle like a can of spray paint. This, obviously, was to make the letters stand out, and it jibed with the whole ‘dates and relationships’ theme of the book.
Unusual pitching strategies are a topic we cover in some depth in our book. Part of the strategy is linking to these folks, so that I can get 117 seconds of their attention. I do that on SocialMediaReady.com, and I’ll replicate that list here:
I’ll stop pimping ebook-related stuff soon, I promise. However, I did want to point to our first substantive blog post from the ebook blog. It’s an excerpt from the book, and discusses ways in which you can make your site more friendly for social media creators:
Ensure that social media creators can link to any and every page on your website. This goes double for websites with online product catalogs. Make it easy for bloggers to write, “I really love this!” and send visitors to your website. Too many sites rely on Flash or arcane organization to display their products. As a result, the URL in the address bar doesn’t reference the particular product you’re viewing.
Both these companies make great products, so we’re reluctant to pick on them, but Matt & Nat and Crumpler both have disappointing websites in this regard. Bloggers are left writing, “click ‘Products’, then scroll to the fourth bag from the right, then pick the blue one…”
I’m totally cheating by calling it “12 Ways”, but hey, the Internet loves a list. If you like the post, please consider Digging, Del.iciu.using (oy) or Stumbling it.
As I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, Julie and I have been working on an eBook. Version 1.0 is finally done, and today we’re launching it. It’s called Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook (quite a mouthful, I know), and we’ve created a dedicated website for it at SocialMediaReady.com.
I assembled (”composed” sounds way too sophisticated) the background music in GarageBand. Watching the video again, it feels kind of like a government public service announcement. “Hey kids, don’t do drugs! Do social media marketing instead!”
If you prefer text, the blurb goes something like:
If you’re a marketer in a company, agency or small business, Getting to First Base, A Social Media Marketing Playbook will show you how to market products and services through social media channels like blogs, media-sharing sites and social networks. The book provides tips, tricks and lots of real world case studies, both from our own work and our colleagues.
Social Media Creators, Review the Book
If you’re a blogger, podcaster, YouTube star or whatever, we’re more than happy to send you a free copy to review. Just email us at ebook@capulet.com and we’ll hook you up.
One of the things I struggled with in writing the book was what to call (to borrow Jay Rosen’s phrase) “the people formerly known as the audience”. We sometimes use ‘bloggers’ to stand in for everybody, sometimes use “social media creators”, which is a bit dry, and sometimes used “new influencers”, which is a bit too slick.
In any case, drop us a line and we’ll mainline you a virtual copy.
I owe a ton of friends, colleagues, clients and contributors copies of the book–they’ll be forthcoming in the near future.
Nothing Says Christmas Like Social Media Marketing
If you’re super keen to buy, great! Just visit our buy page and click the pretty red and orange button. Make the marketer or small business owner in your life extra-happy this holiday season. It’s US $29, which works out to a mere CAN $29.23. Plus, we’re donating a dollar from every book to The David Suzuki Foundation.
Other next steps for those who might be interested:
We’re just putting the finishing touches on this ebook about social media marketing. I was reviewing it today and detected a possible gap in our content around white label social networks.
Unless you’ve got lots of resources to point at it, we generally think starting your own social network is a bad idea. They’re often gleaming examples of corporate hubris (”Our customers love us so much, they’ll bring all their friends to our toilet paper-themed social network”). And even with lots of cash it can be risky. See, for example, the miserable, $20 (or $30, the jury’s still out) million failure that was Bud.TV.
Our advice is to just go where your users are–blogs, Facebook, MySpace, the extant niche networks like Cork’d or Library Thing and so forth.
Let’s assume you agree with that advice. I’m wondering if and how companies can use the quick-and-dirty ad hoc networks that Ning offers? Or should the same principle apply? I’m thinking it probably does, but I’d love to hear some divergent opinions. Understand that I’m not writing Ning off–it has plenty to offer all sorts of individuals and groups, but I’m not sure it’s a good route for companies.
The book has not, as it were, gone to the presses just yet. Of course, it’s an electronic book, but you get the idea.
