“What’s Twitter?”
“What a waste of time.”
“Why does anyone care about what you have to say about these meetings?”

You may have had similar experiences in trying to explain a new technology, social networking, Twitter specifically, or quantum physics, for example.

The discussion really boiled down to “What is the value in a tool like Twitter?” I’m always frustrated when people fail to see the value in new technologies or the revolution occurring right in front of our faces – the use of social media, social networks, web working and so on. Some of this frustration probably stems from my own enthusiasm for such tools, but I’ll bet I am not alone.

1. Twitter is another tool I use to communicate. Not everyone can stop what they are doing to speak on the phone, or even find the time to schedule a call. Not everyone gets to their email right away. IM is blocked in some companies. Etc.
2. Twitter is a tool I use to find new topics. I find it to be an interesting look at the things people do with technology, and a way to discover new tools and approaches I had not yet found myself.
3. Twitter is fast becoming the quickest way to reach some of my authors. At least one has indicated she prefers to be connected via twitter.
4. Twitter is where conversation is happening, in real time, around the globe. I have had several interesting discussions with not only my authors, but authors from other publishers via twitter.
5. For every 100 “Walking my dog.” tweets (and there a lots of those) there is 1-2 real golden nuggets that lead to a new author, a new book, a new topic to investigate.
6. I am approaching 100 “followers” on Twitter – people who read what I say. 100 is not a lot, but as that number grows what a great platform for me to talk about my books, my authors, and my company.

In the end, Twitter is just another tool. It’s value is in how you use it.

Photo credit:  Safanna

It’s important for enterprises to recognize the limitations of Internet-mediated communication and collaboration. While the Web has transformed the way we work, there’s still no substitute for being there.

WWD’s Gunderloy points out – and I believe rightly so – that web working is not meant to replace the “face to face” in all situations, but is simply a new (or additional) way to connect where it might not be possible otherwise:

You won’t be herding cattle, bandaging wounds, or assembling televisions over the web. What you will be doing, we believe, is increasingly communicating and collaborating over the web in smart ways when it makes sense to do so. Web work doesn’t make physical proximity irrelevant, but it does reduce its importance in many cases, and gives us the tools to be productive in cases where proximity is inconvenient or impossible.

Although I happen to be sitting in a corporate office, behind a desk along with about 300 of my colleagues, I still consider myself very much a web worker. In fact, I’ve been doing it for nearly 10 years now. Not exclusively mind you – I do still have the occasional personal meeting with authors, vendors, and partners – and of course we have way too many “face to face” meetings here in the office. But the bulk of my job is done as a web worker:

1. I do topical research almost exclusively online. Be it blogs, conference videos (I’m watching Gnomedex live as I write this post,) online presentations and so on, most of what I need to learn about new and emerging topics I can find online.
2. I have worked with hundreds of authors over the years. Nearly all of them I met online first – that is if I ever meet them face to face at all. In fact, I would say that I have never met most of my authors face to face. I don’t think this makes these relationships any less real – I chat with them on IM almost daily, I follow and converse with them on their blogs, we speak on the phone or over skype, we converse via twitter, I have even met with them virtually in Second Life.
3. I have made hundreds of deals over the years and I’ve only signed contracts across a table in person a handful of times. Almost all of them are made and discussed using email and the methods I mention above.

I could go on, but the point is that web workers aren’t always sitting in a Starbucks looking for wi-fi, and the deals they make, the products they create and the work they do is no less real than what gets accomplished shaking hands at a convention. The difference may be in the speed, efficiency, and cost savings we generate in working the way we do.

I tend to think that Forbes got it right last week when they published their article entitled “How to Network Like a Pro Online.”

What do you think?

Photo credit: Pisco Bandito (which was a collaboration between 2 artists who have never met in person)

There is a transformation going on in real-time social communications, and I’ve discovered that I can now get the same effect as a group “shout out” by simply changing my status message on Facebook. This also happens when using Twitter. This is yet another thing which is just not possible to do on LinkedIN – unless you plan on sending what may appear to be email spam to everyone in your LinkedIN contact list.

I completely agree and have taken advantage of this trend myself. I am always looking for new authors and ideas for new books, and use Twitter as part of my search. Previously I blogged about using a custom Google Search to mine the twitterstream, but that is a look backwards at conversations that have already happened. More recently I have simply tweeted about new book topics I am interested in, or a particular skill I may be looking for – “Looking for a JavaScript Ninja – know one?”

These tweets have resulted in my finding at least one new author, and several other potential authors. Using this form of communication is not as intrusive as an email sent bcc’d to a large list of people. It’s easier to ignore tweets you are simply not interested in, easier to ‘unfollow’ than beg to be removed from a mailing list, and the conversation happens in real time.

I have not yet taken advantage of status messages in my Facebook profile as Jeff suggests, but I will add that to my social toolbox.

Photo credit: plastictaxi

Please feel free to add me as a friend so I can give it a fair test.

Of course this also means I have 6 invites, so…

Thanks to the folks over at Satisfaction who shared an invite with me.

http://pownce.com/chriswebb/

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.

BookVideos.tv is a video channel S&S will use to feature book trailers, author interviews and probably lots of other interesting content. There are several things I like about this:

1. It shows they understand the shifting of traditional marketing and PR to social media.
2. They didn’t just post a bunch of boring “download links” or try and cram it into their CM or commerce applications (you Publishers know who you are) but instead host it with streaming content on what appears to be a WordPress blog complete with social elements.
3. In addition, they mirror the content on their own YouTube channel.
4. By doing #2 and #3, they created a “conversation” not a “presentation.” Viewers are able to comment in text, as well as share their thoughts via video responses.

It’s too early to tell if this will be a hit, but the fact that a large company like S&S is trying to break out of the old traditional models and embrace the changes is laudable. Well done.

I use Firefox as my browser of choice. It is literally a Swiss Army Knife for web workers, and mine is heavily customized with a variety of add-ons and Greasemonkey scripts. Today, I was looking for a search plugin for Twitter and quickly discovered none was available. I did find the solution to my problem, but it would involve me creating my own plugin.

Here are the simple steps for building your own Firefox Search Plugin without needing to understanding OpenSearch or MozSearch formats.

1. Grab the Add to Search Bar Plugin for Firefox. The plugin is v 1.5.1 at the time of this post and supports Firefox 2.0 – 3.0a2. This great little add-on allows the user to right click into any website’s search field and turn it into a Firefox Search plugin. It’s quick. It’s easy. It works. If the website you want to search already has a search feature, you are done – start searching.
2. In the case of Twitter, there is currently no search feature, so I needed to create my own. Google to the rescue! I created a twitter search using Google’s Custom Search.
3. Once the twitter search was created, I just right clicked in the Google Custom Search search field, and added it as a Firefox search plugin.
4. The default icon for Google Custom Search is the same one Firefox uses for regular Google searches. To avoid confusing myself, I nabbed twitter’s favicon and saved a copy to my hard drive and selected that as my new search icon.

Google Custom Search allows you to add multiple sites to your custom search, so using the steps above, one could create a quick Firefox search plugin to search several social networks at once. I find this useful to weed out the results from the rest of the Interwebs that I would normally need to sift through in a regular Google search.

UPDATE: Just discovered Dave Troy’s Twittersearch  which uses the Twitter API to do searches of the public timeline rss feed.  I added it as well, but it only returns results that are currently in the feed.  Thats good for current twits but the Google custom search method gets the past twits as well.

I still feel that Twitter could be a viable part of a marketing campaign, assuming Evan and crew can keep the site running.  I still have problems posting from IM and many other users complain of reliability issues.  Regardless, Twitter and other micro-blogging services should be considered as part of the marketer’s social media toolkit.

Book Business Extra

No big surprises in their strategy, but clearly they understand blogging, social networking and the changing landscape. Of note is their effectiveness in hitting a targeted market well.

Also, in the face of such information-overload, many people are increasingly paying attention to things that specifically interest them, so it’s becoming more and more important to reach a book’s specific audience well. I think the best way that publishers can combat this challenge is simply by always staying on track with what’s the newest way to reach people. Not every way will work, but over time, you’ll find the ones that reach your niche most effectively.

The takeaway here is to try new things – trying to hit new markets the same old way doesn’t work anymore. (In fact, trying to hit existing markets the same old way doesn’t work like it used to.) Instead of using the broad approach to try and hit as large a group as possible, take more well-aimed, targeted approaches to try and get your message across.

Publishers who embrace targeted, grassroots marketing and PR efforts will be the ones who are successful in the future.