We were in the McNally Robinson bookstore in Nolita yesterday. It’s an excellent store, full of great books. As it turns out, it’s Canadian-owned (other stores are in Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Toronto) and shares a space with a tea house owned by Moby.
Inside, I noticed a couple of book-selling ideas that were new to me. Neither was particularly original, I guess, but they struck me as clever ways to repackage the dead tree tome.
The first was a series of tree thematically-linked books, pre-wrapped as a ready-made-gift. Very handy for the lazy gift buyer (and wrapper):
I also spotted these attractively-packaged bundles of a DVD and the book on which it was based:
Neither idea is earth-shattering, but if I were a book seller these seem like to handy ways to sell more product.
This, incidentally, is an ancient but still very useful marketing tactic. I’ve written about it before: visit country X, steal clever ideas and implement them in country Y.
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:
You know the rest. Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired (when did they change their website? It’s a vast improvement), has posted a rant about PR people randomly spamming him with media releases. He’s gone so far as to publish the email addresses of 329 people who have wasted his time in the last month. As you might imagine, he’s sparked a wildfire of discussion.
Good for him. There’s far too much of this useless send-release-to-a-big-list in the industry, and it needs to go away. That ol’ nugget about public relations being about relationships is 100% true. You don’t build relationships via spam, you build spite and loathing.
Could Chris have taken the high road and not posted the email addresses? Probably, but he wouldn’t have caused the subsequent, compelling conversation.
There are a ton of comments on Chris’s post, and I wanted to extract a few that resonated with me. They’re after the jump:
Concerned Albertans, including private citizens, small oil and gas companies and members of the investment community, have come together to launch this website, www.getitrightalberta.ca. The website is a result of mounting concern surrounding the recommendations contained within the Report of the Alberta Royalty Review Panel (ARRP), which appear to go beyond the original mandate of “striking a balance.”
I’m not particularly interested in discussing the royalties issue (but feel free if you have an opinion)–I want to examine the site’s questionable tactics.
There’s no indication anywhere on the site as to who these ‘concerned Albertans’ actually are. I have no problem with advocacy websites–I’ve got a couple as clients–but full disclosure is essential to becoming a legitimate part of the online debate. Who would possibly take this site seriously?
And Who’s Jim McCormick?
Exploring the site a little, I found an interview on City TV’s Breakfast Television with someone named ‘Jim McCormick’, who’s a representative of the site. The segment doesn’t disclose anything else about Mr. McCormick. Maybe all the viewers already know who he is? The interviewer asks about the people behind the site, and he replies “A lot of us, across a spectrum of professions”. Curiously satisfied with that reply, she doesn’t probe any further. That’s some incisive journalism there.
Dave did a WHOIS lookup, and determined that the site was not founded by everyday Joe Albertans, but by the folks at the Calgary office of public relations giant Hill & Knowlton. This woman in particular–Lisa Litz–registered the domain.
Shame on Hill & Knowlton–they’re a big, international agency and ought to know better. It’s underhanded, sketchy moves like this that give us marketing folks a bad name. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised–this is the same company that’s advocated for tobacco, the first war in Iraq and Scientology over the years. They have a long history of underhanded tactics.
Hill & Knowlton has a whole blogger network going. I’d really like to hear some reaction to GetItRightAlberta.ca and my post from the likes of Ian or Brendan.
For the past year, Third Tuesday/Third Monday have provided the social media community in Toronto and Ottawa with a monthly opportunity to gather, hear from great speakers and talk about new developments in social media and social software…
Several people, including Tod Maffin, Kate Trgovac, Tanya Davis, and Darren Barefoot (when he returns from his global jaunt) have said that they are willing to pitch in to make this happen.
They’re organizing the first event later this month, which I’ll attend if I’m able (I’m back in Vancouver for two weeks in August). Leave a comment on Joseph’s blog to express your interest.
I recently read three cutting critiques of marketing and advertising in Second Life. The first is by Rebecca Lieb (found via Adam):
Inhabitants of virtual worlds don’t have real-world needs. To get very far in Second Life, you do need money (in the form of Linden dollars) to buy goods, services, and property. No small quantity of the virtual currency is spent on goods and services related to virtual sex. Way-far-out-there virtual sex, and no small number of sex businesses (one of which recently changed hands for $50,000) often seem like the primary purpose of Second Life. As ClickZ columnist Ian Schafer told the “Los Angeles Times,” “One of the most frequently purchased items in Second Life is genitalia.”
Ms. Lieb refers to an LA Timesarticle, discussing some of the abandoned marketing projects littering the virtual world:
But the sites of many of the companies remaining in Second Life are empty. During a recent in-world visit, Best Buy Co.’s Geek Squad Island was devoid of visitors and the virtual staff that was supposed to be online.
The schedule of events on Sun Microsystems Inc.’s site was blank, and the green landscape of Dell Island was deserted. Signs posted on the window of the empty American Apparel store said it had closed up shop.
The site’s NBA channel, launched in February, has already garnered some 14,000 subscribers; users have posted more than 60,000 NBA videos, which have been viewed 23 million times. But over at Second Life, where an elaborate NBA island went up in May, the action has been a bit slower. “I think we’ve had 1,200 visitors,” Stern reports. “People tell us that’s very, very good. But I can’t say we have very precise expectations. We just want to be there.”
The article later suggests that such a project might have cost $500,000. So that’s, what, about $416 per visitor? Sweet. There’s so much to like in this article–Rose rightfully pokes some holes in Joseph Jaffe’s spin on empty corporate installations.
A couple of other surprising facts from Rose’s article:
“Linden Lab’s servers can handle a maximum of only 70 avatars at a time.” I gather this refers to each island, or region inside the game.
“A company can stage an in-world speaking event for as little as $10,000″. This is in the context of the cleverly-named Electric Sheep Company, a prominent, uh, virtual world presence builder. I think that’s a bit misleading, as you can run an event for a fraction of that cost if you do it yourself.
“Only about 1 million [users[ had logged on in the previous 30 days (the standard measure of Internet traffic), and barely a third of that total had bothered to drop by in the previous week. Most of those who did were from Europe or Asia, leaving a little more than 100,000 Americans per week to be targeted by US marketers.”
We’ve all had this experience: you send an email message to an organization, and you never hear back from them. It’s a story as old as the Web. Why don’t organizations respond? They typically cite excuses like resourcing, workflow and so forth.
It’s 2007, and every organization on the planet understands the limitations of email. Yet, many still publish an email address as the exclusive means of contacting them online. The most recent culprits I’ve found are BC’s property tax office and British Jet (a nightmarish organization for the customer service, incidentally).
A web form is a slight improvement, but most of these exist solely to make life easier for the organization–they reduce spam. On the back end, form queries usually just get sent by email, so the result is the same.
There is a better way. It’s simple, proven and cheap. Most of all, it makes life easier for organizations and customers, and it demonstrates a commitment to service.
I’m speaking here of the lowly support ticket system. You submit a query via a web form, and you get assigned a virtual ’support ticket’, a number which enables you to track your conversation with the company. In my experience, even the automated response is a huge reassurance. I suddenly have confidence that my issue’s in the support queue, and that it will be answered. And it usually is.
The organization gets more efficient, and can do useful things like add answers to the public knowledge base, reducing the number of future inquiries on the same topic.
World of Warcraft Europe has one. I’m sure they receive thousands of queries a day, but I got my obscure question answer in 48 hours.
There’s a zillion such systems out there, and they’re super cheap or free. They’re certainly not a panacea, but they will make your support staff more efficient. In my anecdotal experience, I’ve received far more reliable support from companies with support ticket systems than your bog-standard email address.
More importantly, they show that you actually care what your customers think. An email address, on the other hand, sends a very clear message: “bugger off, we can’t be arsed.”
I was looking for an appropriate photo to accompany this post, and happened upon this awesome one. “Help me, Obiwan, you’re my only hope!”
Then drop me a line, because I have a free, uh, non-medicinal treatment for you to try out. And boy is it fancy.
I’m helping out a colleague with a little online outreach for the REM-A-TEE anti-snore shirt (hey, I didn’t pick the name) and have a few shirts to give away in exchange for a review (positive or negative, obviously).
I snore about once a month, but haven’t done so since moving to Malta. Maybe it’s the warm Mediterranean air?
“You expect to see cameras at these things, but to see all these people with their laptops open, blogging live from the events — it was a completely different use of media than I’ve ever seen,” said Dave Howe, Sci-fi Channel exec VP-general manager.
The only show I know anything about is Battlestar Galactica. We’re currently working our way through season three, so keep your fracking spoilers to yourselves, please.
The press tour was organized by New Media Strategies. One thing they could have done better was to create a little microsite that aggregates all of the blogger’s content–photos, audio, video, blog posts–in one place. That way readers of any one attending blogger could easily access the content created by the other attendees. If they did create one, they needed to make it more findable.
It’s been my experience that when marketing people put on events for bloggers, they think exclusively of the event itself, not about the (more important, because they last much longer) digital artifacts that live on afterward.
For the last few years, local (local to Vancouver, that is) PR guru (and, tangentially, our client) James Hoggan has been publishing weekly PR tips in the Vancouver Sun. They’re pretty elementary , but still useful reminders of what to do and what not to do in the thorny world of public relations.
If You Can’t Fix it, Don’t Ask About it - A critical step in any consultation comes in conceiving the questions that you put to your audience. If you start asking for feedback on issues that you can’t – or won’t – change, you are setting them up for disappointment and yourself up for a heap of grief. So, define the parameters carefully and whatever questions you ultimately ask, be prepared to treat the answers seriously.
Public Speaking: The Risks and Rewards of Winging It - Most people have been impressed at some point in their lives by a speaker who could be scintillating off the cuff, who just seemed to grab one great idea after the other out of the air. So it’s tempting, as a presenter, to want to emulate that style. And in rare cases it could be the right thing to do if you have easy command of the material and if the risks of an error are negligible. But if the stakes are high – and you’re not completely confident – work up a prepared text. Even if you memorize it and only refer to it for prompts, the discipline may save you from making a serious mistake.
That’s a big schwack of tidbits. Some are less useful than others (do we really need tips on ‘a winning wardrobe’?) but the majority are worth reading. Especially, as Glenn Kelman recently recommended, if you want to do your PR DIY-style.
