Many if not most of the attendees were involved in some sort of social media activity, either personally or professionally.  Almost everyone was using Facebook to some degree, less using Twitter, and a lone MySpace user.

Like most, the challenge of everyone in the room was in filtering the noise in order to find opportunities where they could provide value. My goal today was to provide a collection of tools that might be used to set up a Social Media Listening Post – a place where all the signal can be collected and where one might find opportunities for conversation.

The group asked a lot of very smart questions, and as a result we bounced around quite a bit from tool to tool, as everyone contributed ways in which they found certain sites or tools useful. I admit I rediscovered a forgotten tool while answering a question, so I came away with something new again as well.

Among the tools we covered were:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Ning
• Twitterfall
• Google Reader
• Google Alerts
• Google Blog Search
• Social Media Firehose
• Backtype
• Social Mention
• Board Reader
• Feed My Inbox
• Twimailer
• Tweetdeck
• Twhirl
• Firefox
• Google Chrome

What other tools do you use when filtering social media? How did you develop your social media listening post?

The premise was very straight forward – tweet about a book from their website that you would like to read. The 10th person to tweet a book wins the book tweeted. Free book, free shipping. Easy, right?

There are several things I like about the way Chelsea Green ran this contest including:

1. You have to follow them on Twitter to be eligible
2. They have built “Tweet this book” links into each product page that includes a link to the book, as well as hashtags.
3. They primed the contest with a countdown which was re-tweeted several times to spread the word.

So, how did they do on the first run? Some quick stats:

• Total contest time was approximately 4 minutes
• Total contestants was 27
• Total tweets (entries) was 45

At first glance these look like really small numbers, but consider how many others saw these tweets.  According to my quick study via search.twitter.com it appears that these 45 tweets reached 14,216 Twitter users. And each of those 14,000+ users was sent a book title, hashtags, and a direct link to the book’s product page. And, those 14,000+ followers does not include any users who may be consuming searches for the variety of hastags or terms that were part of those tweets.

As a bonus, it appears the Huffington Post re-tweeted at least one funny entry from @daveburdick (over 5000 followers of the 14,000+ total.)

So if you ask me, reaching 14,000 people in the span of less than 5 minutes is pretty good. Of course, we don’t yet know how many of those, if any, clicked through to the publisher’s website, nor how many purchased books.

But, Chelsea only spent some time and the cost of one book plus shipping to try this experiment, which I think is important to do. We need to experiment a little more.  All in all I think it is a very clever use of Twitter to perhaps gain some awareness of the publisher and their books.

What do you think? Productive use of Twitter, or social media folly? What other examples have you seen?

One of the main points Chris made is in my opinion, Rule #1 when you start thinking about entering the social media environment.

Bring wine to the picnic – not a bullhorn.

It seems simple and obvious, but the statement is at the heart of what usually goes wrong for those who only view social media as another channel to send the same old messages.  You need to be a part of the community, connecting, contributing and sharing and not just broadcasting about your product or service.  If you do this, the opportunities to introduce people to your product or service will present themselves naturally. But you have to listen and watch for them as part of the ongoing conversation.

Remember it’s merlot, not megaphones.

I’m obviously paraphrasing only a very small portion of what Chris Brogan covered in his webinar, which you can view in its entirety here.

So, do you have any bullhorn or wine moments to share?

(Photo credit theparadigmshifter)

Like many of you, I use Twitter. (@chriswebb) I use it for a variety of reasons, both personal and professional but have always thought of it as a very ‘personal’ tool. By that I mean it’s an ecosystem of *people* that despite the distance and in some cases, anonymity, relate to each other. It is a social tool – I mean it is called “social media” for a reason.

But I am seeing a trend among several users who are opting for an automated response to everyone who follows them. For example, today I got the following warm-hearted response from someone I followed:

“Thanks for following me! Find GREAT Real Estate deals w/my E-Book (link omitted)”

Wow, how…personal.

So, do I respond personally to everyone who follows me on Twitter? No. But I also don’t send some impersonal canned response either. Instead, I’ll choose to actually engage you in conversation at some point using the tool. That’s the point, isn’t it? Just using Twitter and other tools like it as just another channel to send the same spammy messages one might use in other media is completely missing the point.

The same goes for Authors who use social tools as part of their personal platforms to help support their books. I encourage you to use tools like Twitter – in fact it is becoming more important that you do just that. But use the tools in the way they were meant to be used.

Why not just tweet a simple welcome to new followers?  Maybe 5 or so at a time?  At least then people know you are actually doing it and not relegating it to some cold, automated script. If you can’t manage that for some reason, then just skip it.  I’d rather see nothing than an autoreply.

Do you use an automated, canned response for your Twitter followers?

Book trailers hit the scene earlier this year as a creative way for publishers to promote and market their new titles.  Many have been straight forward, and others have been rather dramatic – more like a movie trailer than a book and that’s the point after all. But I really like what Capstone have done with this tongue in cheek approach to the viral.  The style of the video is true to the Capstone brand, and creates the desired buzz while having a lot of fun with the subject.  It also engages the viewer, and converts them from a passive consumer of media into an active participant.

As we publishers figure out how media like video fit into more traditional approaches to marketing, it is good to see Wiley colleagues like the Capstone team breaking out of the old media mold.

If you want to play along, watch the video below, and visit http://dearcelebrity.co.uk for your chance to win an iPod Touch (subject, of course to contest rules and deadlines.)

Do you think this approach is more effective than “traditional” marketing methods?

A couple of days ago, Chris posted Straight Talk on the Price of Free Content, a discussion post on the role of free content in publishing.  The problem with such discussion points is that much of the discussion around Free Content tends to get muddied by traditional business thinking.

If you have grown up prior to, well, now, or have and MBA, you expect a direct relationship between what you do and your income.  There is probably a formula for it, which is every bit as iconic as e=mc2, a formula like: W=$ (work=money). You do some work, you get a tangible result, commensurate payment.

With Free Content, that relationship is broken. If I post some Free Content, doesn’t matter what kind it is, the immediate payment is:

• The opportunity to display my mastery of a subject and a chance to increase my standing in the community I address.
• A chance to draw attention to or generate traffic for my blog/business/consulting/design gig.

Both of these are intangible payments. It is revenue of a sort, but if you plug that into the common understanding of what happens when we work, we do not expect to be repaid in website traffic, or acknowledgment.

It’s very hard to put food on the table with what amount to personal accolades.

The problem is that consulting types, VCs, and people looking to make a living off the web is that they are looking for revenue in the wrong place: free content is about generating indirect revenue.

For example:

• I post to a Blog for a year, and get a publishing deal from it.
• I run a Blog and post a detailed Presentation, and that leads to speaking offers.
• I post a Podcast, and that generates the traffic that drives my advertising revenue.
• I post a Webcomic, and that leads to marketing gig.
• I code some Open Source Software, and sell support for it.

Notice that in all of those examples the initial transaction is free. The author is giving up their time to entertain and educate the reader, listener, or viewer, without asking for direct payment.

There are many people that want to make a claim that this is a brand new world we live in, a new economics…um, no, it isn’t. Sorry. The Free Content business model is nothing new: it is the same model that broadcast television has been using for 50 years.

For a television broadcast, the viewer pays nothing, other than the opportunity cost of watching another show. The cost of the production of that broadcast is shifted, to advertisers, syndication outlets, or purchasers of the inevitable DVD collection.

With Free Content, the consumer of the information pays nothing to the producer; instead income comes from speaking engagements, book sales, or consulting contracts. The payment for the content is decoupled from the consumption of the content, but theoretically the model does not change, just the degree of separation from content to revenue source.

That is why things like Matt Maroon’s Bubble 2.0 post seem off the mark.
In a sense, he is right: you need to ask where the revenue is coming from, and a revenue model that is based on generating revenues directly from Free Content is not sustainable in the long term. Once the money dries up, that’s the end of the show.

I think there is still question that needs to be asked before we automatically write off one of these “Bubble 2.0” companies: how far removed from what we want our audience to do is the revenue stream?

If there is revenue tied indirectly to the content produced, then there is a repeatable, sustainable, revenue model. It may be hard to quantify, and it may be less than if you were getting paid directly, but forecasting revenues from that content is possible. All you need to do is keep producing Free Content.

Where does that leave the venture capitalists, private investors, and fortune seekers that are backing “Bubble 2.0” endeavors?

They need to ask if the Free Content they are producing generates repeatable indirect revenues, and if not, what they can do to align their Free Content with a business model that does.

Preferably, before the seed funding runs out.

It seems that Bezos keeps his investing activities separate from the business of Amazon.com, so I don’t think we will see an influx of Amazon.com applications leveraging Twitter soon, but I wonder if AWS is not a viable platform for Twitter.

They already use S3 for serving up avatars, so I wonder if moving to EC2 and related services might be part of the plan?

What do you think? is this just a new round of funding for Twitter and Jeff Bezos just happens to be in the mix, or is this the start of something bigger for Twitter?

(Photo credit ETech)

Authors can learn a lot from the personal branding and social media marketing advice of Chris Brogan who recently offered 100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media. Of course, Chris is not speaking about books in particular, but that’s the beauty of his advice – it can be applied to many different situations where your personal brand and growing online network can make a difference.

I’ve written quite a bit on the subject here as well, but with a focus on book publishing. Check out the following and the Related Posts links for some of my thoughts on how book authors can promote their work with social media.

• Why Word of Mouth Matters
• Book Marketing for Authors: The Author Questionnaire
• Crowdhacking: 10 Simple Ways Authors Can Help to Increase Sales at Amazon.com
• Amazon.com as a Social Network
• Looks Like We Are About to Get Bum Rushed by the Age of Conversation
• The Making of A Bestseller: A Case Study in The Meme

(Image credit: emdot)

If you have ever seen Guy interview someone, or read an online interview conducted by him, you know his questions are generally straight to the point, a little dangerous, and usually a little over the top – which of course is why I like Guy Kawasaki’s interviews.

Darren gets to answer some great questions about blogging, but his response to Guy’s question about the lack of comments on marketing guru Seth Godin’s blog was very insightful.

However another stroke of genius (I’m not sure if it’s intended) with this approach is that Seth has made his blog a little more viral by not having comments. What happens when he writes something that people want to respond to? In many cases they blog about it – ’sneezing’ his post further than his current readership.

Check out the number of blogs that link to his posts in Technorati. Most of them are just writing things that you’d normally expect to see being left as comments on a blog. It’s no wonder that he’s currently the 13th most linked to blog in the blogosphere (according to the Top 100 list)!

Sure, it seems really obvious now, doesn’t it?  Of course not everyone can pull that off, can they?

What about you?  Think turning off comments on your blog can help make it a bit more viral by forcing readers to comment outside of your blog?

(via Chris Brogan)