The Art of Book Marketing: Past, Present & Future

This post originally appeared on Shelton Interactive's blog back in December as a guest post.

Writing a book is tricky business. I know because I'm in the process of doing so as I write this post. Marketing a book after it's published can be equally difficult for a few different reasons:

1. There is a LOT of content out there right now. Some good, some bad, some meh, but all of that content on a variety of different topics makes it difficult to break through the clutter.
2. Publishers often don't pony up a lot of money to market new books. That doesn't mean they never put marketing muscle behind a book. Just not a lot. Instead, they rely on the author to hire a publicist that can hopefully propel the book into Amazon's or the NY Times' best seller lists.
3. Slowly but surely, social media is making its way into the mix. But authors that are new to social media are finding that it takes more than a month or two to tap into the benefits of social. And those that have been doing social for a while aren't necessarily the ones writing the books.

For me, I've had the benefit of some past, present and soon to be future experience with book marketing. In the latter case, I'm the one writing the book. In the former instances, it was a boss or a colleague that wrote the books and I've been on the hook to help them get the word out.

In the spirit of being prescriptive, I'm including a "what worked, what didn't and what I would have done differently" for the past and present books I helped market. In the case of my Location Based Marketing for Dummies book that I'm writing with my friend, Mike Schneider, I've spelled out a few things that we hope will work based on past experience. I also have a dozen or so friends that have written books and I've included a few at the end of this post that I think did a good job marketing their respective books.

The Past
Back in 2006, not a lot of people knew about social media. In some ways, this was a good thing. In other ways, it made marketing a book about social media (or more specifically, using a community of people to crowd source a book on a wiki platform) that much harder. The book I'm referencing was cleverly titled, We Are Smarter Than Me, and was a collection of case studies provided by "the crowd."

• What worked: Content creation i.e. podcasts with individuals or representatives from companies mentioned in the book. This helped to extend the book beyond its physical cover and was great SEO juice for the book website.
• What didn't work: While many of the constituents that helped contributed to the book were actively engaged early on in the book writing process, we lost momentum for the six months that it took to get the book through it's official publishing process.
• What could have been done different: Better outreach to the companies mentioned in the book to get them to buy the book in bulk.

The Present
During my tenure here at Powered, I've actually had the benefit marketing two books. One by my colleague, Joseph Jaffe, titled Flip the Funnel, and a second by colleague, Greg Verdino, titled microMarketing. Because the promotion of Greg's book is more recent, I'm going to focus on that one versus Joe's.

• What worked: Greg and his publicist, PTA, came up with the idea of asking bloggers to review individual chapters of Greg's book versus the entire book. This way, we were able to get more of them engaged and lined up several chapter reviews a day for 10 days. The foundational post (and a review of Chapter One) can be found here on Citizen Marketer 2.1.
• What didn't work: Unfortunately, Greg is a busy guy (his full time job is VP of strategy here at Powered). While Greg is always more than willing to speak at events, webinars and take interviews, his day job keeps him focused on delivering client work instead of book promoting. This is good for Powered but tough for Greg as an author.
• What could have been done different: In a perfect world, I would have loved to have spent more marketing dollars against getting Greg to more events and pushing for more press coverage and earned media.

The Future
As I mentioned earlier, I'm co-authoring a book titled, Location Based Marketing for Dummies. In the plus column, this is a book that is part of a well-known series that our publisher, Wiley, has been supporting for years. It's also focusing on a topic that is near and dear to my heart. At the same time, I know there are people with a natural bias against Dummies books and while I'm thrilled to be a part of it, it's definitely not the same as writing a book from scratch. But with that said, I do plan to market the hell out of it starting now.

• What (we hope) will work: We've already secured a URL for the book and we plan to start writing posts that talk about location based marketing. We'll also talk about the book writing process, include video and podcast interviews from the companies we talk to and keep a running list of sources we're using for source material. By building our "followership" early and often, we're hoping that we'll have a built in audience who wants to buy the book when it comes out.
• What (we hope we don't have to say) didn't work: Mike and I never want to come off as too sale-sy. If we ever get accused of that, I know both of us will be disappointed.
• What we hope to do different: Combine the power of the "Dummies series" marketing engine with Mike's and my social knowhow to create a winning product that people want to buy when it's published. Part of what will make this successful is our continuous engagement with our constituents along the way.

So who are a few of the other authors who have done a great job marketing their books? Here are five (if you want to know why, you have to ask me in the comments):

• Clay Shirky: Cognitive Surplus
• Charlene Li: Open Leadership
• Chris Brogan & Julien Smith: Trust Agents
• CC Chapman & Ann Handley: Content Rules
• Joseph Jaffe: Flip the Funnel

Marketing: Why it's a Waltz vs. a Tango

Spoiler Alert: I'm not going to tell you anything that you don't already know in this post. I'm just reinforcing something that I was reminded of last night as I was helping my wife ramp up for her new job which is to do a little social media marketing for an online publication/content hub.

To be honest, it's always easier to market a company that has great content and fortunately the company she is working for has great content in spades. It's also makes it easy when a company hands you the reigns (with some guidance of course) but doesn't give you eight billion rules and regulations that you need to follow (I know, I know... I worked in financial services for nine years... some companies need to be strict about how they market... but still).

Here comes the roll up the sleeves part. Yup, the part where I tell you why it's the waltz versus the tango. As my wife was going through her company's Twitter account we started talking about ways to engage their audience. By the way, as of yesterday, there had been seven status updates and seven followers and that's not a knock against GC -- hell, they at least had the self-awareness to know that they needed help -- just a little background on the task at hand.

The easy thing to do might be to rush out and follow a list of 500 mommy bloggers. Or find a bunch of companies/people that auto-follow everyone back. That would certainly help with the optics around the follow/follower ratio. But would it do anything for the engagement level? Hardly. The first order of business was to reach out to a few of the seven followers and engage them in conversation (seeing some "@'s" in a company's Twitter stream is the second thing I look for after a decent follow/follower ratio).

Twelve hours later, the number of followers on her company's Twitter account had gone from seven to forty one. That may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things but now all of a sudden, her company has some content (a dozen new tweets) and a little groundswell (the new followers) at its back. Yes, they have a long way to go because realistically, they need to be closer to 4,000 or even 40,000 followers before they start to see some meaningful ROI. But as they say, Rome wasn't built in a day.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

A Tale of Two CMO's: Interest (Part II)

If you haven't read my blog in a little while (don't worry, I forgive you), you might have missed the fact that I'm working on a five part series titled, A Tale of Two CMO's: A Study in Contrasts. The goal of the series is to contrast the styles of an old school and new school CMO whose personas I've fleshed out in my original post. During last week's installment that focused on generating brand awareness, James' and Tessa's responses sounded more similar than different. This week, you will start to see a more noticeable divergence in their positions (a trend that will continue as we move down the marketing funnel).

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What role does search play in fostering consumer interest?

James: For us, paid search (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) have become a major component of our day-to-day marketing efforts. To be honest, I can't think of a better way to "fish where the fish are." I just wish there were more relevant search queries to buy and page views to serve up. Right now, we max out our key search terms and as it turns out, we're still only spending 3-4% of our overall marketing budget on SEM and SEO. Obviously product ads on television, print and online also play a huge role in driving customer interest. I don't see this going away anytime soon.

Tessa: Yes, search is a great tool. And as James mentioned in his repsonse, our company also continues to use product specific advertising to drive consumer interest. However, we've been experimenting recently with our newly launched branded online community (four months old) and are starting to see some amazing results. In fact, where we are seeing the most traction is when we take a prospective customer from a paid search term to our branded online community (heavily threaded throughout our website). We've done a series of A/B testing using the same keyword and while the sample sizes are still small, the prospects we've surveyed post-community visit have shown a 3-5% increase in brand affinity and interest in a specific product vs. those that haven't visited our community.

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Thoughts on a branded online community's role in helping foster brand interest?

James: I 

About nine months, our director of digital marketing tried to convince me pilot a branded online community. While I am not opposed to the idea, investing another $500,000 to a million dollars in something in which very few companies have shown demonstrable success just seems premature to me. I'd rather reinvest that money in paid search or perhaps think about testing out a small ad buy on Facebook where there is some critical mass in the two to three hundred million users.

Tessa: As I mentioned in my last response, we are starting to see some real traction in our branded online community driving not only interest in our products but also creating a deeper level of brand engagement. It's also starting to move the needle ever so slightly on the NPS (Net Promoter Score) front. My only complaint with the community so far has been a lack of critical mass. We're starting to get there with over 150,000 members thanks largely to making the community more visible from all areas of our website and select Facebook ad buys. Ideally, I'll really start to pay attention when we get north of 500,000 members.

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How about the greater social Web? Are you testing places like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn?

James: I know a probably seem like a dinosaur but I'm still not convinced that there is real upside to participating in the social web yet. Of course our HR department uses LinkedIn to recruit but beyond that, we haven't done a whole lot. Our corporate communications people have started a Twitter and a Facebook account but mainly use it to post press announcements. To me, I see what's happened with companies like Southwest Airlines, and Nestles and I think, "do I really want to open our company to that kind of criticism?" I'm sure we'll get there at some point, just not until the rewards outweigh the risks.

Tessa: We are testing various outposts on the social Web like Facebook and Twitter to see if we can do a better job at engaging our prospects and customers. I'm not sure I can look at our Facebook Fan page and say, "wow, look at all the consumer interest we're generating," because Facebook doesn't really work like that. With that said, if we can do a better job at providing valuable content to our prospects and customers while engaging them in meaningful dialogue, that looks like success to me. As for LinkedIn, that's been mostly a recruiting tool for our company but I do see promise based on some of the conversational capabilities they've added over the last 6-9 months.

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As we can see, we're starting to see a little bit of a divergence between the way James and Tessa view social to drive traditional marketing outcomes. Next week, I have a few additional twists and turns up my sleeve so don't think we're done just yet. By the way, if you have any questions for our two CMOs -- trick or straightforward, let 'em fly in the comments!

The Semantic Web: A Treasure Trove for Marketers

Co-written by John Cass and Aaron strout. First posted on ReadWriteWeb on March 12, 2009.

What is the semantic web, you wonder? Don't worry, you're not alone. The term "semantic web," or "Web 3.0" as some folks have started calling it, means different things to different people. In this post, we'll clarify what it is and why we think it will play an important role in the world of marketing.

Two technologies in particular (natural-language search and content enhancement) promise to bring companies much closer to their customers and deliver to consumers more relevant content than ever before.

A little background may be helpful first in understanding what the semantic web is before we talk about why it's important. Tim Berners-Lee, the man best known for his role in "inventing" the World Wide Web, is credited with coining the term "semantic web." In fact, as early as 1999, Tim is quoted as saying:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web - the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The "intelligent agents" people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Heady stuff, to say the least. An easier way to think about the semantic web is to boil it down to a few baseline concepts:

• The web as we know it is mainly comprised of HTML documents, or web pages, as opposed to data repositories. Sure, mega-sites such as Wikipedia, Bigyellow.com, Amazon and YouTube sit on mountains of data, but by and large most sites have little to no real connectivity with each other.
• Because most web pages and websites were built for people (to browse and search) rather than machines (to crawl, collect, and interact with), there is very little "meta-data," or information that actually describes the data on an HTML page. For instance, most HTML tells a web browser where to put text, images, and video on a page but beyond that doesn't do a good job of categorizing the information required for search engine optimization.
• In that sense, search engines don't actually understand what they read; they see only patterns or primitive contextual pairings of words. For instance, searching for "semantic web" will lead most search engines to scour billions of documents for those two words (preferably near each other) and then return results based on set SEO criteria. What they won't return is a list of companies using semantic technologies, unless those companies' websites scream it in the title, header, or body text.
• Until more sites are built in semantic-friendly formats such as XML, OWL, and RDF, intelligently collecting, compiling, and connecting the billions of web pages out there will be nearly impossible. This becomes increasingly problematic as more and more consumer-generated content (CGC) is created on blogs and social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

With this baseline, we can now dive into the two particular ways that the semantic web is beginning (and will continue) to help marketers like us. The first, natural-language search, is implicit in nature insofar as it will help companies consume, digest, and interpret terabytes of conversations. The second, content enhancement, is more explicit because it makes existing content more valuable by reaching out to the vast resources of data available on the web.

Natural-Language Search

Consumer-generated content gives companies an opportunity to understand their customers' concerns and conversations. Yet because so much content is out there, companies need filters to find the most relevant conversations. Natural-language processing can provide this function by automatically summarizing online content for useful analysis by filtering compiled conversations.

Natural-language processing is the process of analyzing web content for meaning. Using sophisticated linguistic technologies, large volumes of content would first be collected into a database. Then, identifying information, perhaps the sources or authors of the content, would be tagged. All of the data would be standardized into one relational database. Lastly, key metrics would be drawn from the raw data. The metrics might include the specific issues being discussed or the "sentiment" of a conversation (that is, whether it is favorable or not).

Semantic technology enables companies to understand the meaning of content and, hence, determine how people feel about their brand. Natural-language processing can help determine how much conversation is happening around an issue, the importance of that issue, and the growth rate of new issues. Natural-language processing can also help determine who is influential on a given issue and if a company's marketing communications engage and resonate with customers.

As companies become more sophisticated in their understanding of what it means to engage customers, they recognize that the entire company needs to be involved in the process of engaging customers and community online. Semantic web technology vendors have developed workflow processes that copy the manual systems developed by companies to triage online opportunities. These workflow processes are CRM tools. In the process, semantic technologies have moved from just search and monitoring tools to engagement tools that allow sophisticated response management across the enterprise.

Examples of companies that are exploring ways to help businesses tap into the power of true natural-language search are Visible Technologies, Radian6, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Cymfony, and BuzzGain. (Disclosure: Aaron Strout serves on BuzzGain's Advisory Board.)

Content Enhancement

While natural-language search helps companies interpret data and see deeper into the trends in the conversations of their customers and prospects, think of content enhancement as a way for companies to make their existing content more valuable. As "social marketing" -- or the practice of deeply engaging customers through content and social tools -- becomes increasingly important, so too is finding ways of giving that content life and context.

Companies can pursue content enhancement in two primary ways. The first is to find out more about the explicit likes and dislikes of their customers -- think favorite music, books, products, movies, activities -- and then to find related pieces of content that are semantically tagged and bring them back for users to interact with. Companies like Twine (in private beta) promise to deliver on this concept.
The second way is to take existing content -- think company blogs, press releases, product descriptions -- and add in "semantically charged links." If you created a blog post, podcast, or video a couple of months ago about the credit crisis, technology such as the kind provided by AdaptiveBlue can add suggested links to it after the fact.

As the treasure trove of consumer-generated content on the web gets richer, these types of semantic technology could go a long way (with the right filters and human oversight) towards helping companies better allocate scarce resources. Content will not only last longer but increase in value exponentially from the contributions of billions of other virtual contributors.

Conclusion

Semantic technology enables consumers and companies to find information that is difficult to discover using traditional search technology. Companies can use the results of this technology to improve their marketing intelligence and provide more relevant content to their customers.

With the cost of monitoring and providing relevant value to consumers lowered, the stage is now set for the development of semantic technology: building out a customer engagement infrastructure. Technology for finding relevant data may still be new, but the deployment of semantic technology is giving a boost to the next stage of development for mapping the engagement workflow to customers, in which opportunities that appear on the web are brought to people who can take advantage of them, whether marketers or consumers.

In essence, semantic technology will help marketers listen easily to the increasing volume of content, sort through the clutter, and find what's relevant to companies and consumers.

About the authors: John Cass is Online Marketer & Author of Strategies & Tools for Corporate blogging and the blog PR Communications. Aaron Strout is CMO, Powered Inc.