Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Better Metadata Will Ensure That Canadian Books Don’t Get Lost Online

We’ve been doing a lot of work around discoverability for the last year or so, especially with regard to how readers discover books—or other cultural products—online. A version of this post appeared as part of feature called “7.5 Ideas for Fixing Canadian Publishing” in the 75th Anniversary Issue of Quill & Quire, Canada’s Magazine of Book News and Reviews, April 2010.

How do readers find books today? In many respects, the same ways they always have: word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, suggestions from trusted sources such as booksellers or media reviews, and impulse buying from end caps, table displays, or homepages.

But we’re also discovering books in very new ways. For one thing, our filters are shifting. Newspaper review sections are shrinking, and there are fewer independent bookstores hand-selling books. But it’s the Internet that is really moving the needle on book discovery: the Web is where we go to find out about things, and increasingly it’s where we go to find books. Whether we buy them online or not, we look up books on Amazon or other major retailers’ sites, we join online book communities, we read blogs, we share links to books that catch our interest, and we discover books while searching or browsing online.

This is more than a change in behaviour. It also marks a sea change in book marketing. It used to be that the press release or catalogue was the foundation of the marketing plan. No more. Now it’s the metadata: the title information that publishers send out into the world about their books.

If publishers don’t begin improving the quality and depth of their metadata, they risk being lost in a sea of information and competing titles-especially the rising tide of books published outside of Canada. Good metadata makes it easier for people to find and buy books: it registers a book’s availability throughout the supply chain, allows the book to be presented on retailer websites, and primes the awareness pump for search engines, bloggers, online book communities, media, and readers of all kinds. Bad data makes books invisible in a crowded marketplace where the balance of power is shifting to readers.

If you’re a publisher, what other information could you include in your data file that would help readers - or librarians, or educators - find your books? How about expanded author information such as a detailed bio, a photo, and the author’s nationality? Or rich descriptive content like review quotes, extended book descriptions, or excerpts? Did the book get nominated for or win any awards?

Every publisher has this information. Relatively few include this rich content in their data feeds, but it’s time to do so. Above all, publishers need to own their data - to ensure its accuracy and completeness and to be authoritative sources of information about their books. It’s too valuable a resource to be treated any other way.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Super Clients, Super Websites

We’ve had the privilege of helping two very cool people launch their brand websites: Carrie McCarthy of Style Statement and Toby Nangle of Nangle+Partners.

Carrie and Toby—despite their very different businesses and audiences—came just as we like ‘em: passionate, intelligent, open-minded, and right on board the idea of strategy driving execution. We developed branding plans for both Carrie and Toby before jumping into tactical work, and it was thrilling to see things progress according to these blueprints.

Congratulations Carrie and Toby for your awesome sites, and big kudos for design and development to Vivien at VG Universe Design (for Style Statement) and Travis and Susie at Hop Studios (for Nangle+Partners).

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

What’s Your Brand’s Major Hurdle and What Can You Do About It?

Every brand has challenges. The best brands—actually, the people behind the best brands—know this, identify the challenges, and come up with solutions to at least minimize them and at best overcome them. Mediocre brands endure a perennial state of a problem’s existing but being ignored in the hopes it will somehow take care of itself or that people—read, audiences—won’t mind too much.

When a brand problem occurs on its public-facing website, it’s a big deal because websites obviously represent such a crucial touchpoint. Following are issues on all too many brand websites:

• failure to state up front what the brand or company is and does, and/or to explain this enough,
• insistence on brand features to the exclusion of benefits,
• presenting in a bland, cold, or otherwise unappealing tone,
• overestimation of the amount of time users want to spend on the site,
• failure to address audiences’ needs, manifested in non-user-centric navigation and/or site behaviour, aka ...
• designing the site according to internal understanding of the brand/company and not according to what audiences want to learn and find.

All of these mistakes are very easy to make, and again, they’re commonly allowed to persist because they’re “not dealbreakers.” Says who? Certainly not the visitors who walk away because of them, since they’re not talking—they’re gone.

Does your website suffer from any of them? We’ll be reviewing ours over the next few months to see where we can improve (do let us know if you have suggestions), but in the meantime, here are a couple of examples of brands that have taken the challenge of confronting—and we think, solving—a major issue they faced.

Brand: Bookriff (currently in closed BETA)
Challenge: Convey a very cool but rather complicated idea as simply as possible so visitors don’t lose interest/get confused/feel it’s too complicated and navigate away from the site.
Solution: Main benefit is written in bold—“build your own book”—with clear explanatory text right below. But most importantly, they include a prominent link to a high-quality how-to video for visitors who would rather learn audio-visually, as well as a link allowing them to try out the concept. We’re excited about Bookriff!

Brand: VisionCritical
Challenge: Bring humanity, energy, and warmth to what could be a very cold, impersonal site (VisionCritical is an online panel research and interactive technology company). Market research sites are often plagued by jargon and boring language.
Solution: On balance, ambitious and interesting copy and content. Lots and lots of video with employees talking like people really do (not canned) about what moves them and excites them. Sometimes the language gets carried away, but for the most part it’s way, way above average for its sector. Take the following for example:

With Vision Critical, grassroots insight is always on, poised to deliver when you need it. Discover and amplify what moves your biggest fans. Find out what your customers want right now. Find out what little touches keep them loyal. See trendsetting customers for what they are: a wealth of winning strategy waiting to be tapped.

Our interactive technology, strategic research and global panels turn customer groundswell into authentic, resonant brands that move with confidence.

Right now.

Because when your customers take the lead, so does your brand.

What comes across with VisionCritical is passion—and that’s a huge achievement considering how dryly the brand could have come across with another treatment. Another nice touch is their interview series: check one out at http://j.mp/6atLaN

So what’s your branding challenge?

And what will you do about it?

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

How to Get Your Target Audience to Open Your Emails

For starters, don’t include the word “free.”

Way back in 2007, Mailchimp, a company specializing in sending clients’ email newsletters, published an excellent article on what works and doesn’t work for email subject lines. We still go back to that article sometimes because it’s so helpful, so we thought we share some of its highlights and provide its link.

The article is based on Mailchimp’s study of open rates for over 200 million emails.

Highlights
Don’t

• Don’t include “free”—it’ll trigger spam filters—and avoid “help,” “percent off,” and “reminder”—they reduce open rates.
• Don’t keep repeating the same subject line from campaign to campaign. It’s good to keep basic branding intact for some consistency but then it’s important to include a focus on new content. So if your September email subject line was “Bookcentral Study Shows No Interest in New Online Bookstore” you could make the next one “Bookcentral’s Top Reading Picks for 2009.”
• Don’t send too frequently—everyone has too much information to process.
• Don’t using splashy promotional phrases, CAPS, or exclamation marks.

Do

• Do keep subject lines short—50 characters or less.
• Do make it clear that your information is timely (e.g., details on an upcoming conference’s speakers).
• Do make it a “newsy” headline with information designed to pique your readers’ curiosity (then make sure you satisfy their curiosity in the newsletter).
• Do put yourself in your readers’ shoes—they are pressed for time and they’re only going to open your email if the subject line is relevant, respectful, interesting, and useful.

Mailchimp ends with this advice: “When it comes to subject lines, don’t sell what’s inside. Tell what’s inside.”

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Launching a Whitepaper

We’ve been working with Launchfire, a leading interactive promotions agency, on a new series of whitepapers, and the first one was just released. The topic this time around is how to motivate consumers with interactive promotions. The premise is that the advertiser-consumer value exchange that has fueled the advertising business for the last 50 years (i.e., 22 minutes of television show wrapped around eight minutes of advertising) needs to be adapted and applied to the Internet.

Interactive promotions—advergames, contests, and other viral promotions—activate this value exchange in a dramatic way. Because of this, spending on interactive promotions is expected to overshadow online search and display advertising by 2012.

The whitepaper presents findings from a new consumer survey and draws on Launchfire’s 10 years of experience in delivering interactive promotions for leading brands. The paper is available for $0.00 on the Launchfire website, and is well worth a read if we do say so ourselves.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

How to Tell Your Customers to Go to Hell and Have Them Love You Even More

I received a message in my inbox a little while ago that made my day. It damned me to hell and told me I was despised.

The message was from a company I have always admired. The message made me love this company even more. The company is The Onion, the very funny “news” organization that parodies the real news.

The Onion knows that anyone who likes them and their merchandise appreciates twisted humour. They know their audience expects marketing to be clever and that we’re thrilled it’s now harder for telemarketers to bombard us during Sunday dinner. They know we like to laugh, and that we don’t like earnest, insincere ploys for our attention and dollars.

The Onion knows their audience, and makes sure everything they do considers our taste and speaks to us in a unified, audacious voice.

The Onion is brilliant.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Seth Godin Wants Me, He Really Wants Me

Somewhere in my permanently backlogged RSS reader, there’s a feed from Seth Godin’s hyperactive marketing blog. It turns out that Seth has a new book coming out this fall, and he’s come up with a new way to promote it. A promotion so clever that—before you could say “act now”—I was signed off, paid up, and anxiously awaiting further news.

Here’s the necessary context: the new book is called Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, and it’s all about “groups of people aligned around an idea, connected to a leader and to each other.” The main argument of the book appears to be that the web makes it easier than ever to find and participate in your tribe, and this in turn uncorks no end of opportunities for marketers and other tribe-interested folk the world over.

But who cares what the book is about. I bought it because of the promotion.

Here’s the invite from Seth’s promotional message yesterday:

I’d like to invite you to join a members-only tribe. A tribe for marketers, for leaders, for those focused on building communities or creating products or spreading ideas.

This online community will live on a site we’ve created that will feature blogs, forums, social networking, comments, photos, videos and a job board. And it’s by invitation only until October. Spots are limited and early members get privileges and bragging rights.

Members get a password and the privilege of meeting each other, posting thoughts, connecting to big ideas or projects and more.

The catch is you have to pre-order Tribes and send Seth your proof of purchase in order to get a password to join this new online community. “It’s not about selling more books, of course,” says Seth. “It’s about creating a small hurdle to get the right people in the door.”

Genius. Here’s why:

• Who doesn’t want to be “the right people.” (Where do I order my copy?)
• The invite is time-limited and creates an incredibly effective sense of urgency. (How soon can I buy?)
• The invite appears to offer real value—an exclusive online community of like-minded folks. (I’d be crazy not to buy this. These are my people.)
• The promo proves the central argument of the book—tribes good, join one now—as well as a minor argument that the most powerful tribes are those that are not open to everyone. (This guy’s really on to something. Do you take Amex?)

We spend a lot of time at Turner-Riggs working on strategies for better book marketing, and this is as nifty an idea as we’ve seen recently. Months in advance of publication, Seth has engaged his community of interest (the term we use around here for “tribe”), cranked up the pre-sales for the book, and seeded the marketplace with lots of good word of mouth. I’m in the tribe, if only to see what happens next.