The American Christian Fiction Writers (@ACFWTweets) conference (@ACFWConference) (#ACFW) is being held in Dallas, TX and Somersault (@smrsault) is here telling authors, agents, and publishers about
- our online dashboard for publishers and marketers, SomersaultNOW
- this blog as a telescope helping industry professionals “see around the corner” to prepare for the future of publishing
- and SomersaultSocial, our new program to educate authors and speakers in the strategic and effective use of social media marketing.
Congratulations to Allen Arnold, winner of the ACFW’s 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award “in recognition of his impact on the Christian fiction industry, its authors, and its readers.” He’s the former publisher and senior vice president of Thomas Nelson Fiction, having launched the Fiction group in 2004.
ACFW’s other awards are Julee Schwarzburg - Editor of the Year, Nicole Resciniti - Agent of the Year, Allison Pittman - Mentor of the Year, Genesis winners for the best unpublished Christian fiction projects, and the Carol Awards for the best Christian fiction published in the previous calendar year.
If you’re attending the conference, please come to our exhibit booth and say hi!
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New findings from a Nielsen (@NielsenWire) online survey of respondents from 56 countries:
· Nearly half (49%) have purchased a product online.
· 46% have used social media to help make purchase decisions.
· 37% purchase from online-only stores most frequently.
· 1 in 5 global respondents plan to purchase electronic books and digital newspaper and magazine subscriptions in the next 3 to 6 months.
· The online purchase intent of hard copy books and physical subscriptions declined from 44% in 2010 to 33% this year.
· Categories with growing global purchase intent include computer/game software (+18%), entertainment tickets (+10%), computer/game hardware (+6%), video/music production (+5%), cars/motorcycle and accessories (+4%) and apparel/accessories/shoes/jewelry (+1%).
· More than one-quarter (26%) of global respondents plan to purchase food and beverage products via an online connected device in the next 3 to 6 months — a jump from 18% reported in 2010.
Also see the Infographic “The Pre-Purchase Habits of Shoppers” and our previous blogposts, “Why Shopping Will Never Be the Same” and “Tablets Change Shopping, Media Habits.”
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help digitally publish and market your content.
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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
CMO.com’s (@CMO_com) latest Guide to The Social Landscape (interactive version; pdf version), developed by 97th Floor (@chrisbennett), offers helpful analyses in the categories of
• Customer Communication
• Brand Exposure
• Traffic to Your Site
• and SEO
for the social media marketing sites of
• Twitter
• Facebook
• StumbleUpon
• Google+
• Pinterest
• Reddit
• YouTube
• SlideShare
• Delicious
• Digg
• Flickr
• LinkedIn
• Quora
• and Instagram.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you leverage the power of social media marketing for your branded content.
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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
The above Infographic (enlarge it) is by Fast Company (@FastCompany) in its September 2012 issue (#therules). Submit your own rule.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategize and execute social media marketing for your brand.
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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
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.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
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.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
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.
Floatingsheep.org (@floating_sheep), a website that maps the geographies of user-generated online content, has created the pdf booklet “Geographies of the World’s Knowledge,” a joint venture between Convoco and the Oxford Internet Institute (@oiioxford). Through creative maps, it visualizes the distribution of the world’s knowledge through 10 categories
1. Literacy and Gender
2. Internet Penetration
3. The World’s Newspapers
4. The Location of Academic Knowledge
5. Academic Knowledge and Language
6. Academic Knowledge and Publishers
7. Mapping Flickr
8. The Distribution of all Wikipedia Articles
9. Time-series of the Distribution of Biographies on Wikipedia over the Last Five Centuries
10. User-generated Content in Google
Data, evaluated in an unprecedented way, shows the current distribution of knowledge in the different parts of the globe. Some of the implications of this are surprising, others are worrying. The maps visualize where the foci of knowledge — and, thus, the forces of innovation and economic growth — are located. Thanks to this scientific visualization the most important factors involved can be grasped at a glance.
The booklet is also available in interactive format for iPads.
Consider how this information should influence your publishing strategy.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan, execute, and analyze market research for your brand.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Research tab.