Infographic: A Breakdown of Who Uses Social Media


(Source: Mashable)

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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.

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

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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.

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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Embracing Change

An article by Stuart Elliott (@stuartenyt) in The New York Times (@NYTimesAd) explains another facet of the revolutionary change occurring in society because of the Internet:

The language of social media — “fans,” “friend request,” “like,” “social network,” and, yes, “status update” — is increasingly appearing in advertising, whether or not those ads are running in social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Such ads are also increasingly being aimed at mainstream consumers, not just the younger consumers who were the early adopters of social media.

The appropriation of the trappings of social media for marketing purposes is an example of a tactic known as borrowed interest, by which brands seek to associate themselves with elements of popular culture that are pervasive enough to be familiar to the proverbial everybody. Social media’s new starring role in product pitches signals that agencies and advertisers believe they are sufficiently prevalent to refer to without producing puzzled reactions.

Read this in full.

Another article says “every business should embrace change.” Kevin Chou, CEO and co-founder of Kabam, writes on his LinkedIn blog about counsel he received from a colleague, who said, “Business change is never popular, and it's a messy affair, but survival depends upon it."

"It's tough to put difficult advice into action, and harder still to have the conviction to see necessary changes through. For one thing, you need a thread-the-needle combination of self-confidence that you've made the right decision, and humility, so that you and your team learn quickly to fix the inevitable mistakes in the messy road ahead. For anyone facing a dreaded but necessary change process, I give the same advice – you likely won’t be popular, and will make inevitable mistakes – but standing still is certainly not an option."

Read this in full.

We at Somersault believe the unprecedented changes occurring in the publishing world aren’t a crisis to avoid; they’re a playground of possibilities. We’re here to help you embrace change and leverage it to fulfill your mission. We like to say we’re flipping the publishing world right-side up!

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.

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Infographic: 50 Things We Don't Do Anymore Due to Technology

(Click to enlarge the Infographic).

The above Infographic is by the online backup service Mozy (@mozy).

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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Publishers are Reshaping Themselves

Publishing professional Mike Shatzkin (@MikeShatzkin) writes on his blog about the news that Hyperion plans to sell off its “backlist” to focus its attention on new titles it will develop in conjunction with its corporate cousins at Disney and ABC. He says this follows Wiley’s selling a lot of the most bookstore-dependent parts of its list, including the sale of Frommer’s Guides to Google, in 2012.

Both Hyperion and Wiley are showing us what the publisher of the near future is going to look like. They will be more focused. They will be shedding overheads so they can expand or shrink their offerings more readily to respond to opportunities and circumstances. They will be less dependant on the trade bookstore and book review trade networks. And Hyperion’s decision says something more about the future that Wiley’s doesn’t: book publishing will increasingly be an activity operating in tandem with or in service of other objectives of the owning organization. (There is a parallel here in retailing, where Amazon and Google and Apple fit this description, and Kobo and Barnes & Noble do not.)

...the current state-of-the-art for merchandising and presentation of books online is not very helpful to backlist. Most retailers return a limited number of books (10 or 20) per screen to any query. Customers have limited patience for refreshing screens, so the number of titles an online purchaser “browses through” is far fewer than the number that would catch the same eyes in an equivalent amount of time in a store. This appears to be pushing sales more and more to newer books and books on bestseller lists.

This problem of concentration will probably just get worse as mobile devices become more ubiquitous and the shopping takes places on ever-smaller screens.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Publishing Must Reinvent Itself.”

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.

Amazon's Customer Q&A Is Social Commerce Done Right

For MultichannelMerchant (@mcmerchant), George Eberstadt (@georgeeberstadt), founder of social commerce company TurnTo (@TurnTo), writes that “Amazon now offers true social Q&A on most of their product pages.” This is one more step Amazon is taking to try to capture the one retail element online shopping misses: in-store conversational engagement with product experts.

They have built a powerful engine for ensuring that questions reliably get answered by past buyers....

The key to making social Q&A work for eCommerce is speed, and Amazon has done all the right things to make their model fast:

* The question appears immediately on the page when you submit. In the age of Facebook, this is what people expect from a social experience. Not a message that says “We’ll alert you if we decide to accept your question. It may take hours or days...”

* The question is immediately emailed to a large selection of people who actually bought the product.

* The answers get sent immediately back to the asker. That provides fast reminders about the purchase the shopper was considering – while the shopper is still in the buying moment – and a smooth path back to the product detail page complete it. And the answers appear immediately on the site for future shoppers to use and for the asker to view.

* Askers can easily submit follow-up questions, or even just send thanks, back to the answerers. That, too, is email enabled, so that it’s easy to have rapid, back-and-forth dialog about products that one knows about the other needs to learn about.

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.

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.

How 'Big Data' is Changing Lives

Data is increasingly defining us - from the information we share on the Web, to that collected by the numerous companies with whom we interact. Intrigued by the sheer scales involved, photojournalist Rick Smolan wanted to see how data was transforming the world.

Here, as part of the BBC News - What If? series about the future, take a look at his global snapshots - compiled in his book The Human Face of Big Data (@FaceOfBigData).

See this slideshow in full.

Consider how publishing fits in to the Big Data picture.

Also see our previous blogposts “Learning in the Digital Age” and “Digital Nation,” and all our posts tagged “Youth” and “Future.”

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.

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)

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

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