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Philip Jones, editor of The Bookseller’s (@thebookseller) digital blog Futurebook (@TheFutureBook), interviewed Bob Stein, founder and co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, who insists publishers need to make books social and look for ways to “build the conversation around books.”

"The current system of publishing doesn't really support the shape publishing is taking on as it develops," says Stein, who founded The Voyager Company in 1985, the first commercial multimedia CD-ROM publisher. But publishers are chronically slow at recognising what is happening to them and grasping the opportunities before they emerge. Stein argues that the real innovation is happening left-of-centre in sectors such as gaming, where collaborative narratives have already taken root. "The future is being born outside their field of vision," he says.

"The idea of publishing is to move ideas around time and space," is how he sees it....His big idea now is "social reading", the concept that in the future texts will become one part of a much larger conversation that happens around them, with notes and context shared on a collaborative platform.

Stein is currently working on SocialBook — a reading platform that allows users to interact with texts, leave notes, and begin conversations around those books. The site will have free and paid-for areas, though the commercial model is not yet finalized. "It begins as YouTube for social documents in the free space, but then we'll build Amazon for publishing," says Stein.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you build the conversation around your books.

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

This video by Salon Alpin tells the story of a bookmark stuck in a forgotten book that is one day knocked over by wind. The bookmark experiences its environment by surfing the pages that turn in to ocean-waves, enjoying the ride of its life. As the book cover closes, light reveals new challenges.

See 3 videos that show the making of the above video.

Also see our blogposts, “EPILOGUE: the future of print” and "The 3 Qualities That Make a YouTube Video Go Viral."

If you love books like we (@smrsault) do, we invite you to make our SomersaultNOW online dashboard your personal computer homepage (see instructions).

Internet Retailer (@IR_Magazine) senior editor Zak Stambor (@ZakStamborIR) writes about the requirement of brands to properly use social media marketing.

With consumers spending so much of their time on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and the like, some retailers are brushing aside questions about the return on social marketing dollars. “Measuring the ROI of social media is like measuring the ROI of air conditioning,” says Lisa Gavales, Express Inc.'s chief marketing officer. “It's necessary.”

Many others agree. 76% of marketers in a recent Forrester Research Inc. survey said social networks are key elements to building their brands. Moreover, 71% said that by leveraging social media they could gain an edge on their competition.

But just routinely posting new arrivals to a Facebook page or “pinning” images to a Pinterest board won't cut it. Consumers spend time on social networks to interact with friends, not brands.

Perhaps no retailer is as all-in on social networks as Wal-Mart (WalmartLabs blog & @WalmartLabs).

Read this in full.

If Wal-Mart believes in social media marketing for its brand growth, shouldn’t you?

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help create your social media strategy.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

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The public radio program about language, A Way with Words (@wayword), asks, “Why are some book titles so incredibly long?”

A caller complains about book-title inflation, usually consisting of a shorter title followed by a colon and a longer subtitle that seems to sound important and ends with the words “and What To Do About It.” Cohost Grant Barrett (@grantbarrett) explains that such extra-long book titles have long been a form of search optimization by publishers and marketing departments. The more searchable keywords in the title, the more copies sold.

Listen above. Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you select the most effective title, and other marketing necessities, for your book.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Wieden + Kennedy's (@WiedenKennedy) production of the universally heartwarming “Thank you, Mom” campaign for Procter & Gamble (@ProcterGamble) originally launched for the 2010 Winter Olympics. Its messaging continues for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London with “Best Job,” a cinematic and emotional anthem. It has achieved more than 5 million views online and it won 5 Lions at Cannes last month, including golds in Film and Film Craft. Adweek (@Adweek) says:

The new spot is a beautiful testament to parents around the world who have helped their children through the grueling daily grind toward becoming an Olympic athlete.

The tagline of the online-only ad is, “The hardest job in the world is the best job in the world.”

Its new companion video spot, “Kids” (already reaching 1.7 million views), has a similar heart-tugging payout at the end:

What makes these videos so effective and viral? They’re

·         beautifully filmed, directed, and edited

·         poignant

·         emotional

·         brief

·         relevant

·         able to draw the viewer in to self-identify with the message.

In other marketing news relating to the Olympics, Marketing Land (@Marketingland) reports that Twitter and NBC have announced a new partnership centering on Twitter’s new “hashtag page” concept at twitter.com/#Olympics (distinct from the general search hashtag #olympics).

Twitter will have staff monitoring Olympic-related tweets from athletes, coaches, Olympics officials, NBC personalities and others and curating the best content surrounding the #Olympics hashtag on a single page.

NBC will promote the page and the hashtag during its on-air coverage across each of the networks providing coverage, including in primetime coverage on NBC itself.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, "The 3 Qualities That Make A YouTube Video Go Viral."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you produce strategic viral videos, and publish and digitally market pbooks and ebooks.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

See the SlideShare deck page.

See the report in pdf.

According to a new survey, 56% of Americans have a personal profile on a social network, up 4% from 2011. And the number of people who say they follow brands or companies online has almost doubled in the last 2 years, to 33% of those polled.

These stats are from The Social Habit 2012 study by Edison Research (@edisonresearch) (SlideShare; Blog) and Arbitron (@ArbitronInc).

See The Social Habit website (@thesocialhabit).

WCG (@WCGWorld) highlights the following from the report:

·         Social networkers check their profiles often

·         Understanding the mobile experience is critical

·         Visual content is king

·         Users of social networking sites are following brands now more than ever

·         Facebook does impact buying decisions

·         It is not all about the coupon

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Report: Half of Americans Are Now Social Networkers.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically leverage and effectively communicate your brand message using social media.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Google’s Nexus 7 is the latest tablet on the tech scene, along with Apple’s iPad, Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and Microsoft’s Surface.

See a comparison chart above and another one by The Verge (@verge).

See all tablets compared at The Verge.

A new study by Gartner (@Gartner_inc) says consumers are choosing to use tablets now for some activities they previously used to use PCs for.

According to the findings, the “main activities moving from PCs to media tablets” included checking email, a shift observable among 81% of contributors, and reading the news, on 69%.

Over 50% prefer reading newspapers, magazines, and books on screens rather than on paper.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you use current technology to publish and market your brand’s content.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

This week’s The New Yorker (@NewYorker) cover bitingly captures how obsessed Americans are with being online all the time, no matter what we’re doing and who we’re with!

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you capitalize on the digital revolution to strategically and effectively publish and market your brand’s content.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

New York-based start-up Zola Books (@zolabooks) is planning to replace the Google eBooks re-seller progam (to end in January; originally embraced by the American Booksellers Association), as the ecommerce platform of choice for independent bookstores selling ebooks.

According to Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld), “Zola will offer readers a social e-reader and bookstore, independent bookstores a new place to sell ebooks, and publishers another storefront to display their wares. When it launches to the public on September 19, the company plans to make a splash, offering readers a sizable selection of ebooks, including titles that will only be available on Zola.”

The plan is to offer a selling experience for independent bookstores that is easier, more attractive and more profitable than Google eBooks was.

Zola allows each independent bookstore to create its own storefront that it curates with titles it thinks its readers will like. Each bookseller is responsible for marketing their storefront but the proceeds could be worth it. Zola will pay independent bookstores 60% of net proceeds from every sale.

With Zola, publishers get a straight 70% of every sale and then Zola and its partners split the rest after paying a 4% credit card transaction fee....

In addition to providing a storefront for bookstores, Zola is providing pages for publishers, book reviewers and influential bloggers. Books sold through those pages will net whoever maintains the page an affiliate commission, which will vary in size depending on who or what the affiliate is. Each storefront comes with tools that allow for simple integration with all major social platforms so pages can be kept up-to-date by tweeting.

Read this in full.

Tech Crunch (@TechCrunch) reports, “The company’s Zola Social Reader will work on the Kindle Fire, Nook, and iPad. Zola Books will make both native apps as well as HTML5 apps available for its readers.”

Given the controversy surrounding ebook pricing right now, the company has decided to hold off from selling books until the publishers and the US Department of Justice have settled their current issues. Zola Books plans to use an agency model for selling books, meaning it will give authors and/or publishers full control over the pricing of content their are publishing exclusively on the site. By the time it launches publicly, the company expects to have every publisher on board. Exclusive content on the site will be offered DRM free.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market ebooks and pbooks, as well as stay current with the quickly changing digital publishing world.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Floatingsheep.org (@floating_sheep), a website that maps the geographies of user-generated online content, says the word “church” is most often found in tweets originating in the Southeast United States, while tweets about “beer” are most common in the Northeast. The depiction of this in the map above strongly aligns with the multi-state area known as the Bible Belt (NC, SC, GA, KY, TN, AL, MS, AR, LA, OK, TX).

The Bible Belt is an informal term for a region in the southeastern and south-central United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. The Bible Belt consists of much of the Southern United States extending west into Texas and Oklahoma.

See CNN’s report.

In an earlier study, Floatingsheep investigated the relative number of mentions of the word “church” in placemarks uploaded to Google. The results are reflected in the above map.

Interestingly, while the “Bible belt” in the physical world is often talked about as being synonymous with the American South, the virtual “Bible belt” additionally incorporates large parts of the Midwest.

Also see our blogpost, “Mississippi Is Most Religious USA State.”

Where would you have the most success in distributing your content?

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.