The Chameleon Net blog

Are publishers getting the most out of social media?

danm@chameleonnet.com (Dan Martin) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:53:25 GMT

In case you missed it, here’s my article that appeared in the 5th February issue of the Bookseller, entitled ‘The Long Game’:

There is an interesting discussion taking place at the moment on how useful social media is as a marketing tool for those in the book trade.

While many in the sector feel that the potential of sites such as Twitter and Facebook to fuel sales of books is limited, others see social networking playing a huge role in publishers’ and booksellers’ marketing strategies.

Many readers agree with this latter view, with many having acted – and spent money – as a result of recommendations made across the social networks.

One crucial factor that is extremely important in this equation is that social media is a communications mechanism in which you can have a constructive dialogue with people. Sales and marketing impact can be a consequence of an effective social media engagement strategy. That is to say, sales and marketing results are a secondary, but still very much ‘real-world’, effect of social engagement.

Fortunately what most people on both sides of the debate recognise is that social media as a marketing channel is still in its infancy. Couple this with the fact that technologies, particularly those that integrate different channels, support digital products, and are based on mobile devices, are still young, and what you have is a vibrant and constantly evolving environment.

The challenge of influence
As many brand owners now recognise, social media has deprived them of the ability to reliably control the conversation. No longer can they dictate the agenda as they could with TV, radio, press ads and the first generation of websites. One of the first rules of embracing social media is to acknowledge, and embrace, this loss of control.

At first glance, the social media landscape appears as a bewildering array of separate channels offering access to distinct audiences. Your average Twitter user, we are told, is older and more likely to be male than his Facebook counterpart, though the age gap is closing. Bebo and Piczo by comparison are significantly more popular than Facebook amongst the under-18s. Within these communities a range of forums, groups, fan pages and other facilities is to be found, allowing like-minded individuals to connect and share their views on a range of interests.

Participating in – and influencing - these threads, as well as contributing to conversations taking place on one’s own website, is a challenge for even the most assiduous of online marketers in the publishing sector. Even more disturbing is the potential risk that something might go wrong in the communication, making the community turns on its host.

The publisher, with its access to authors, critics, readers and the wider public, is in an ideal position to build and place itself at the hub of this resource. One way to mobilise this advantage is to create a distinct online destination that enables conversations about authors and publications taking place across the internet, and externally-created user generated content, to be brought into a single site.

We are increasingly seeing organisations appoint Community Managers, staff occupying a role that encapsulates a participation-rich model of interaction where book clubs, blogging and forum discussion can all be steered by the Publisher. This role fits perfectly with such ‘destination sites’.

And far from competing with the established channels such as Facebook and Twitter, your sites can connect and draw content in from them. This enables readers to stay a part of, and post content at, the sites they are most comfortable with and still be part of the conversation on your site. It is also possible, meanwhile, to create a social media environment within an existing website that connects to social network sites in a way that’s appealing and seamless to readers, for instance by allowing them to log into your site with their Facebook credentials.

The idea of a social media focal point, either within your main site or as a separate destination site, creates opportunities for publishers and booksellers of all sizes to get closer to their target audiences, develop brand identity and grow their online presence. For publishers, it also re-invigorates their original role – that of a creative selector, an authoritative commentator, a lens for talent – something that is hard to find amongst the sheer quantity of content that exists online.

And it doesn’t need to be prohibitively expensive. Many publishers have already invested in interactive functionality within their websites – and many more are gearing up to do so in the knowledge that the initial outlay will generate valuable dividends, and be offset by repeated PR campaigns in support of an extensive backlist and constantly flowing number of new publications.

Linkage
None of which means, of course, that publishers should abandon their existing activities on social media sites. Quite the contrary: the interactive element to their own sites will benefit from the linkage between their presence on Facebook, Twitter, LastFM, Bebo, You Tube.

All of which means that, a concerted social media strategy, supported by your own tailored web presence, offers an excellent way to bring authors and readers closer together - with the publisher and/or bookseller at the heart of the dialogue.

And a final cautionary word - it is, however, a mistake to expect an immediate and direct increase in sales as a result of engagement. Consider engagement the initial goal and decide how much you value it. Using interactive channels to show a human face, join in conversations, get to know communities and add value to users’ experiences takes time. The rewards however, such as trust, customer loyalty, consolidated brand positioning and the resulting sales uplift are similarly long term.

Necessity is the mother of invention for Higher Ed

danm@chameleonnet.com (Dan Martin) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:19:37 GMT

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce)’s announcement that £449m is to be slashed from university budgets this year has led to much debate about the impact that cost-cutting measures will have on individual HEIs and the sector as a whole. It's certainly on the lips of most of the people in HE I've met in the past month or so.

Anyone working in HE will understand that each University is very much a unique institution even when compared with its peers. So likewise every institution faces a unique challenge in surviving the cut. Some are being forced to make redundancies and consider closing departments; others are increasingly asking postgraduates to double as lecturers.

The Guardian recently reported Newcastle University is dealing with the cuts by increasing their number of overseas students, some of whom pay up to £14,000 a year for their education. It's certainly an area where there is more flexibility for UK Unis in increasing their income, and an area Chameleon Net has been working in for the last year or two. What's more it contributes to the balance of UK, EU and overseas students that make universities cosmopolitan, diverse and thriving places.

If times are going to get tougher, it’s clear to me that universities will need to innovate in order to succeed. And connecting with prospective and existing students, wherever they may be, can be achieved in so many different ways. We can see this happening in relatively simple ways across the sector. For instance, City University London’s website has a plethora of options about how to interact with the university all displayed on their home page; City has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, as well as providing RSS news feeds.

So putting more energy into web experience and social engagement can open up alternative avenues for recruitment; especially useful if it also allows you to cut down spend in other areas. An HE contact of mine whispered some taboo words the other day - 'You know, I think this might be the year we reduce our prospectus print run and do more online'. Times they are a-changing alright!

But it's not just about costs. Creating a good impression with prospective undergraduates and getting them engaged are major benefits; online tools can enhance the student experience and make existing undergraduates’ lives easier. For example, mobile sites, social networking accounts and an optimized, interactive website all work to improve communications, and give students a greater sense of community and belonging. And better communication always helps organizations to run more efficiently.

Speaking of efficiency, the digital world also has a big role to play in significantly reducing administration costs. Online student portals, e-submissions and e-marking could help to streamline the assessment process in some cases, while automated processes and better-connected online systems can help deal with incoming applicant traffic during, say, clearing. These are just some ideas I’ve been batting about with my friends in the higher education sector. They might not work for everybody - as I said early on, each Uni is different - but at the heart of all this is the opportunity to re-think what you currently do, and relish the challenge to explore new and different ways of doing things.

Because unfortunately, it’s often not until we’re financially squeezed that we start finding more clever and creative ways to do what really matters.

Books vs eBooks: a war of distraction

jeremyd@chameleonnet.com (Jeremy Davis) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:23:47 GMT

There is of course much debate, discussion and discourse in publishing circles about the importance and impact of eBooks. As ever with breakthrough developments, opinion is mostly polarised, as exemplified by an event I attended a while back for publishers entitled “Digitise or Die”. On the one hand we have those who believe that eBooks represent the future of books (“content” seems such a cold word to use) – an opportunity for publishers to find new markets and new profits, and an opportunity for more people to read, to digest, to think, which at the end of the day is what literature is all about, isn’t it? An opportunity to continue the democratisation of knowledge that began with Gutenberg nearly 600 years ago.

Without doubt Gutenberg’s invention changed the world and the experience of human beings in that world. At the time that he was putting the final touches to his printing press Cambridge University library consisted of 122 books. Reading, and therefore knowledge, but also I would argue to a large extent, thinking, were the preserve of the elite, and mostly the clerical elite at that.

Within 60 years of the first printing press, the entire classical canon had been printed. Ordinary people learnt to read. Everyone had access to ideas. Cambridge University library today has more than 7 million books.

Now, the information in the above paragraph came from books. Some of it was aggregated and edited for me by the folk at Wikipedia. I was able to visit them, not in person but of course via the internet. I was able to find it quickly because someone wrote an algorithm that allowed me to search all that knowledge in less than 1 second. Very handy. But a replacement for books..?

On the other hand of course we have those who position themselves as the defenders of the book - they see digital as an unwanted by-product of technological change; an assault on the rich contribution that that form has made to our world that should, but probably can’t, be repelled; that there is something inherently more valuable in a book than an eBook. An eBook cannot replace the tactile, personal and perhaps beautiful experience of reading a well-crafted book.

I think this polarisation of opinion is artificial and a red herring. I think it has seduced people away from the real question, and the real opportunity, that digital presents, that is: “What is possible with digital that was not possible before?”

Before Gutenberg, our culture was rich with the oral tradition of story-telling and some mourn that loss. But I suspect those people have a very romantic view of what life was like for most people in 1440. I very much doubt that ordinary people happily spent evening after evening sat around fires, enjoying the telling of stories, thanking their lucky stars that they had the chance to spend such quality time together. I suspect life was generally much harder than that (if you were lucky to make it to adulthood) and that whilst ignorance may be blissful, this was a world in which the vast majority of people had no opportunity to engage with the ideas of their time and so no opportunity to benefit from those ideas or participate in the development of their culture. They were ghettoised.

The book did not make the spoken language obsolete. It made possible that which was not possible before – engagement and participation on a huge scale: a huge shift towards equality of access to knowledge and ideas. And our culture has been immeasurably richer for it. Einstein, who was taught at home for many years and was not enrolled at a University in 1905, but was a clerk at a patent office who studied out of hours, in that year sent his paper, entitled “The Theory of Special Relativity”, to a magazine in the hope they would publish. The rest is history and human thinking was changed forever and can never go back. This could only have happened in an era of relatively easy access to books.

So for me, the argument is not books vs eBooks. It is about what digital can make possible. To see an eBook as simply the digital form of a book is to miss the point, and the possibilities, entirely.

For me, reading a good book is not an experience that can be replaced wholly by an eBook. There is something that can happen in the clear, clean simplicity of the space between reader and author that only books can really provide: it is a function of the black text on white paper, no distractions, no power other than my eyes and my fingers, and the feel of the book in my hands. It’s not just about the “content” for me.

Digital cannot compete with this experience for me, but that’s not what I want. Digital offers the opportunity to create something entirely new: the elegant combination of text, image, audio and video, all in one medium. It can add to my experience of the book or the author. It can update me, connect me to others. It’s not just about the content: it’s about what else can be done.

I was recently on holiday and got the chance to read a good book from beginning to end: Iain M Banks. Yes, I love Sci-fi and for those of you who don’t know, Iain M Banks is one of the best in the genre. The stories are complex, intelligent, incredibly detailed and very other-worldly.

At the end of this excellent book there was a written interview with Iain Banks about himself, his politics, the world of his books, etc. I turned the pages avidly, desperate for more information about the man and this world I had inhabited for more than a week. Man, what a letdown! It barely scratched the surface – it was like having fillet steak for dinner and then getting half a Cream Cracker for dessert.

Would I have rather read the book as an eBook? No. Did I want invitations for what else I could do or have? Yes. Would I pay a fiver for a year’s access to exclusive online material about the world of the books (or better still get it for free in exchange for my contact details)? Absolutely! Would I have downloaded (and happily paid for) an app with author voiceover there and then? For sure! Would I have checked out a forum about the books? Registered for information about his next book? Would I be interested in work by similar authors? The opportunity to ASK HIM QUESTIONS?!?! Yes, yes , yes! But what did I get? 6 pages of brutally edited interview that offered me nothing of the detail so evident in his books. And this is Sci-Fi!

Now, some of this stuff is available at the author’s personal website, but the Publisher has virtually nothing. A single, short paragraph about the author that barely makes it into the first 5 pages of Google for a search on his name.

So, I think the Publishing world will soon divide between those who embrace digital and pioneer its possibilities and those who get stuck in the trenches of an imaginary, myopia-inducing war that will drain them dry.

For those in the former camp, it will take vision, commitment and investment.

The signs are already out there – see Enhanced Editions’ app for “The Death of Bunny Munro” and of course Apple’s iPad and iBook store could make a huge difference.

Also, see the new MP3 format, MusicDNA, which allows music files to carry up 32Gb of additional information, including video, lyrics and additional songs and dynamically updates with anything new. Apple’s iTunes LP format is similar.

All these are not about competing directly with the old format but about creating something new. Adding value.
Oh yes, if you’re in the latter camp, well, just keep doing what you’re doing. After all, it’s good to be busy.

Is the future of the book written in the iPad?

chris@chameleonnet.com (Chris Thorn) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:26:39 GMT

Although the iPad is surely going to be a popular way to watch video, play games, surf the web etc., what I am really interested in is what it means for the future of the book.

eBook readers have been slowly been gaining ground, but with the iPad and iBooks store, eBooks take another leap forward. Although ebooks are available from multiple online retail points, Apple's major centralised ebooks store is the first to present a genuine challenge to Amazon. Five of the six major publishing houses - Penguin, Harper-Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette Book Group - have signed up to iBooks. Random House is the lone major yet to sign up. Also unlike Amazon, Apple has embraced the open ePub format, bringing an industry standard closer to fruition, which is bound to knock down another barrier to widespread adoption of using electronic devices to read books.

Therefore, there can be little doubt that over the next five to ten years, there will be a major shift in developed countries from the printed word to the electronically created word! More than this, Jobs says that the iPad can read colour photos and video. Therefore, the nature of books themselves could change, and the distinctions between media categories and formats blur; you can imagine a cooking eBook containing a video of the celebrity chef making the recipe along with a link to the chef’s website; or a gardening book containing a video of Alan Titchmarsh in action. Maybe new hybrid formats might appear in fiction as well softening the line between film, books and on-line resources.

But before I get too carried away, we will have to wait to see what the reading experience on the iPad is like. After all, the eBook movement has been underpinned by the development of non-backlight, high contract screens using technology like eInk, which is why products like the Barnes & Noble nook use two screens - one eInk screen for reading and a small LCD touchscreen for navigation.
So the jury is out, but whether the iPad is as hugely popular as the iPod and iPhone or not, one thing we know for sure is that the electronic “book” is here to stay and there is no going back!

Blue Skies and White Clouds - The PA’s ebook strategies event

danm@chameleonnet.com (Dan Martin) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:03:49 GMT

Earlier today I attended the Publishers’ Association’s ‘Blue Skies and White Clouds’ event focusing on key issues that will shape publishers’ ebook and digital content strategies.

In a sector experiencing (positive) turbulence in both the technology and business models (to coin the phrase of Mark Carden who was on one of the discussion panels) it’s really encouraging to see such clarity of thought and appetite for change.

The message from the PA in advance was that the event – the latest in the series of ‘digital publishing fora’ organised by the PA – had become more popular than expected. In fact it had to be moved to a larger venue, and the reason for that was clear walking into the room. There was a high turnout of professionals from the book trade, all keen to hear and share opinions on the future of ebooks and digital content. There is no doubt that digital products represent an area of acute interest and are a key element in publishers’ future consumer propositions.

Represented in the speakers roster were major publishers – the likes of Random House, Pan Macmillan, Hachette, Bloomsbury, Taylor & Francis, HarperCollins all played key roles – but also consultants and suppliers to the sector like Ingrams, Adobe and Sony, those from other creative industries such as Simon Waldman (@waldo) of the Guardian and Bertrand Moullier of Narval, and consumer representatives – in particular the RNIB.

Key points

So what was the thrust of the morning? Sara Lloyd from Pan Mac summarised concisely in the final panel that consumers want to be at the centre of the equation with a quick and simple product experience, and that to achieve this the sector faces technology challenges (agreeing open standards, using ‘The Cloud’) and organisational challenges (coupling discrete innovation projects with more fundamental business transformation).

The latter point on transformation interested me, as it did @waldo in his keynote. The wider sector needs to see the bigger players changing their models and working practices in order to foster the market for the products so everyone can benefit. Is there the appetite for such change within large businesses during a time of technology shift and economic instability? I quizzed the panel during the Q&A and there was a distinct optimism…

Fionualla Duggan of Random House gave a useful viewpoint that US ebook successes have provided a good level of enthusiasm for the potential for the UK market, but also made a very sensible point that there needs also to be transformation within the overall infrastructure that supports publishers. We can’t expect publishers to do it all alone.

David Roth-Ey of HarperCollins and George Walkley of Hachette gave an equally useful, but different and more granular slant. They felt that transformation can and should be woven into the fabric of the entire business so everyone involved in making books thinks ‘digital’ in some way, shape or form in their daily work.

Great to hear such optimistic messages from digital advocates at leading publishers.

What else?

So any other ‘take-homes’? Well yes, lots, but I’ll try to be brief…

Keynotes

In the first keynote, Simon Waldman gave us many reasons to be excited about ‘creative disruption’, and used his experiences in the news sector as evidence. Destablising, yes. But ultimately just a different way of doing things, more effectively and for everyone’s benefit. And also inescapable if that’s where consumers want to go, so putting our heads in the sand is unlikely to prove a successful strategy.

In the second keynote we heard from Bertrand Moullier on the lessons learned by the movie biz, and how we might speculate about different revenue models. The overall message I got from this was – don’t rule anything out, do what works for the product and the market. He also made a really good point about how premium products can degrade fast and become discounted back catalogue items. The book trade should take note and seek to establish long-term content strategies around key products.

Consumer Experience

In the Consumer Experience panel session, Marek Vaygelt from YouGov seemed like he didn’t have ‘making friends’ on his agenda, but I don’t think he was looking to alienate the trade either. He was simply straight-talking as far as I could tell. He claimed that the sector's market research could be improved and that devices are still the domain of the technology early adopters, which doesn’t yield mass market consumer experiences. Fair enough.

Tom Reynolds, author of “Blood, Sweat and Tea” advocated the goodwill and sales potential attached to a Creative Commons licence on content. This will go down well with those who feel content in general should be free, but I think more importantly this bears out the potential to use free content to enhance a commercial offering.

According to a colleague I chatted to after the event, Adobe clearly showed, to those ‘in the know’, that they are actively interested in conversations with publishers about more than strict DRM – social DRM and watermarking were mentioned as possibles. Personally, I definitely feel those latter areas hold a lot of appeal, for the right products and markets of course.

Richard Orme from RNIB discussed how digital content can have a very positive effect on accessibility for partially sighted and blind people, and that his organisation is very willing to work with the sector to advance this issue.

Supply Chain for Digital Products

Supply chain can be a bit of a dry subject, but it’s of crucial importance to digital content. This panel session held a lot for the audience. It was good to see it wasn’t just a sales pitch for the ePub standard (despite this being a perfectly good standard imho btw) with some of the pros and cons touched upon.

One notable point was made by Santiago de la Mora from Google, who brought the benefits of ‘The Cloud’ to the table, and the reach it can deliver. Mark Carden though was sure to make sense of what can seem an intangible notion by proposing there is no such thing as The Cloud; in reality it’s really just a network of brands, services and repositories. Technically correct, but not quite such a glamorous description, no?

I thought a particularly salient point from this session was given by Ben Drury, CEO & Founder of 7Digital, saying (and this is my précis) that a great way to combat piracy in supply is simply to offer a great product and service.

Good stuff, more please…

The PA, the digital directors group, and the contributors should be commended for organising and supporting such useful events for a sector in need of a common direction, and quality peer advice on how to progress in what is a new era for the content they provide. The PA obviously has its finger on the pulse of how they support their members and help to propagate market confidence in digital products.

Twitter hashtag: #paevents

My twitter ID: @danm605

data.gov.HOORAY

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:51:37 GMT

Today marks a watershed moment in UK government digital policy. With the launch of data.gov.uk, the government has instantly become more accountable, more transparent and more democratic. Finally the huge amount of data generated by the public sector has being harnessed in such a way that it becomes of real use to citizens like you and me, through the medium of web-based apps.

Data.gov.uk will host a growing number of datasets covering all aspects of public sector performance. These can be used to:

Build web applications that make useful information accessible and relevant to anyone.
Examine the performance of public sector services both nationally and regionally.
Create visualisations that accurately illustrate how social issues affect different areas and groups across the UK.

Data Visualisation has been a tactic I’ve been advocating to clients throughout 2009. In a world where we are all bombarded with information on a constant basis, visualising large amounts of data in one diagram can often help you cut through the noise around your chosen subject and instantly get your audience to understand your point.

Here’s an example: how confused are you about the differences between the parties in the upcoming election? Most people can grasp that the biggest issue facing the economy is our national deficit and how to cut it, but if you were to listen to Brown, Cameron and Clegg waffle on about “real terms increases” and “public spending efficiency savings” it would take you a fair while to work out what their real policies were. Instead, why not look at the visualisation below culled from party policy documents? It certainly helped me get a clearer idea of who I’d vote for.

The other great reason for making this data public is the applications it can power. The government has realised it will make more progress by crowdsourcing the development of these rather than by paying for them to be built. Some great examples such as ‘PlanningAlerts’ already appear on data.gov.uk, and some other ideas of ways to use government data can be found here.

Credit to MPs like Richard Allan and Tom Watson who pushed for this sort of approach to be adopted by the civil service and have worked to make it a reality. With this agenda receiving nothing but rave reviews from the tech media and now also mainstream outlets, it’s not hard to envisage a world 5 years from now in which open data (not just from government but from private companies as well) shapes news stories, informs our everyday decisions and allows real political dividing lines to be drawn for all to see on the issues of the day.

Releasing datasets, doing data visualisation and building apps are all great ways of driving online PR and building inbound links to your site: this has obvious knock-on benefits for SEO etc. Get in touch if you want to know more.

BBC blog on the same topic here

Top Tips For Charity Digital Marketers: Jan 2010

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:54:16 GMT

Two weeks into the New Year and already Christmas feels a lifetime ago. For many marketers, January is a quiet month, with conventional wisdom saying that apart from a few obvious products (gym memberships, savings accounts etc) acquisition / sales will be average at best given the previous months gluttony.

However, January is a really exciting month for charity marketers, especially those dedicating time and resource to the web. We run the pay-per-click search advertising for several charities, and we always see an uplift in the number of donations made in the weeks following 1st January. These conversions will usually originate from a brand keyword search, or a search on the issue your charity is associated with, suggesting that these January donors are aware of who you are and / or what you do, and have been triggered by the passing of the New Year to give you some cash. Whether this is driven by Christmas guilt or a desire to start a new year on the right foot matters little, what matters is that as a charity you take advantage of it.

Here’s our top tips:

Defer December spend: that Christmas campaign you were thinking of running? Save it! People are stressed, busy, preoccupied and generally frazzled in the run up to Christmas. Your message may achieve greater penetration and be afforded more thought in the New Year

Target your warm leads: cross reference the following:

newsletter subscribers
people who’ve signed your petitions
people who have fundraised for you
people who have sponsored your fundraisers

with your list of regular givers. Those people that aren’t giving via direct debit are a good group to target with email, social networking or even offline material around the 1st January.

Ramp up your PPC budget for the month and spend it effectively: Have you checked your AdWords scheduling recently? Do you know if your daily budget enables your ads to be shown 24 hours a day? Do you use bid adjustment to spend your budget at the most profitable times of day? Failure to do these things may mean your organisation misses out on a great deal of potential regular givers through a lack of visibility in search results.

For many charities, January will be a peak time for getting people to sign up to do various fundraising events in 2010. The London Marathon is one particularly lucrative opportunity. As a result however, competition in search results amongst charities is extreme. First page bid estimate for “2010 London marathon” in Adwords right now is $1.25, and $1.50 for “london marathon charity”. Maybe 1 in 100 people who clicked on your ad for that term would download an application, so now is the time to investigate the long tail of keywords for events like this, especially if your budget is not very big. Keyword research should inform not only your PPC campaigns but also SEO. Whilst there is little point aiming for a top 3 spot in the “London Marathon” SERP, you could get a real win optimising around “run the London Marathon for charity”.

Finally, a word on improving website performance, with special regard to acquiring regular givers. Recent research shows that the way you present amounts of money on your site affects the number of people who convert. 3 price formats were tested in the study:

Dollars and cents numerical format with a dollar sign ($00.00)
Numerical format without a dollar sign (00.)
Scripted or written-out prices (zero dollars).

It was found that adopting option 2 led to significantly more acquisition. Even if you have the most convoluted CMS, testing this would not be a great deal of work. We recommend trying an A/B test using Google Website Optimiser if you want to improve your site's performance: delivering a percentage increase in donations would be great way to start your organisation’s year!

Of course, our top tip is to get in touch with Chameleon Net if you think we could help you with search marketing or website improvement!

The Publishers, the Internet and the new Decade

rossm@chameleonnet.co.uk (Ross Miles) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:42:02 GMT

In 2010 publishers everywhere are facing challenges to their business models as the power of the internet spreads. In its simplest form it is purely a case of old meets new. Traditional print media is struggling to adapt to the digital revolution.

One such battleground is the controversy about Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM is intended to protect the intellectual property from unlawful distribution, but it also restricts what devices can use the content to only those that have been authorised. One outspoken critic of DRM is ZDNet’s David Berlind who prefers the acronym C.R.A.P (Content, Restriction, Annulment, and Protection) as it limits cross platform/device sharing, which has the knock on effect of preventing its spread via word-of-mouth and viral marketing.

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp and Sky News, stands on the other end of the spectrum and is currently waging war against search engines, but most vocally he is railing against Google, about the free distribution of ‘paid-for’ content online. He sees the distribution of News Corps content, for free by Google News and similar services as “stealing” and has set June 2010 as the date for the removal of all content from Google.

While the pros and cons of DRM continue, other publishers are looking on how to embrace and enrich their content for a more tech savvy audience. The development of eBooks and eReaders is one such area being led by Amazon’s Kindle but other devices are being announced, such as the Newspaper & Magazine friendly Skiff Reader and the Cool-er eReaders with 3G and WiFi connectivity in the wake of Random House announcing $23m in eBook sales off the back of selling 100,000 copies of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. There is however one hurdle to overcome with eBooks and that is the ability to turn smartphones such as iPhones and Android devices (and their increasing screensizes and fast internet connectivity) into eReaders through a simple download.

Smartphones are helping some magazine publishers engage their consumers on a whole new level. Before I go on, does :CueCat ring any bells? 10 years ago, as the last decade started, magazine publishers such as Forbes and Wired were sending :CueCat devices to all their readers so they could interact with the specially printed barcodes in their magazines. As it happens the technology didn’t take off due to the fact the :CueCat barcode readers needed a user to be sitting next to their internet-ready computers whilst they read the magazine, which limited its usefulness so much so that Gizmodo voted the :CueCat the Worst Gadget of the Decade. Fast forward 10 years to the present day where smartphones exist and free to download barcode scanners are some of the most oft-used items and the field of play has changed...

In their March issue Esquire magazine will be using barcodes as part of a feature entitled “30 items a man would need to get through life” in order to give further ‘styling advice’ to consumers interested in the products shown on the page. Other magazines such as Everyday Food, Entertainment Weekly and Star Magazine have used SpyderLynk’s SnapTag technology to engage with readers with more basic phones. The concept is that the reader uses the phone’s camera to take a picture of the SnapTag and then txt or e-mail it to a specified address to receive more information. This method is a little more convoluted possibly but does not require a consumer to download anything or be connected to the internet.

Also in March 2010 InStyle Magazine will use actual photos of clothing items themselves, held up to webcams, as triggers for 3D videos to load and help readers to put outfits together. Although the presentation of the enhanced information will still be atheistically pleasing (no black outlines or barcodes necessary) the magazine reader WILL need to be next to a computer with a webcam, which was part of the problem with the aforementioned :CueCat. (*Google Goggles is a ground-breaking, but very new, image search functionality that may eventually eliminate any need for unique identifiers*). The December 2009 issue of Esquire saw the publisher use the increasingly popular ‘WOW-factor’ of Augmented Reality (AR) to enhance reader experiences on the front cover, in the fashion pages and others as the publishing industry has begun to wake up to the digital challenges of the 21st century.

The use of barcode scanners on smartphones is a technology already well embedded in Japan where QR codes (another form of barcode) are prevalent in everyday life; on taxis, in magazines, on billboards and even on t-shirts so when you see someone wearing one you like, you can quickly order your own! It is also becoming more common in the Western Hemisphere too as its functionality is included in Mobile Apps for eBay (scan a regular barcode and then see if the item is listed on eBay), Amazon (scan a barcode and search for similar items on Amazon) and Calorie Counter (scan barcode and get all nutritional information for the food/drink) to name a few.

So with the numbers of smartphone users skyrocketing and technology such as AR, portable internet devices and barcode scanning apps becoming more ingrained into society, why is print media still just that, printed media? I’m one of those people that does like to hold a tangible item such as a book or magazine when reading, rather than gleaning my information from a computerized version or website, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to experience a greater level of interactivity or immersive content! Publishers need to be less scared of protecting their content and more concerned with engaging their consumers!

‘Tis the season to be social

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:26:34 GMT

This week will go down as another milestone in the development of social media, with a major news story being shaped by hundreds of thousands of web users across popular networking sites.

Unless you live under a particularly well hidden rock, you’ll know that right now, across the nation, a campaign is being waged to ensure that “Killing In The Name” by Rage Against The Machine is Christmas #1, and that “Geordie Jer Mcelderry” and his X Factor overlords are left crying into their turkey dinners.

The scale of this challenge is worth thinking about: The X Factor final was watched by 18 million people. Mcelderry’s record should clear 500K copies this week, as the faceless masses up and down the nation rush to buy “wor Jer” for their Nan. Other record companies like Universal, with endless resources, don’t even bother to compete.

So how have a husband and wife team managed to mobilise around 1 million people and leave the most powerful man in music helpless?

• Audience - Tracy & Jon are tapping into a rich seam of support; those that Tommy Morello called “the silent majority”, who dislike the constant stream of manufactured pop X Factor spawns. Brits have always loved an underdog, and many people find the arrogance of the X Factor winner expecting a #1 reason enough to get behind an alternative. The group’s core is urban, young, and in the main educated, loyal to music outside of pop, and are perfect for amplifying the campaign’s message as they are extremely social literate.

• Community - The inclusiveness of the campaign allowed it to develop momentum. Most people will join the facebook group before downloading, and the activity of this group clearly communicates the “wonderful dose of anarchy” RATM4XMAS represents (e.g. “just went to HMV and hid all the copies of Joe’s single”). You’re not just downloading a record, but being a co-conspirator.

• Product - Whilst the song might not be “Christmassy” enough, its popularity proves how good a choice it was. The infamous final refrain is a perfect rallying cry for the target audience, and it’s been popular with fans of alternative music for nearly 20 years - meaning a large potential support base. The juxtaposition of KITN and “The Climb” by Mcelderry is almost hilarious - listen to them back to back and try not to snigger. Finally, by linking up with homeless charity Shelter, RATM4XMAS exhibits a softer side and broadens its appeal and advocacy base dramatically.

The tactics which have naturally occurred in a group this dedicated are staggeringly sophisticated. Here’s a few I’ve observed:

• Reputation management: constant messages are posted reminding people about messaging should they get on radio or TV, many of these read like a set of brand guidelines.

• Crowdsourced marketing collateral: banners, profile ribbons, videos, posters, tee shirts, email copy; you name it; someone’s created it! A huge collective body of marketing material now exists, with specific messaging for different target groups, and is distributed across various platforms round the web.

• Buzz monitoring: The Facebook group’s wall reads like a newsfeed on the campaign - each new TV appearance, radio phone in or article is seized upon, including the already infamous “radio 5 incident”. Unhelpful or critical articles are quickly highlighted and people head off to register their disapproval at source.

• Online PR: Journalists and radio / tv presenters email addresses are added to the wall regularly and members are encouraged to get in touch with these people, urging them to spread the word through their shows or columns.

• Measurement and forecasting: several members have taken it upon themselves to research past Christmas chart battles and armed with this information plus current sales figures have forecast the trend in sales for both records until Saturday - for instance recent years have shown a surge on Saturday mornings in single sales and action is already being mobilised to counter this.

• Social optimisation: members are encouraged to use the share facility to ensure that the campaign appears in as many users feeds as possible.

• Focus on conversion rate: the ratio of group members to download sales is under constant scrutiny, with the groups profile photo currently geared to make members who haven’t shelled out yet do so. Active members use white label message content to send reminder messages to random group members about the need to buy the song.

Whatever happens on Sunday (here’s hoping Rage win out!) it’s clear this Facebook campaign represents a watershed moment in the battle for dominance between two marketing channels: TV and the high street vs. collaborative social networks.

So if you’re looking to improve or launch a social engagement strategy, you could do worse than learn from the elements that make up Jon and Tracy Morter’s success.

Effective Tweeting Made Easy

rossm@chameleonnet.co.uk (Ross Miles) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:58:25 GMT

As I have grown more accustomed to Twitter I have created a way of managing what I am doing to maximise what I can get out of this short-messaging system and this blog post is intended to share that with you... and to throw in a few handy tips on best practice too!

The first and foremost thing for effective tweeting is a 3rd party app that allows you to tweet from your desktop. For me this is important as the website itself is a little clunky and limited in what it can display for you at any one time. Running a dedicated Twitter app from your desktop makes it easy to access and manage. My own personal favourite app is Tweetdeck, but it has a worthy rival in Seesmic Desktop. You can check out a comparison of the two here by Mashable. There are plenty of other clients out there such as Twhirl and Digsby that also do a great job, which can all be found at this handy wiki: Twitter Apps Wiki.

The reason I choose Tweetdeck originally was the ability to see all my tweets, @replies and DMs on one screen and be able to filter in/out certain search terms. This is still an extremely useful function that I use all the time, but the functionality of Tweetdeck in general as multiplied many times over! It now supports multi-account sign-in, the ability to update Facebook and MySpace, URL shorteners, organisation features via group creation, not to mention text translation options and spam reporting. Tweetdeck has quickly become the most powerful and popular 3rd party app for a reason...

One of the main problems people find with Twitter is how to process all the incoming tweets and still be a valuable contributor yourself. It is easy to get washed away in a tide of information, some of it relevant, plenty of it not. Rule 1 here I’d say is DO NOT just auto-follow people who follow you. There are a lot of junk/spam accounts out there. It is not a social faux pas to not follow someone back! My method is to quickly skim over the latest tweets and profile of anyone who has followed me and make a quick decision on if I want to follow them myself. Rule 2 is that setting up auto-DMs for new followers is a bad idea. People can tell they are not genuine. Those using auto-DMs and auto-follow are concerned with their number of followers. It is much more important, in my opinion, to have quality, not quantity, when it comes to twitter. Another tip I think worth noting is to have separate accounts for tweeting about work and/or personal musings. My love of American Football and discussion of the St Louis Rams has no place on my work account and I’m sure 99% of my followers would not be interested in receiving tweets about them. On the flipside, I don’t think my fellow NFL enthusiasts want to hear about Digital Rights Management and eBooks. It is a slightly grey area in some ways as you do want your ‘work’ Twitter account to have a personal side to it so you do not seem robotic link machine. The best way to do this is engage followers, RT their tweets and @reply and comment when you see fit. You can manage both accounts easily from within Tweetdeck these days which makes this very easy to manage.

As mentioned above I think it is far more important to focus on quality Tweople that you find interested and useful, rather than blanket following anyone who mentions your brand, industry or product etc... If you do find yourself in a position of following thousands of Twitterers you need to start really managing the information you will be receiving. Jesse Newhart’s HOW TO video here really helped me understand how to use Tweetdeck to keep on top of the torrent of tweets. I would note this video is several months old now and Tweetdeck has been massively upgraded and re-tooled since then, but the general principles still apply and can be used to great effect.

Once you have begun to tweet regularly and have built up a follower base you should use Tweetdeck’s group creation functionality to help organise the incoming follow of information. By creating separate columns showing tweets from a group of pre-defined users it makes it a lot easier to scan for relevant tweets. For example I have separate groups created for my work colleagues, target sectors and clients. If I want to know what people in the Publishing industry I follow are tweeting about its easy to scroll down and see etc...

So now you have a desktop Twitter client, a value-adding network of friends and a process of filtering the wheat from the chaff, but how can you provide useful content in return without coming across as a spammer? Well firstly it depends on the amount of tweets you send. If you are posting upwards of 5 tweets a day (not @replies or RTs) I would strongly consider using a tweet scheduling service such as Tweetlater, FutureTweets or Twuffer. I have always felt that posting several tweets in a row appears somewhat spammy and I also like to spread out my activity during the working day to maximise my chances of ‘being seen’. My own personal preferences are to tweet once an hour throughout the working day (starting around 9:30 and finishing at 5:30). Of course if I want to retweet or reply to anything this happens on an ad hoc basis. A few useful facts for you to help you tweet effectively: most RTs happen around 11:30am and 4:00pm. Tweeted links are clicked more often between 1:00pm and 2:00pm, while 2:30pm to 4:30pm is when there is the most conversation. Tuesday and Wednesday are the busiest days of the week and the weekends see a large drop in activity.

Valuable content is one thing, but it needs to be tweeted in a way that will encourage a click-through. Check out this blog post for more info on writing effective twitter headlines. Tweetdeck automatically shortens the URL which is handy, but I make a point to copy and paste the article’s title and add credit when I know the Twitter handle of the author. Sometimes I might edit the title if it’s unclear what the article I’m linking is about, but my general rule is to use the title. It’s also important to add hashtags in order for other users to find your tweets (and you if you tweet about the topic regularly). It is certainly worth being aware of the commonly used hashtags for topics you tweet or read about in order to fully engage users in the same genre. For example when tweeting about Social Media I will use both #socialmedia and #sm. When tweeting about the Third Sector I’d add the hashtag #nfp (not for profit), and so on. To save characters I will make any keyword in the article title a hashtag rather than adding it again at the end (i.e. Case Study and #ROI of a #Twitter Engagement (by @socialmedia2day) http://bit.ly/2dPreF#sm #socialmedia). I’d also add that where possible you should also leave 20 characters so that it is easier to retweet. By easier I mean that the user re-tweeting you is less likely to have to re-word your original tweet in order for it to fit the 140 character limit including the name-check to the original author. In summary, my basic tweet format is:

(by )

(i.e.) The 5 Big Myths of #SocialMedia (by @socialmedia2day) http://bit.ly/12jTIG #sm

When it comes to hashtags it is important to use them correctly. By correctly I mean using those that are relevant to your tweet. By hijacking popular hashtags in order to get your tweets seen you are open to heavy criticism for breaking social media protocols, as seen by UK furniture brand Habitat’s foray into social media. It is also important to hashtag your tweets as you will become much more visible to people that use the search functionality, or those looking to aggregate tweets of a particular topic.

So, in summary:

• Use a 3rd party desktop app (I recommend Tweetdeck).

• Create separate accounts for work and personal use.

• Focus on the quality of people you follow, NOT the quantity.

• Organise those you follow into quick reference groups.

• Engage those you find interesting. RT, comment, reply!

• Do NOT use auto-follow or auto-DM services.

• Use a tweet scheduling service rather than send your tweets in quick succession.

• Make your tweets concise, clear and give credit to authors.

• Use relevant hashtags to help yourself be found.