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)

Jeff Gomez

Anderson discusses several ways he and his publisher are considering making aspects of his upcoming book free, but stops short of simply releasing a free e-book:

“free book is the marketing for the non-book thing.” In his case, what he’s really selling is himself. He also acknowledged that, for his publisher, this is a difficult and different proposition. But Anderson believes that “you give away what you can give away, and you charge what you can charge for,” and that all of the iterations of the eBook or the printed book with ads — that any way you offer the “free” version — will be inferior to the real book.

Many of the “free things” Chris discusses as part of his book project are things we have discussed at my company such as advertising in books, and free sample chapters online – so there’s nothing really revolutionary about what they are considering. However if they execute on ideas like in-book advertising, they would be the first to actually do so to my knowledge.

You should head over to Jeff’s blog to read his coverage, but one item that was especially interesting was their social media focused approach to marketing his first book, The Long Tail:

Give away books to “influentials.” (This worked incredibly well for The Long Tail, where Anderson convinced his publisher to print 1,000 ARCs — many more than publishers usually print — and they ended up getting about 800 copies into the hands of interested bloggers. From this, more than 600 online reviews appeared, which then linked to Amazon. Anderson said that his Amazon sales outweighed his bookstore sales, leading him and his publishes to believe that all of that online-linking led to more Internet/Amazon sales.)

1000 review copies is generally unheard of, but look at the return on their investment – 600 highly influential reviews driving sales to Amazon.com where the book has had a permanent home on their Computers and Internet Best Seller List since its release.

Chris Anderson is also blogging about “Free” at his Long Tail blog.

One of the compelling lessons of the digital music revolution was that people wanted to acquire and share songs, not albums. The analogies to books are imperfect, because books tend to be more of an essential organic whole than albums, but even with books, especially reference or tutorial books, it’s certainly possible that someone wants only part of a book. Based on this idea, we’ve had a goal for quite some time to enable “by the chapter” purchase and download.

It also appears the content is to be delivered as DRM-free PDFs.

One of my primary competitors, O’Reilly has once again demonstrated how nimble they can be and even though many publishers have been working toward this goal, they will all be seen as following Tim’s lead on this one.

Time will tell if this model works for O’Reilly and in their usual transparent fashion I am sure we will get an update on sales in the near future.

“We know that people want to learn online, on their own time,” says Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media. “We set out to create online courses that are true to O’Reilly’s high standards and take full advantage of the online environment, and the result is O’Reilly School of Technology.”

O’Reilly School of Technology

2008: Firefox 3.14159 ships (those geeks at Mozilla just won’t be able to help themselves, and the resulting flamewar and developer resignations over whether to call it “PiFox” or not will lead to it being dubbed “PyreFox”). This version adds offline support to Ajax web applications. People will want to call the result “Web 3.0″ but that term was claimed in advance by the Semantic Web so the blogosphere will quickly decide to call this Web 2.86 but the period will be quickly quickly lost (to the condemnation of purists) and the media will refer to “Web 286“.