Tips For Making Your Video Go Viral

In Fast Company, Karen X. Cheng (@karenxcheng) explains how she succeeded, through hard work, to get her video to 3 million views:

1. Don’t be “too good” for marketing

2. Understand how things go viral on the Internet

3. Release on Monday or Tuesday

4. Figure out who has a stake in your video

5. None of this matters if your video isn’t good

6. Tell a story

7. Make your video shorter

8. Write a viral title

9. Know what you’re willing to compromise

10. Know what to do once you go viral

Read this in full.

See our previous blogposts on viral video.

Infographic: A Breakdown of Who Uses Social Media


(Source: Mashable)

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Viral's Secret Formula

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Jonah Berger (@j1berger), Wharton professor and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch Onsays, “Virality isn't luck. It's not magic. And it's not random. There's a science behind why people talk and share. A recipe. A formula, even.”

Six key drivers shape what people talk about and share. And the first principle is Social Currency....

People talk about things that make them look good. Sharp and in-the-know. Smart and funny rather than behind the times....

Social Currency...is why people brag about their thousands of Twitter followers or their kids' SAT scores. Why golfers boast about their handicaps and frequent fliers tell others when they get upgraded....

Want to generate word of mouth? Get people talking about you? One way is to give them a way to look good. Make people feel special, or like insiders, and they'll tell others – and spread word of mouth about you along the way.

Read this in full.

See our other blogposts tagged Viral.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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Infographic: Copywriting Cheat Sheet

The above Infographic (click to enlarge) is by VerticalResponse (@VR4SmallBiz).

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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Amazon Buys Goodreads

Amazon (@amazon) has acquired Goodreads (@goodreads), a website featuring user-generated reviews of books. Goodreads, which is one of the most popular among a raft of sites created as a book recommendation engine – members are directed to titles by seeing what their friends are reading, or have recommended – does not currently sell any books, but many in the industry saw it as an ideal sales outlet.

The site currently has over 16 million members, averages 37 million unique visitors a month, and has over 30,000 book clubs.

Read this in full.

Read Goodreads announcement.

Salon (@Salon) says the “brilliant business move” shows Amazon is “determined to monopolize book publishing.”

In just five years Goodreads has grown into the largest outlet for armchair reviewers and readers to share their opinions, as well as a safe space for author-reader interactions. Most members saw Goodreads as an unbiased haven for books, a place where they could profess their bookish love free from the ugly noise of commerce. And the noise has certainly been ugly the past few years, with the closing of Borders and many independent bookstores, the consolidation of the corporate publishers, the e-book pricing wars. In the background of all this ugliness has been the rise of Amazon and their unabashedly thuggish way of doing business

Read this in full.

Forbes (@Forbes) sees the purchase as an assault against Bookish (@BookishHQ).

Read this in full.

TOC (@toc) declares, "Amazon marches on toward global retail domination."

And Huff Post Books (@HuffPostBooks) asks, “What Does It Mean for Authors and Readers?

Also read our previous blogposts, “What's Going On With Readers Today?” and “All About Goodreads.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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Chart: How People Use Facebook On Smartphones

The above chart is by Business Insider (@businessinsider) SAI (@SAI) Chart of the Day (@chartoftheday).

 

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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Bookstore Browsing Vital for Publishing; Bookstore Chain Offers Exclusive Bonus Material

A report in the The Bookseller (@thebookseller) says “the crucial role of physical bookshops to a healthy publishing industry” is evident “by findings from both Bowker Market Research UK (@Bowker) and research company Enders Analysis.”

“We estimate that when a bookshop closes, about a third of its sales transfer to another bookshop,” says Enders analyst Douglas McCabe. This means as much as two-thirds of sales disappear. Some of this spend doubtless migrates online, but much of it vanishes from the book sector entirely.”

Both McCabe and BMR director Jo Henry agree on the crucial role of bookshop browsing. Discovery still does not work online, McCabe asserted. “Consumers do not browse the Internet as is often suggested,” he said. Enders Analysis estimates that serendipity and discovery generate as much as two-thirds of UK general book sales, much of this down to bookshops. “There is almost nothing that can be done to sustain the health of the network of bookshops that should be collectively considered too extravagant,” McCabe said. “Without bookshops, publishing would have to rethink its model at every level.”

Read this in full.

The UK bookstore chain Waterstones (@Waterstones) is now “stocking special limited edition books with exclusive extra material to try to give it the edge in the competitive book-selling market. The book retailer has signed contracts with publishers to sell unique versions of their books, only available in Waterstones stores” to lure buyers away from Amazon and other online outlets.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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What's Going On With Readers Today

The above presentation was presented by Goodreads (@goodreads) CEO Otis Chandler (@otown) at the 2013 Tools of Change (@toc) conference in New York. It details how readers discovered, acquired, and read two specific titles – Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, a hardcover book, and The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, which is available in paperback.

Also see our previous blogpost, “All About Goodreads.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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Quality, Not Quantity, Should be Social Media Follower Objective

Top leaders from Google, Twitter, and Facebook spoke at the annual NRB Convention (@NRBToday & @NRB_Convention) (#NRB13) in Nashville March 4 and stressed the importance of communicators (authors, broadcasters, presenters, and others) to concentrate on engaging with their audience through social media platforms and not to focus so much on numbers only.

Claire Diaz-Ortiz, Twitter's social innovation leader, said that while her company was doing some analytics, just 3 years ago "we started to see that Bible verses were doing really well."

"Someone would tweet out Bible verses and 500 people would immediately re-tweet it," Diaz-Ortiz said. "People of faith were really engaged with these Bible verses. Religious content on Twitter is incredibly engaged. You can look at a pastor such as Andy Stanley and see that he will tweet something out and get more reaction and more engagement than famous celebrities like Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber with 50 times as many followers."

Facebook's manager for policy, Katie Harbath, said, "The Internet and how people use it is constantly changing and so what worked six months ago may have changed."

Although some people add as many Facebook friends as they can accumulate, she believes the value of the site is not found in a numbers game.

"The number of fans you have on your page is important, absolutely, but in reality it's how many of those people are engaged with you. A fan is worthless if they are not seeing your content and not engaging," she said.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogposts, “Infographic: The Importance of a Fan Base” and "Know Your Brand Advocates."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN)

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.