Results tagged “tools of change” from Chad

These are my random notes from Gavin Bell's session: "The Long Tail Needs Community" I didn't include all of the book-centric stuff, and instead tried to keep it to the universal truth of web sites and online communities. Funny aside, the opening lyrics of the song that came on at the end of Gavin's presentation were "Wake up everyone" from the song "Make it mine" by Jason Mraz I am loving this irony! Well done Ollie the sound guy, who was the one who picked it. In my role as production coordinator for previous sessions, I lived for finding poingient and ironic songs to play at conferences.

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Music always gets listened to. Who has an unlistened to album? Who has an unread book?

You can't do the last.fm data modeling for books like you can do for music.

Digital is easier. It can be remembered, annotated and stored. Then we can process it. The tools in one area, however don't always work in other areas.

Making reading work harder. It changes them when they read a book. We need to get their opinions and reactions etc.

We can help our readers by scaffolding the experience and making it social. ... We can go more in-depth than book groups.

Will we be able to get the reading data from ebooks?

We're in danger of getting disintermediated with things like PDF. This post-sale data is really valuable.

I hope we can create an open-ended platform for book reading.

The clever data capture tools for ebooks will be slow to come to print books.

How do we know an out-of-print book will be in demand?

We can take a popular book and harvest the interest from the people who read it. People are keen on annotating the books they've already got.

By publishing books you're creating a community. The people who bought the first-hand run never get the errata back to them.

What can reader themselves bring?
Recommendations, but we need to build tools to facilitate their interactions.

How can we extend the interaction?

Putting content online is a good first step.

Put reviews on the site. For bad reviews, engage with them, like Kodak does.

If you're hoping for a deeper reaction than a 3 line review, you need to know what activities people are up to.

Look deeper into Flickr for example. There are long-term deep relationships there. The same thing with Twitter. On the inside there are connections to real people and their real lives.

There's not a single social model for all book interactions. All have different needs. Travel is different than photography etc.

The community creates other objects, which will be the basis for other applications, all connected to the content you originally published.

Understanding the interactions between fellow readers. Publishers don't need to be the focus of the conversation.

Analyze the things that come from conversations about your books.

It's important to think about the social life of each social object.

You need to look at the things people create that come from your books.

Every activity we do is social in nature. (Check out the Acting with technology series from MIT press)

The people who read your book are not all the same. Make sure you recognize them as individuals. They don't want to have to create new accounts for everything you create. Understand when they come from different devices, they are still the same person.

**The role of community manager will become vital** (Aside, you should hire my wife Erin Capellman ... end of plug - Chad ;-)

People don't come to a restaurant because the tables are yellow.

Building websites is like running a bar. They come to a bar to have a good interaction with other people who are there. As a community manager, you must ensure this environment and deal with issues quickly.

You shouldn't launch a site with no budget for maintaining it, just as you wouldn't do that with an actual restaurant launch.



Make your content discoverable and that's relevant to the user. Flickr calls it "interestingness"

You want to showcase the things people are creating when they create them on your site.

Building an API is fundamental when building a social web service.

Summize built a search based on Twitter's own API.

If you're not doing this, you're missing out on orders of magnitude of activity.

And if you do, make sure you support open standards and allow connectivity. We're not building islands anymore.


What we're moving to is a role where we're brokering relationships.

Many publisher brands are generally anonymous. What does MacMillan mean as a brand? I can't really tell you.

Create a brand that has a way of interacting with people.


TAKEAWAYS

Build meaningful relationships

Think about long-term projects not just book sales.

Engage with the activities of your community, not just the people in them.

What a morning! I came to the first session of O'Reilly's Tools of Change Conference with two goals: Learn stuff and get a job. Not necessarily in that order.

So I go to the tutorial by "Twitter-famous" author Chris Brogan (aka @chrisbrogan) and I do what I do at conferences and other events - I tweet.

So I see he's got a screen up behind him but he's not at the computer. So I type a tweet, but I wait.

Then, at exactly the right moment it turned out. I struck. I posted this tweet:

Wonder if @chrisbrogan will be psyched or annoyed at me for plugging "Hire thisguychad.com " ... seriously, I'm available ;-) #toc

Then he went to his computer and updated the #toc stream, and there I was, on the big screen, fourth down, for like a half an hour.

But that didn't feel like enough. So I whipped out my flip-cam and went closer up in the room so I could capture the moment on video.

Done. But now what?

YouTube!!

So I log in to my TubeMogul.com account, uploaded the video, tagged it, and "launched" it into my YouTube account.

So I then want to tell the world what I did, cause that's what you can do with YouTube and Twitter, so I used the Firefox is.gd URL shortener to fit the link into a tweet.

Then, to my amazement, I hear Chris mention how great a Flip video camera is and what you can do with it.

So, as someone who has attended my share of conferences and enjoyed enhancing the conversation with tips from my unique perspective, I chimed in with my YouTube link.

One problem though, the link was bad. D'OH!

So Chris tries to show off this very meta moment, and it goes to the wrong page. Then, my wireless goes down RIGHT THEN so I can't update.

Nightmare.

I take some well-deserved ribbing for "side-swiping" him during the workshop, but we eventually get back on track.

Meantime, @suzaxtell tries to re-tweet my tweet, but there were two problems, one she wrote @Chad Capellman which doesn't link to my twitter account, and she re-tweeted the broken link.

I think I'll be looking back at this exchange a lot. It highlighted a lot of elements of the immediacy of social media tools, what can be done with them, and how easily things can run off the side of the road without meaning to or even sometimes being aware that it happened until it's too late.

Click here for notes from this session. Like I said, what a morning!!

This is from the first half of Chris Brogan's Blogging and Social Networking tutorial UPDATED at Noon. You might also get a chuckle of my mis-adventure post Guerilla marketing at Tools of Change conference that occurred during the same session.


Should you be everywhere? I don't think so anymore. If you're going to be everywhere, you have to provide customer service everywhere.

Try it in the order of things you can pull away from if you need to pull it away.

You have to segregate your email lists. You can do this with some technology.

Batchbook.com is a good site for managing an email database. 


We can do so many things that go past the page if we think about it. They can augument and build better relationships
etc. there's way to monetize it.

Just because you think you're so speical doesn't mean you can't try sales approaches that others are doing. And not just your competitors.

Another word I'm not a fan of is wiki.

We wrote our entire book in Google docs right in real time.

A: to time issue - More hands lighten the load. Different people do it in different ways. There are customer service issues and sales issues that different people can use.

How do we get an American Idol for books? There's a lot to it. There's always going to be editorial knowledge, you know what you're going to do there.

There's a lot of social software tools for new authors coming up.

You could have three free chapters "fight to the death" and have people vote which one goes forward.

We want people to want our opinion, right?

I challenge you to tell me why a blog isn't a better place to refer to than a website.

(On his Facebook reservations) I want a relationship and most people try to sell me, and I'm not buying it.

Blogging to me is a way not to get on as many planes. If you can be there before the sale and help them make it ...

When you can curate to small group level, you have something meaningful, because then you can get those people to spread it out further.

Pay for people so you don't have to re learn how to invent the wheel.


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First half notes:

When my wife comes back from a bookclub meeting, I never hear a think about the book.

I have solved the book moving problem in my life - (throw them away to have people help you move, use the library, review books on blogs to get freebies)

We need to focus on ways for people to distribute my books.

You lose money every time you release a new book - it's called marketing.

Thinking of yourself as an information broker might change what we're doing.

Using settings is a form of product placement - I'm a little worried about it and pragmatic.

Community and pockets of sale - SM and blogging etc. Your communities are clumped into smaller groups. What's a success in books? 5,000? That's easier than going after the million. If you could find more of these systems of thousands ...

Cafe-shaped conversations. As opposed to McDonalds, WalMart etc. It's not that personalized.

Comic book store owners. They need to know what their audience wants to survive.

Now he's using twitter to push marketing of new comic books to @chrisbrogan ... he's cultivating my interest.

I am passionate about location-based services. Bought an iPhone because of Brightkite. (I leave a message as I'm LEAVING a place, just to be safe) "The secrets of the annotated world"

I could leave messages in the air. People who know to look can later see my annotation. Now think about that as a book. You could start leaving information to create an alternate reality like Nine Inch Nails did. It gives you an opportunity to access to more people.

"I find the comments in my blog are better than the post"

I walk away from you must login to post a comment.

Are you making it easier for me to do business with your blog? Or helping me understand the literature.

@chrisbrogan suggesta chipin.com to get people to donate money to get books to teachers.

It's not about your website, it's where the people are -

I don't try to control the message. I have a service to you.

I think of twitter as the new phone. It's a dashboard for me to do business.

If all markets are conversations, these are the tools ...

What I find out that works best to get an initiative is to point to another organization that's doing it and use it as a leverage tool.

I'm kind of back and forth on my value proposition for that particular platform (Facebook).

If I'm reaching out my hand to you, don't stick your tongue in my mouth. We're not there yet kids. Too many people are taking that approach online with social media tools.