The above Infographic, based on research from the My Hope with Billy Graham (@BGEA) outreach campaign, depicts statistics of the average American neighborhood of 100 people.
How might this information shape your publishing agenda? Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you.
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In an opinion essay for The New York Times, author Andy Martin (@andymartinink) says settling on a book title is one of the hardest things to do – even if you spend all day thinking of names for other things. How do you summarize 50,000 or more words into five?
Perhaps the rule about titles is that there is no rule. Like everything else we write, a title is a bunch of words that are arbitrary, random, largely meaningless, and yet still striving to sound as indispensable as the opening notes of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony….
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The above Infographic (enlarge it) is by Fast Company (@FastCompany) in its September 2012 issue (#therules). Submit your own rule.
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Above poster by Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld).
Also see our previous blogposts, “Discoverability in the Digital Age: Personal Recommendations and Bookstores” and “Sites That Facilitate Book Discovery.”
Stay current with publishing news when you bookmark and use daily our (@smrsault) SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.
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LEGO (@LEGO_Group) turns 80 this year. To celebrate, the company produced this 17-minute cartoon about its humble origins and how it revolutionized the toy industry. 17-minutes long and it succeeded in getting 2 million views in 2 weeks. 17-minutes! And the pace of it is slow-moving, at that!
If a slow-moving 17-minute-long video can get more than 2 million views, it proves viral videos don’t need to be constrained to only 3-minutes of flash mobs or kittens!
Also see our previous blogposts, "Unlikely Videos Go Viral" and “The 3 Qualities That Make A YouTube Video Go Viral.”
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you produce creative and effective videos promoting your branded content.
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Knowledge@Wharton (@knowledgwharton) says, “Our current multi-channel, multi-screen, ‘always on’ world is giving rise to a new form of storytelling, dubbed ‘transmedia,’ that unfolds a narrative across multiple media channels.”
A single story may present some elements through a television series or a motion picture with additional narrative threads explored in comic books, video games, or a collection of websites and Twitter feeds. Depending on their level of interest, fans can engage in selection of these story elements or follow all of them to fully immerse themselves in the world of the story.
Andrea Phillips, author of A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling: How to Captivate and Engage Audiences across Multiple Platforms, offers her observations on the current shift happening in marketing, including stealth advertising across media:
It has to do with experience. There's a point where you enjoy ambiguity. The problem is that that point is a little bit different for everyone. And the audience wants to be in control of knowing where that line is. When you present yourself as real, you open yourself to creating problems for people.
Assuming that your audience can't possibly know it's fictional is ridiculous on the face of it…. The idea that admitting that something was fictional would ruin the whole thing winds up being a non-starter. An audience is a little more robust than that. They're not so fragile that when they can find out that it's not real, it will ruin it….
There's a myth that if you make something interesting and you tell a couple of people, it will spread virally across the Internet. That is, by and large, a terrible, terrible lie. It is not true that the cream rises to the top on the Internet.
When you launch something, don't just send someone a mysterious box. Send them a mysterious box if you have to, but also send them a letter with a URL telling them what you're doing. Send out a press release. Make sure people know what it is you're going to do, and make sure that they know before it's almost done or nobody will look at it.
These things do have to be marketed and promoted exactly the same way that every other entertainment medium does. It's frustrating to see campaigns start with no concept of a marketing budget, no concept of how they're going to spread the word beyond, "Well, people will know because it's cool."
...There's a lot of talk about the attention economy, where we're in a flat-out war for attention. Marketers have cottoned to the idea that people aren't going to look at marketing just because you put it in front of them. People simply don't notice banner ads. Calling [the impact of a banner ad] an ‘impression’ is a terrible lie, because it isn't making an impression on anybody. You just tune it out. It might as well not exist.
Marketers have started to realize they need to create content people will seek out because it has value to them, independent of the value to the marketer. You're seeing things like the Old Spice guy, which has tremendous entertainment value — partly because it's really funny and partly because Isaiah Mustafa is extremely beautiful to look at — and people seek that out because there's something there that they want. And the marketing comes in subtly.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you cover all the bases in your marketing strategy.
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Bottlenose (@bottlenoseapp) is a new real-time social search engine. All Things D (@allthingsd) senior editor Mike Isaac (@MikeIsaac) says:
It is essentially described as a Google for the social Web, using public API inputs from the largest social networks out there: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, as well as photo-sharing sites like Instagram. Enter a search query, and Bottlenose scans each of the networks for the most relevant, current information, depending on trends across networks and the influence of the people sharing the content.
It’s likely most relevant to marketers and social strategists who want to keep an eye on the pulse of whatever their clients follow. Without the search algorithm, the dashboard is especially close to a HootSuite-like analytics product. The free version is advertising-based — like Google — while the upgraded paid versions give better access to the Twitter firehose, along with additional feature upgrades.
Bottlenose is included in our (@smrsault) SomersaultNOW online dashboard in the “Research” and “Monitor Your Brand” tabs. Bookmark our dashboard and use it every day.
MediaPost’s (@MediaPost) MarketingDaily lists the top 10 designated market areas (DMA) in which adults who personally own an e-reader reside:
1. San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA
2. Washington, DC (Hagerstown, MD)
3. New York, NY
4. Boise, ID
5. Austin, TX
6. San Diego, CA
7. Seattle-Tacoma, WA
8. Denver, CO
9. Philadelphia, PA
10. Salt Lake City, UT
Source: GfK MRI’s (@GfKMRINews) 2011 Market-by-Market study
See the Market-by-Market List of 205 DMAs (pdf).
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your brand’s content in today’s digital publishing environment.
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On the ECPA (@ecpa) website, David Kinnaman (@davidkinnaman), president of Barna Group (@barnagroup), says new research shows pastors love books. “One of the nation’s most loyal book-buying audiences, 92% of all pastors in the US say they buy at least one book every month, and they average 3.8 books per month. That’s anywhere from 12 to 46 books a year. Compare that to the total population, where only 29.3% of American adults buy more than 10 books in the course of a year.”
· Pastors, as a group, purchase between 8 million and 13 million books every year.
· Pastors influence others — their staffs, boards, and congregants — to buy books.
· Many pastors say they want to support the business and ministry of Christian retailers. But this sentiment — particularly for bricks and mortar Christian retail — is changing with the generations. Younger pastors are leading the shift to online buying, with 57% of Buster pastors (ages 28-46) expressing a preference for online.
· When a pastor selects a ministry-related book, the most important factor, by a wide margin, is the topic. 58% of pastors say topic is the most important factor, while only 15% give top priority to the author of the book. This is consistent across all generations and across all church sizes.
· By a large margin, pastors in the US prefer to read books in hardcover (55%). Only 24% prefer paperback, and 16% prefer digital.
· E-reading devices have tripled in their penetration among pastors in the last 2 years.
Also see our previous blogpost, “Study: Christians are Embracing Tablets & E-readers” and other posts tagged research.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you reach pastors with your book and brand message.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Research tab.
The goal of every marketer is to nurture customers of brands into lifelong raving fans so they enthusiastically talk about those brands and continually recommend them to whoever will listen (thereby contributing to increased sales). Here at Somersault, we’re raving fans about books and publishing, and we focus our sites on generating that same enthusiasm in others.
We think lessons can be learned from watching this 8-minute ESPN (@espn) documentary video. Consider how you’d go about turning customers of your brand into the kind of people who would identify themselves with it so strongly that they’d include it in their own send-offs.
Also see our previous blogpost, “Rest in Fleece: Woolen Coffins – Innovative Market.”
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you effectively communicate your brand’s message to create raving fans.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.