Business Insider SAI’s (@SAI) Chart of the Day (@chartoftheday) above depicts book popularity on Goodreads (@goodreads) by members listing the books they’re reading or would like to read, and the spike a book receives after it's mentioned by NPR (@NPR) or The New York Times (@nytimes).
Let Somersault (@smrsault) help your brand’s publicity.
And bookmark our SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially see the Marketing/PR tab.
Hans Villarica (@hansvillarica) writes in The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) about the study, A Stranger's Touch: Effects of Accidental Interpersonal Touch on Consumer Evaluations and Shopping Time, published in the Journal of Consumer Research (@JCRNEWS).
It turns out that consumers who are physically touched in stores judge products more harshly, leave more quickly, and are less willing to spend than those who aren’t, especially if they’re touched by a man.
Implication: Although retailers try to drive as many customers to their stores as possible, overcrowding may drive them away as well.
Be sure to bookmark and use daily our (@smrsault) SomersaultNOW online dashboard designed specifically for professionals in the book trade.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Ann Patchett | ||||
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Novelist Ann Patchett discusses on The Colbert Report the importance of brick-and-mortar bookstores and explains what prompted her to open Parnassus Books (@ParnassusBooks1) in Nashville.
In Fast Company (@FastCompany), NYU journalism professor Adam L. Penenberg (@penenberg) interviews self-published author Charles Orlando, who’s written two volumes of The Problem With Women… Is Men. Orlando has sold upwards of 15,000 copies of his work as a Kindle, iPad, and iPhone ebook, as well as a traditional paperback, generating around $130,000 since its release in November 2008.
Which self-publishing service did you choose?
BookSurge Publishing (now CreateSpace, @CreateSpace). BookSurge was partnered with Amazon.com, and once I was published, my book was automatically included on Amazon.com (this was 2007/2008, before there was a real ebook publishing effort). It was print-on-demand with really good quality, so I didn't need to hold an inventory and I didn't need to be part of the backend stuff: shipping, fulfillment, returns, chargebacks, etc. Plus, I would get all the benefit of being grouped with best-selling authors, receive reviews, and more. They had multiple levels of service – editing, marketing, public relations, custom covers, and much more – but I elected to go with a flexible offering (allowing me a custom interior, custom cover, and no more than 10 interior illustrations).
What did all this cost?
Editor: $500 (flat fee)
BookSurge publishing package: $900 (now priced lower)
Cover design and all artwork: $750
25 copies (for review): Free.
Total: $2,150
He goes on to explain how he marketed his book.
I started a blog: three posts a week. Simultaneously, I spun up my Facebook and Twitter (@charlesjorlando) efforts and started publishing my blog posts to my Facebook Page. But I could see that readers had to leave Facebook or Twitter to interact with what I had written. As a test, I just wrote on Facebook, using the Notes application on my Page. And... voila... increased engagement and interactivity; more comments, more sharing on individuals' Walls. I took down my blog at the end of 2009 and in an effort to meet my audience where they "lived" I transitioned all my efforts to Facebook (and some on Twitter). My Facebook Fan Page was now a few hundred strong.
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you with your publishing, marketing, and branding needs.
Be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially take advantage of the list of self-publishers in the Publishers tab.
Articles in Harvard Business Review (@HarvardBiz) focus on the reinvention of retail that’s going on right now. “The Future of Shopping” explains that when the dot-com bubble burst 10 years ago, the ensuing collapse wiped out half of all online retailers. Today, e-commerce is well established and much digital retailing is now highly profitable.
As it evolves, digital retailing is quickly morphing into something so different that it requires a new name: omnichannel retailing. The name reflects the fact that retailers will be able to interact with customers through countless channels — websites, physical stores, kiosks, direct mail and catalogs, call centers, social media, mobile devices, gaming consoles, televisions, networked appliances, home services, and more.
If traditional retailers hope to survive, they must embrace omnichannel retailing and also transform the one big feature internet retailers lack — stores — from a liability into an asset. They must turn shopping into an entertaining, exciting, and emotionally engaging experience by skillfully blending the physical with the digital. They must also hire new kinds of talent, move away from outdated measures of success, and become adept at rapid test-and-learn methodologies.
A successful omnichannel strategy should not only guarantee a retailer’s survival — no small matter in today’s environment — but also deliver a revolution in customers’ expectations and experiences.
Read this in full (registration required). See a PDF version here and here.
In “Retail Isn’t Broken. Stores Are,” J.C. Penney CEO Ron Johnson is interviewed:
When Johnson joined Apple, in 2000, as the senior vice president for retail, conventional wisdom held that a computer maker couldn’t sell computers. Johnson promptly tossed out the retailing rule book and built the Apple Store from scratch. “The Apple Store succeeded not because we tweaked the traditional model,” Johnson says. “We reimagined everything.” Today, Apple stores are the highest performing stores in the history of retailing.
In November, Johnson took the reins as CEO of the venerable J.C. Penney department store. Times are tough for many retailers, but Johnson, characteristically, sees the chance to reinvent the department store as a great opportunity. He also understands the challenges ahead. “A store has got to be much more than a place to acquire merchandise,” he says. “It’s got to help people enrich their lives.”
Johnson discusses his vision of the future of retail and shares insights about innovation, leadership, and why he trusts his gut.
Read this in full (registration is required). See a PDF version.
“Know What Your Customers Want Before They Do” says
Shoppers once relied on familiar salespeople to help them find exactly what they wanted—and sometimes to suggest additional items they hadn’t even thought of. But today’s distracted consumers, bombarded with information and options, often struggle to find products or services that meet their needs.
Advances in information technology, data gathering, and analytics are making it possible to deliver something like the personal advice of yesterday’s sales staffs. Using increasingly granular customer data, businesses are starting to create highly customized offers that steer shoppers to the “right” merchandise — at the right moment, at the right price, and in the right channel.
But few companies can do this well. The article demonstrates how retailers can hone their “next best offer” (NBO) capability by breaking the problem into 4 steps: defining objectives, gathering data (about your customers, your products, and the purchase context), analyzing and executing, and learning and evolving. Citing successful strategies in companies such as Tesco, Zappos, Microsoft, and Walmart, they provide a framework for nailing the NBO.
Read this in full (registration required). See a PDF version.
Also see HBR’s portal The Future of Retail.
To stay current with news about publishing, consumers, branding, retailing, and more, bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
Smartphone-toting consumers are embracing a world in which they can find out about (and potentially buy) anything they see or hear, even if they don’t know what it is or can’t describe it in words. According to trendwatching.com (@trendwatching), the concept of “Point—Know—Buy” will reshape consumers’ info-expectations (“infolust”), search behavior, and purchasing patterns. Here are some of the drivers trendwatching identifies:
· QR Codes
· Augmented Reality
· Tagging
· Visual Search
Available online services that accommodate those drivers include WordLens (@wordlens), leafsnap (@leafsnap), Skymap (@googleskymap), Shazam (@Shazam), Aurasma (@aurasma), Blippar (@blippar), and others.
Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you track and act on trends that impact your brand.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
The popularity and sustainability of technology depends to some degree on its favorable use by consumers. Often the “next new shiny thing” bursts onto our radar and we get excited, which feeds the hype, creating momentum, until we drop it for the next new shiny thing. Unless we judge it to be valuable and necessary. So it is with social media. And marketers today must understand this technology cycle if we are to properly and efficiently communicate our marketing messages.
Analyst firm Gartner Inc. (@Gartner_inc) describes this process as The Hype Cycle. It identifies peak points in visibility over time for technologies, highlighting the common pattern of over-enthusiasm, disillusionment, and eventual realism that accompanies each new technology and innovation:
· The technology trigger
· Peak of inflated expectations
· Trough of disillusionment
· Slope of enlightenment
· Plateau of productivity
It’s a useful chart to understand both the trajectory of technology and the actions of consumer behavior.
In the 2011 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle, activity streams, wireless power, Internet TV, NFC payment, and private cloud computing are some of the technologies that have moved into the Peak of Inflated Expectations. And ebook readers are moving up the Slope of Enlightenment. (Compare the 2011 Cycle with 2010 and 2009 above.) Gartner dissects 4 themes in current technology trends:
The connected world: Advances in embedded sensors, processing and wireless connectivity are bringing the power of the digital world to objects and places in the physical world….
Interface trends: User interfaces are slow-moving areas with significant recent activity. Speech recognition was on the original 1995 Hype Cycle and has still not reached maturity, and computer-brain interfaces will evolve for at least another 10 years before moving out of research and niche status. However, a new entry for natural language question answering recognizes the impressive and highly visible achievement of IBM's Watson computer in winning TV's Jeopardy! general knowledge quiz against champion human opponents. Gesture recognition has also been launched into the mainstream through Microsoft's Kinect gaming systems, which is now being hacked by third parties to create a range of application interfaces….
Analytical advances: Supporting the storage and manipulation of raw data to derive greater value and insight, these technologies continue to grow in capability and applicability....
New digital frontiers: Crossing the traditional boundaries of IT, new capabilities are reaching levels of performance and pricing that will fundamentally reshape processes and even industries. Examples on this year's Hype Cycle include 3D printing and bioprinting (of human tissue), and mobile robots….
Read the news release in full.
Read the Hype Cycle Special Report.
Let Somersault (@smrsault) help your brand take publishing and marketing advantage of today’s developing technologically.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
How do people discover books in the digital age? Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld) reports that, according to a survey presented at the Digital Book World conference (#dbw12) in New York last month, nearly half of readers discover new books through the recommendations of family and friends, and nearly a third discover them at bookstores.
· 49% - Family and friends’ recommendations
· 30% - Bookstore staff recommendations
· 24% - Online and print advertising
How will readers discover, buy, and read new books as e-reader and tablet ownership increase and traditional books sales channels are challenged?
A new service that wants to help in this regard is Small Demons (@smalldemons). It takes all of the meaningful data from all favorite books and puts it in one place. Small Demons collects and catalogs the music, movies, people, and objects mentioned in books and makes those details searchable, creating a universe of book details, or as the service calls it, a storyverse.
Book Baby (@BookBaby) says Small Demons CEO Valla Vakili was so intrigued by the description of Marseilles in Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Chaos that he replaced the Paris leg of his trip with Marseilles, an experience so inspiring that the concept of Small Demons was born.
In a recent interview with GalleyCat (@GalleyCat), Small Demons VP of content and community Richard Nash explained: “If you are an author, we are going to create verified author pages. You’re going to be able to add biographical information, information about your own books and other features. You will also get access to the editing tools that we are using to fix the computer’s mistakes. We know algorithms can’t get everything right and even when they get something right, they can’t necessarily provide the nuance that a human being can.”
Nash continued: “A computer can tell us how many times a song appears in a book. But it can’t tell us that it is the song that the couple dances to at the wedding reception or the song the jilted lover plays after being dumped. It can’t tell you the emotional resonance of it. So we are going to be relying on librarians and authors and gifted amateurs to come in and help us fix and add and weight and evaluate all the data we are generating. Individual authors will have that ability over an extended period of time.”
Other services that aids in discovering new books are Rethink Books (@RethinkBooks) and its FirstChapters (@first_chapters) platform, and Findings (@findings), a tool for sharing clips while using Amazon Kindle.
Other articles about the challenge of finding books:
Enhanced Editions (@enhancededition), “On Book Discoverability, Discovery, and Good Marketing.”
Austin American Statesman (@statesman), “‘Discoverability’ key in publishing industry's transformation.”
AARdvark (@digitaar), “The Key to Saving Publishing and New Writers — Branding the Publisher to the Consumer.”
GalleyCat (@GalleyCat), “Amazon's Book Search Visualized: Check out this nifty, homemade book recommendation engine.”
The Digital Shift (@ShiftTheDigital), "Libraries Still an Important Discovery Source for Kids' Books, Says Study."
Also see our previous blogposts, “BookRiff (@BookRiff): A Marketplace for Curators” and "How Ebook Buyers Discover Books."
Along these same lines, you’ll want to read StumbleUpon’s (@PaidDiscovery) “Creating an Infectious Brand” and “Recapping the 5 Keys to Brand Discovery.”
Stay current with publishing news when you bookmark and use daily our (@smrsault) SomersaultNOW online dashboard., especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.
In a dramatic final quarter of Super Bowl XLVI, the New York Giants came back from a halftime deficit last night to route the New England Patriots with a final score of 21-17. See the NFL (@nfl) Super Bowl Game Highlights.
The close score throughout the night kept viewers watching to the end, which was good news for advertisers, who paid $3.5 million per 30-second spot to air their commercials. If you missed the ads, you can see coverage at
· Advertising Age (@AdAge) “Instant Replay: See All the Super Bowl Spots Again and Again”
· ESPN (@espn) "Super Bowl Ads"
· Adweek (@Adweek) live blogging transcript and "The Spot: Return of the Jedi" and portions of all the spots edited into a 2-minute video
· Mashable (@mashable) “Super Bowl 2012 Commercials: Watch Them All Here”
· Unruly Media (@unrulymedia) Viral Video (@VideoChart) Chart
· USA TODAY Ad Team (@USATAdBeat) Ad Meter and “Super Bowl Ads Go To The Dogs”
· BrandBowl (@brandbowl) “Super Bowl Ad Chart” (#brandbowl)
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you advertise your brand.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.
Thinkmodo (@thinkmodo) dreamed up a publicity stunt for the movie Chronicle about three teenagers who get superpowers and can fly. The stunt? Create people-shaped motorized kites, video record them flying over New York, and hope the video goes viral. It has. In just four days, the video has more than 5 million views on YouTube. Discovery (@Discovery_News) explains the technology behind it all. And here’s a CNN report about it.
Also see our previous blogpost, “How ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ Reveals the True Meaning of Viral Content.”
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you get people talking about your brand.
And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, especially the Social Media/WOM tab.