The Chameleon Net blog

Social Media by the Book: A Publisher’s Guide

danm@chameleonnet.com (Dan Martin) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:29:43 GMT

Do you need a social media strategy?

If you’re dubious about the benefit of social media to your business, it’s useful to go back to basics and think about the power of word of mouth. How many restaurants have you eaten at, hairdressers visited, books bought, as a result of a recommendation made by a friend?

In the case of social media, we are talking word-of-mouth; only typed up. An effective social media engagement strategy that creates a constructive dialogue with your audience can and does lead to tangible results.

What happens if you don’t have a social media strategy?

Social media has significantly changed the media landscape. A company’s public relations or marketing department can no longer dictate the agenda in the way that they traditionally have through TV, print, radio and the first generation of websites. Failing to engage with those who are talking about your brand online could mean that you miss out on business opportunities, or damage your reputation.

In order to succeed in PR in an online environment, you must first accept the loss of control that that environment brings, and then work at socialising your way to your desired result. Sound fun? Well it’s not quite as simple as that, but hopefully you’re on board with the idea by now.

Join the party

The difficulty with social media is that it is a constantly evolving and relatively new marketing medium, further complicated by all the separate channels and sub-channels that sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and the user-created groups within those sites, present. So engaging with, and influencing, these online communities, as well as contributing to conversations that might be taking place on your own website, is no mean feat. Here are a few pointers to working your selected social scene:

1. Where’s the party at? Find out where your audience resides online; this could be in well-known or more ‘underground’ locations

2. Know who’s talking about you, and what they’re saying: analyse conversations talking place online

3. Go where the in-crowd go: identify the most influential online touch-points for your audience’s demographic e.g. fan pages, online book clubs

4. Stay on the scene: Commit to internal resource and / or external assistance to create and maintain a presence in your selected online communities

5. Be yourself: Know your voice, and research how best to communicate with your audience

Be the party

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 an online community. So one option is to connect to all the relevant social networks through your own site or microsite. This is like choosing to hold a big social gathering at your house, the advantages of which are:

You can chat to all your friends, and potential friends, under one roof

Because the party’s in your house, people have easier access to your stuff (a good thing when you’re also selling books, remember)

You can keep an ear in on, and engage in, the conversation

Being the host means you can watch your guests’ every move, meaning you can also more easily measure the success of your social engagement in monetary terms (it’s easier to keep track of how many people actually ended up buying the book you’re trying to sell as a result of social engagement)

Whether you decide to join the party or hold it, you can get more advice on social media strategy from us by reading the dedicated pages on this website or giving us a call on 020 7332 6360.

Protecting books, embracing digital, satisfying readers

danm@chameleonnet.com (Dan Martin) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 14:17:31 GMT

With the Digital Conference of the London Book Fair falling yesterday, I wanted to put together a blog about the digital direction of the sector to act as Chameleon Net’s follow up. As a digital agency working with some great publishers in the UK – including digital advocates like Random House and Pan Macmillan – we are in a great position to provide commentary.

So when I started to assemble the various thoughts I’d had for the blog, I concentrated more on what really matters for publishers if they are to establish meaningful digital strategies, and less on the technology that is helping to support digital.

"Dear reader"

Naturally, I found myself at the doorstep of ‘the reader’. Without the reader none of this means anything; authors would write books no-one reads, publishers would waste a lot of energy and yes – even today – paper, technology companies would sell gadgets no-one wants.

Ask someone outside the industry what they think about e-books. They’ll often say “what’s wrong with books?”. Of course the answer is “nothing”. It’s just that there are possibilities opening up that weren’t there before, and once experienced they’ll become part of the reader’s expectations and desires for their book experience.

So what does the reader want from books now, and what will that experience look like in the near future?

To make sense of these questions it’s essential to recognize the nature of the revolution happening with books. Quite often there is a comparison made between reading books and the way listening to music has evolved. That is helpful in some ways, particularly around technology and rights, but in another very important way the comparison misses the point. Music’s revolution was different to the one we’re seeing for books.

What revolutionized how we think about, and consume, music was the fact that media and playback became portable in the 1980s. That was the point of no return for music and the music industry.

Almost every time I pick up my MP3 player I can’t help but remember the walkman-accompanied journeys I’d take in the 80s and 90s, the audio backdrop for which you would have to plan carefully in advance to be sure to take enough of the right C90 cassettes, often having to sacrifice a fair few candidates due to the space they’d take up. Even so, it was amazing to be able to take a soundtrack with you!

It has taken 30 odd years to get to a world with iPods, shuffle, Spotify for mobile and so on. In the intervening years, an entire generation has grown up with portable music… and in more recent times access to pretty much anything they could want, when they want it.

Viva the revolution

That latter point - access and immediacy - is something that is more recent and is an important point in planning for digital in publishing. Books have always been portable, so introducing new ways to carry them around – which is effectively what most e-books experiences provide at the moment - is not revolution no matter how smart the technology housing them.

Even digitizing books is not revolution. That has also been possible for many years, and while e-ink technology is exciting in improving the visual experience of reading on a screen, it’s still not the tipping point. Digital media is.

What will be revolution, and will make for an exciting ride, is a new model that combines access, choice and interaction. Digital media and an interconnected world make this a reality.

Back for a minute to the reader’s experience and intention in picking up a book in the first place.

Now, publishing is an industry that thinks very carefully about readers. The vast majority of people I have met in the book trade love books and care about the experience of the reader that buys or borrows them. So the potential for digital to be organically adopted into the way publishers work is enormous – so long as it’s good for the reader.

And what’s more the reader/publisher relationship is about to get much more important, more obvious, and more bilateral. That relationship has historically been one obscured by authors and titles, genres and subject matter. Readers understandably place more emphasis on the book itself that on its publisher.

Access all areas

Readers now and in the future will want to access related information, immediately, through internet connected devices and web-enabled publications. They’ll want to be able to choose what they read more easily, and have more choice. They’ll want to be able to engage with the material, the author, the experts (including publishers) and other people who are interested in the same material or topics.

The best opportunities for publishers will arise when you act as curator, by helping the reader select, understand context, and point them to related material or experiences, perhaps not even produced by you. You’ll also be combining media… text, audio, pictures, reader discussions, fiction and non-fiction will all be part of the experience. You’ll be breaking outside the book format, but not with disrespect.

The digital revolution for publishing has come at a perfect time for the industry, and publishers should react with relish. The timing is perfect because most of us can remember a time before the web and mobile telephony, but we can all see the benefits they bring. This means we’re afforded a unique way of thinking about the relationship between digital and books - we can both respect the past, yet embrace the future, and in doing so help to shape the reading experience in the best way possible.

Decisions publishers make now will form the future of digital book experiences. You will be facilitator of the experience, educator about the possibilities, and deliverer of the next wave of developments.

What better way to protect, and enhance, books for future generations of readers?

Chameleon Net blog highlights for book people

danm@chameleonnet.com (Dan Martin) — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 21:58:17 GMT

With the London Book Fair taking place early this week, I thought it'd be worth putting some signposts up in time for the first morning of the Fair proper to highlight some of the digital publishing entries that have been posted so far on our blog in 2010...

Chris Thorn gave us his view of the impact the iPad may have. Hopefully Apple will get around to launching it in the UK sometime soon (I heard May from an industry source last week).

Jeremy Davis suggested that the ebook format in itself might be a distraction.

And I gave a viewpoint on how publishers should look at social media and marketing to engage more effectively with readers (first published in The Bookseller) as well as a write up of the Publishers' Associations Digital Forum in January.

There will also be a couple of new Publishing-related posts, one each on Monday and Tuesday, so keep checking back!

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.

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

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!

Analytics > Assumptions

richardk@chameleonnet.co.uk (Rich Kirk) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:58:42 GMT

Last week at Chamtech09 (our digital trends seminar in the City) I spoke to two great audiences on the need to do away with decision-making and assumptions when it comes to creating online content. I argued that simple analytics data and customer feedback should drive the development of a web presence, and that a marketer’s focus should primarily fall on turning more visitors into customers; getting more visitors should be of secondary importance.

It was great to speak to a bunch of people who could obviously see the benefit of this approach, and I hope that I’ll be able to work with as many of you as possible in the future.

In this post I wanted to expand on a few points I raced through on Thursday, especially around the development and operation of a Google Analytics (GA) strategy.

“The numbers in my GA reports don’t add up”

There are numerous reasons why GA might not track an individual visit. The most common ones are:

User has no java support enabled so GA code is not read (>5% of web users)
Users are blocking the first party cookies GA needs to place on your computer (>5% of users)
Code is not implemented correctly on certain pages of your site (Best practice = implement it once in a piece of content that is called by every page e.g. the footer)
Code is being interfered with by other javascript on the page. Fix this by ensuring the GA code is called before these other scripts.
Browser fails to execute the code (increasingly problematic as mobile browsers are susceptible to this)
Pages are failing to load properly.
User bounces before page load completes (often explains why your adwords clicks > visits from adwords). This problem is increasing due to mobile browsing growth. Bloated sites often designed for computers rather than mobiles and the 3G network are especially vulnerable.

A common problem arises around unique visitors (aka “the hotel problem”) and it can be seized upon by people looking for a reason not to invest time in GA as an example of its “inaccuracy” (I know, I’ve been there!). Luckily, the problem is fully explained and illustrated on Wikipedia, as is the issue of total visitors not being equal to new visitors + repeat visitors.

Link tagging

You can track the RoI of every link you put on the web by attaching a source (e.g. person / dept), medium (e.g. email / banner ad / social campaign), campaign (e.g. twitter competition / april newsletter) and an individual content tag to each link. GA allows you to analyse the behaviour of users via the individual link they arrived on. Very quickly you can start to attach a pounds and pence value to links, campaigns, marketing channels and people within your organisation. Who doesn’t want to do that?!

You can create these links really easily in excel spreadsheets as they all follow the same pattern (links broken down by section for easy viewing, obv. this would be one URL string normally):

www. ursite.com/?

utm_source=xxx

&utm_medium=yyy

&utm_campaign=zzz

&utm_content=123

In each case you would want to make the utm_content tag an individual descriptor for that link. E.g. if I was going to send out a Chameleon Net newsletter containing a link to our blog the link would be (again, broken down for easy viewing):

http://www.chameleonnet.co.uk/blog/default.aspx?

utm_source=chamnet_marketing

&utm_medium=email

&utm_campaign=june_newsletter

&utm_content=blog_home

Within the GA dashboard, under traffic sources > campaigns, you can quickly compare the successes and failings of different source, medium, and campaign tags. Then you can easily drill down to the individual content tags for more granular detail. For each tag you’ll be able to see a host of metrics, most importantly goal conversions, but also bounce rate, time on site, and of course visits/visitors/unique visitors.

Pretty neat huh?

“My goals are hard to track”

A number of Chameleon’s clients are charities or NGOs, whose website in many cases provide information rather than make a sale or get an email sign up. For these organisations simply getting someone to read a page is the goal online; the real conversion, i.e. that person taking action, occurs offline in the real world. Goal tracking still has a lot to offer, and maybe you need to think about how your site and your offline conversions interact: e.g. display a unique phone number so you can track how many calls your site is generating.

Another idea might be to flip the situation and instead of focussing on where people are going within your site look at where they are coming from. If you have particular traffic sources that send traffic which tends to bounce out of the site straight away, isolate that traffic and look at its top landing pages. There may well be an obvious disconnect between the content on those pages and the traffic source / audience.

Alternatively, you can look to diversify the traffic sources for your site. Social networks are the web’s watering holes and you can easily (and cheaply) search for and enter conversations around your campaigns. We advise on developing landing pages aimed at audiences you don’t normally target and the process of entering these online conversations. GA will be able to let you know if you’ve developed a new audience and whether they are exploring your site beyond the landing pages you have set up.

**********

Phew, long post. Hope these tips help you and your digital marketing teams.

Remember; your site is made up of sources, (your audiences: get granular by using segmentation) behaviour (the content they browse) and most importantly; defined goals. Without goals your site has no purpose: identify the pages that your user sees when they’ve done what you wanted them to do, then work back through your funnel.

Hit me up in the comments below if you've got issues you want answering!

Scribd - friend or foe to publishers?

danm@chameleonnet.com (Dan Martin) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:30:42 GMT

I have been reading with interest the online discussion over Scribd.com

If you're unfamiliar with it... in their words 'Scribd began with a simple observation – that there's a writer in all of us. Today, Scribd is the place where you publish, discover and discuss original writings and documents.' Surely a laudable, innocuous-sounding concept?

The answer is less than straightforward. In effect what Scribd is providing is a mechanism for users to upload and tag content for others to consume and download. It's firmly aimed, supposedly, at self-publishers or content-owners.

Of course, unauthorised copyrighted content is cropping up all over the place on Scribd. So as you might imagine it's attracting a lot of interest in the publishing sector. Two of the latest pieces are Alison Flood's appraisal on thebookseller.com last week and this article in the Guardian.

For me the real issue surrounding Scribd is the user's responsibility for their own actions, and it's as old as the web. For year's there has been an issue with people posting stuff that they either don't have the rights to legally, or they shouldn't in someone else's opinion.

Scribd make it clear the resonsibilty is in the hands of users when it comes to posting content. See their general terms. It has also said publicly that it does not police the site - it expects the community to do that itself - but will remove content on request.

Which means that so long as they are seen to be acting on information provided to them by those who have an issue with certain content in a reasonable timeframe, then they are acting within their stated remit. And it's true that most reports I have seen online suggest their staff are friendly and react quickly.

But the problem lies in the passive nature of this moderation. It wrestles the onus onto content owners, who no doubt have better things to do, to check to see if their content has been illegally posted. And of course users can always put the content back up again! OK, there are automatic checks, but users are canny and have plenty of tricks to get around those, if they are that way inclined.

Such automatic checking, without active moderation, is only as good as the technology it uses, which is always flawed by its nature.

In many ways it is similar to implementing a automatic system to vet out unacceptable words, such as swearing or racist terms, but not imposing any checks on the context or purpose of all the acceptable words, and so can miss things like harrassment or bullying, or even simple stuff like deliberate mispellings to 'get around the bots'.

Of course I'm not in a position to comment on the quality or otherwise of Scribd's auto-checking of copyrighted works. But it's clear to see where the gap lies, no matter how good their systems. I've seen plenty of content posted that looks copyrighted to me, big titles by well known authors, and I'd suspect that some of that content was not posted with the right authority. Have a browse and see for yourselves.

So what's the solution? Stop file sharing sites? Well that's just never going to happen. For every Scribd there are dozens of 'underground' sites, torrent networks, etc. Give up content rights altogether? No publisher will, or should, ever do that - it's their product.

Where the real solution lies IMO is in understanding users and then providing a compelling proposition to the market. Sites like Scribd thrive not just because people want stuff for free, but also because there's a genuine demand for the content itself.

People are willing to pay for products if they value the content and feel the price is acceptable. Ask yourself, is the hardback jacket price a suitable price point for a new e-book?

They are even more willing to pay if they get something they couldn't get elsewhere, like goodies or extras. Just think how much money is spent every year on repackaged DVD box sets with the latest special features, director commentaries, and cool new boxes.

'Honesty box' experiements, like with Radiohead's last album launch, have also proved people understand the value of the artist and their need to make money from their works too.

If publishers can get their digital content strategy right, then legit sites like Scribd, file sharing networks and so on, will keep on going but pose only a minor threat to the markets publishers need to survive.

And in some cases, free content on those sites can even stimulate demand for the genuine article, reaching audiences that may never have paid in the first instance, but whose appetites have been whetted by a freebie.