Landing Page Infographic by KISSmetrics (@KISSmetrics).
Search Engine marketing agency Trada (@Trada) held a webinar today explaining "Landing Page Psychology:"
Visitors are likely to have a certain amount of wariness as they're asked to part with money or personal information. Use the following elements to work toward removing this friction from the buying or decision-making cycles.
Virginia Heffernan (@page88) writes in The New York Times (@nytimes) that spelling has become a major problem in publishing. “Bad spellers, of course, can be sublime writers and good spellers punctilious duds.”
Book publishers used to struggle mightily to conceal an author’s errors; publishers existed to hide those mistakes, some might say. But lately the vigilance of even the great houses has flagged, and typos are everywhere. Curious readers now get regular glimpses of raw and frank and interesting mistakes that give us access to unedited minds. Lately, in a big new memoir from a fancy imprint, I came across “peddle” for “pedal.” How did it happen?
Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.
There is also “pressure to publish more books more quickly than ever,” an editor at a major publishing house explained. Many publishers now skip steps. “In the past, you really readied the book in several discrete stages,” Paul Elie, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux (@FSG_Books), explained. “Manuscript, galley proofs, revised proofs, blue lines. You marked your changes at each stage, and then the compositor incorporated them and sent you the next stage. Now there are intermediate stages; authors will email in ‘one last correction,’ or we’ll produce intermediate stages of proof — the text is fluid, in motion, and this leads to typos.”
Authors, too, bear some blame for the typo explosion....
Craig Silverman, a Canadian journalist with a book and a website about corrections called Regret the Error (@CraigSilverman), expressed chagrin. “We seem to keep removing steps that involve editing and checking and don’t bother to think about how we replace them with something better,” he told me.
Be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard of more than 300 links and RSS feeds assembled specifically for publishing and marketing professionals. Especially see the resources in the Editing tab.
Twitter Infographic by Touch (@touchagency).
Jonathan Richman (@jonmrich), Group Director, Strategic Planning for Possible Worldwide (@possible), writes on Warc (@WarcEditors) that if consumers don’t love your Web marketing, it may as well be invisible. And it’s difficult to conduct a SWOT analysis to discover how your competitor stacks up against you because, “when it comes to digital, everything is your competitor.”
Your competitors in digital are everything else that takes time away from your digital program. Everything. Your competitors aren’t just a product in the same category or even brands in the same industry. It’s everything. That means that your competition online isn’t your arch nemesis’ brand site, but it’s also episodes of Family Guy on Hulu. It’s Lolcats1 and Perez Hilton’s blog. Sure, you may not admit to visiting any of these, but someone is accounting for the millions of visitors a month to these sites.
Richman offers a list of digital marketing sins that cause your customers to say “We Hate Your .com”:
· Blunder #1: Trying to Do It All
· Blunder #2: Random Targeting
· Blunder #3: Death by Boredom
· Blunder #4: All for one and… all for one
Let Somersault help you succeed in digitally marketing your brand.
Sell the sizzle along with the steak. That advertising mantra is exemplified in STA Travel’s (@statravelAU) I Want To Know viral video marketing campaign (the above video is 1 of 3).
Karl Krantz of the Start Up Daily (@thestartupdaily) says it’s “an example of advertising done right....it makes me want to travel....for a video commissioned by a travel agency, you can’t get a better emotional response than that.”
It's not important what your marketing says, it’s important how it leaves people feeling. Show your customers what could be, inspire them to live better.
Nick Morris of Internet Marketing Adelaide (@WebMarkAdelaide) interviews Adam Fyfe, the “Move, Eat, Learn” campaign coordinator. Morris asks, “What were your objectives for this project?” Fyfe says,
At a brand level we had a need to increase awareness of our brand. At a more personal level, it was about putting some excitement back into what should be an inspiring industry.
Let Somersault help create a strategic and effective ad campaign for your brand.
More than 70,000 leaders attended the Willow Creek Association Global Leadership Summit (@wcagls) (#wcagls) Aug. 11-12. Its objective is “to transform Christian leaders around the world with an annual injection of vision, skill development, and inspiration for the sake of the local church.” Internationally known speakers offered attendees practical development insights.
Bill Hybels (@billhybels) began the summit with 5 critical questions:
1. What is your current leadership challenge level at work?
2. What is your plan for dealing with challenging people in your organization?
3. Are you naming, facing, and resolving the problems that exist in your church or organization?
4. When was the last time you re-examined the core of what your organization is all about?
5. Have you had your leadership bell rung recently?
Read summaries of all the presentations at the GLS blog. Also see Matt Perman's (@mattperman) blog What's Best Next.
The latest in the Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) / Digital Book World (@digibookworld) free Webcast series, "Digital Textbooks: Innovations From the Academic Business Model" (#dbw) featured panelists Matt MacInnis, CEO, Inkling (@inkling), Eric Frank, co-founder, Flat World Knowledge (@flat_world), and Brett Sandusky, director of product innovation for Kaplan Publishing (@ReadKaplan).
The panelists all agreed that with expansion of digital capabilities, publishing has become an ongoing venture with continuous opportunities for improvement, thanks to the 2-way communication with readers. MacInnis said the iPad is the vehicle that’s reinventing the textbook from the bottom up. Inkling doesn’t try to emulate a book; e.g., it doesn’t paginate. He said Inkling’s vision for publishing is moving “from pages to objects, from serial to hierarchical, from monolithic to modular, from static to dynamic, from passive to interactive.”
The discussion's archive is available until August 16 and can be found here.
An article in SplatF (@splatf) by Dan Frommer (@fromedome) displays the new “red vs. blue” map published by Jumptap (@Jumptap), a mobile ad network, which highlights the dominant smartphone platform in each state. In particular, it seems that the South and West are Google Android country, while the North and Midwest favor Apple’s iPhone. And New York is still BlackBerry-dominated.
Something to consider when creating mobile apps.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil (@KurzweilAINews) was interviewed on Jimmy Kimmel Live about his vision of humans merging with technology in the coming years to create The Singularity. The above videos are Part 1 and 2 of that interview. If even a tenth of what he predicts comes true, it will further revolutionize the world.
You’ll also want to read our previous blogpost “2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal.”
And you’ll want to listen to this On The Media (@onthemedia) segment, “Our Future with Technology.”
What do you see as the implications of these possibilities from a Christian point of view? From a publishing point of view? Add your comments below.
Join Somersault (@smrsault) in keeping an eye on how today’s technology will influence our future by reading the Somersault Futurist Daily News and using the SomersaultNOW dashboard of more than 300 articles and RSS feeds designed for publishers and marketers; especially note the Future tab. And tell your colleagues. Thanks!
This article in The New York Times (@nytimes) says, “The publishing industry has expanded in the past three years as Americans increasingly turned to ebooks and juvenile and adult fiction, according to a new survey of thousands of publishers, retailers, and distributors that challenges the doom and gloom that tends to dominate discussions of the industry’s health.”
BookStats, a comprehensive survey conducted by two major trade groups that was released early Tuesday, reveals that in 2010 publishers generated net revenue of $27.9 billion, a 5.6% increase over 2008. Publishers sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1% increase since 2008.
The Association of American Publishers (@AmericanPublish) and the Book Industry Study Group (@BISG) collaborated on the report and collected data from 1,963 publishers, including the six largest trade publishers. The survey encompassed five major categories of books: trade, K-12 school, higher education, professional, and scholarly.
“The printed word is alive and well whether it takes a paper delivery or digital delivery,” says Tina Jordan, vice president of the Association of American Publishers.
Also see coverage by Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly), “Industry Sales Rose 3.1% in 2010; Trade Ebook Sales the Big Winner.”
Follow all the news about publishing by using SomersaultNOW, our free online dashboard of articles and RSS feeds from more than 300 media sources.