Marketing
NaNoWriMo Publishing
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/17/2009 - 11:09Over on Communication Exchange is a blog post entitled
Fiction Writers: Find a Publisher? Self-Publish? Or Is There a Third Option?. It explores options for publishing works of fiction. I posted a comment there (which appears to still be waiting moderators approval). However, I thought it was important, so I am posting it here as well.
I would like to suggest that there are actually many different ways to be published that exist upon a continuum. At one end of the continuum is the traditional publishing where you send a manuscript to a publisher and hope to get them to do all the work.
The other end of the spectrum is the vanity press where you send a manuscript and a large enough check, and they publish your book for you and you store many books up in your attic. The former is regarded highly, and the latter, less so.
Yet all of that was based on a day when typesetting was complicated and you had to make some large number of prints to make it worthwhile.
Today, we live in a world of publishing on demand. You can publish your book at a good POD publisher and they will print out a copy whenever someone orders one. Lulu press does a great job of this and is very popular with the NaNoWriMo crowd. My middle daughter has recently published her second novel on Lulu press. Two years ago, she published Subtle Differences. This year, she has published The Silent Serian.
It has been a great experience for her. Friends and relatives and a few strangers have bought copies of her books and she has made a small amount of money off of her books.
Yet with a press like Lulu, you need to do everything, designing the cover, editing the text, laying it out, and marketing.
In these days of social media, there are a lot of new marketing opportunities and I'm starting to explore some of this with my daughter the writer, as well as my daughter the sales person. We are kicking around ways to provide editing and marketing services to self publishers on some sort of commission basis which would keep POD publishing viable for NaNoWriMo type writers.
One group that already provides a service something like this is the Writers' Collective. They act like a traditional publisher in terms of accepting, editing and marketing a book, but they use POD publishing methods to keep costs under control and make their services more accessible to smaller, less known writers.
I'm sure there are other similar efforts and I would be glad to collaborate or share ideas with people interested.
I wrote my first novel as part of NaNoWriMo two years ago. It sits partially edited on my hard disk. I'm gearing up for another effort this year and my daughters are excited and gearing up to help me market the book.
So, let's hear what others are thinking about.
Application Development in the Twenty First Century
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/12/2009 - 05:26I have been programming computers for over forty years, but it is only relatively recently that the idea of computer applications as advertising tools has caught my attention. I imagine that if anyone had presented this idea to me twenty years ago, I might have joked, “This subroutine is brought to you by Ford Motor Company”. Yet computer applications have changed considerably over the past four decades and so must our understanding of how they may be used in advertising.
Today, Digiday: APPS will explore the issues with some of the brightest people in the advertising space. However, I would like to take a step back and look at it from a different vantage, the viewpoint of an old programmer.
Marketing and advertising people are likely to look at how many people they can reach with an application, and hopefully, how engaged the viewers will become with the application. Hopefully, they will consider how closely integrated the experience of the application is with the application itself.
As an example, one of my favorite areas of exploration is virtual worlds and the virtual worlds space is rife with successes and failures when advertisers step in. When the Obama campaign placed ads on billboards in various computer games, it may not have had much of an effect on the gamers racing around the racecourse and seeing an Obama sign on the side of the racetrack. It was subtle and fit into the experience nicely, but wasn’t particularly interactive, unless something special happened when you crashed into an Obama sign, which I never heard about. Yet it was very effective in generating earned media, which sometimes can be more effective than the ad itself.
Other billboards in other games and virtual worlds have been much less successful and have attracted criticism, ridicule, or even vandalism. On the other hand, successful product integration can happen when the advertisers understand the medium and fully integrate their product in the media. Colgate made smiles in Second Life. Nike sold shoes in one virtual world which actually made you run faster in the virtual world.
Yet what about the developers themselves? What do they like? Friends of mine that develop for mobile devices are not very excited about the current development environments. Getting everything just right to be listed in the iPhone app store can be a significant challenge, even for experienced embedded device developers. This becomes even more of a challenge if you are attempting to integrate your iPhone application with other applications like Facebook. Then, there is always the concern that Apple will arbitrarily and capriciously reject your application.
Friends speak much more highly of developing for Android, but they complain that it isn’t as wide a user base and they long for a development environment that will work across a wide range of mobile devices.
Personally, I’m most interested in efforts to develop a good open source handset. OpenMoko is a project to create an open, Linux based handset. There is a handset available, which appears to be a powerful development environment. Unfortunately, it does not yet include G3 support or a camera.
Over with the web-based side of application development, everyone seeks for better authentication methods. Advertisers and marketing folks want to ‘own’ the individual, and this is best done by requiring users to use an authentication method specific to the application. Yet this is a nightmare for users. They need to remember userids and passwords to many different systems. Google and Facebook are going at it with their ‘Connect’ software. You can login to many sites that I build these days using your Facebook userid and password. Being an open source developer, I like to support OpenId. It allows users to log in with a single userid to multiple systems.
For applications that need to communicate between systems, there is OAuth which allows one application to check to see if a user is properly authenticated with another system. To what extent OpenID and OAuth becomes a key part of advertising oriented applications remains to be seen, but it seems like there are real benefits in terms of sharing data.
Just as my view of what goes into a good application has changed considerably over the past forty years, I expect it will continue to change as new ideas come forward. However, some key ideas need to be kept in mind. Successful application development requires understanding what the users really want and also requires application development environments that developers enjoy working in.
(Originally posted at Digidaydaily).
The Death of Twitter
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/12/2009 - 17:46Today, I saw two reports presenting very different views on the imminent death of Twitter. The first is from people noting that sites like Compete.com are reporting Twitter’s growth was essentially flat. The second is that soon, Twitter will pass two to the thirty-first tweets, which is the largest signed integer. Anyone who is storing information about tweets using signed integers is likely to crash sometime on Saturday.
It was just seven months ago that Twitter passed its billionth tweet. So, is Twitter really slowing down, or is there something else going on? Looking at sites that track the number of visits to the Twitter Website, it does appear to be slowing down. However, as people start following more and more people, keeping track of tweets on Twitter becomes more and more difficult, and people start using tools like Tweetdeck, Seesmic and PeopleBrowsr. Looking at traffic on these sites can also be misleading as people download applications to view their tweets.
So, what can the impending Twitpocalypse tell us? Looking at the number of Tweets per day, the trend is still up, sharply, even during the ‘flat’ month of May.
This illustrates one of the problems with metrics in a Web 2.0 world. Page impressions, and all the metrics around page impressions mean less and less. With Web 2.0, information from one site is displayed on other sites, and what you need to look at is the underlying API traffic, sort of like the number of Tweets per day.
From the bigger picture, I believe that we are seeing just another example of what goes on with technology adoption. Back in 2007, I wrote about a reporter at ad:tech who “was surprised to hear that twitter was still around and active”. In my blog post about the Technology Adoption Curves and the Twitter Lifecycle I commented, “As the innovators go out and try to convince people of a really cool new technology, and the early adopters start piling on, the laggards hear about this and try to convince everyone else that there isn’t really any value to the cool new technology.”
A group psychologist, who isn’t on Twitter yet, as far as I know, was commenting about Twitter on a mailing list and suggested as a tweet from him, “Adapting and resisting – two sides of the same coin”. Perhaps that sums up some of the discussion about the death of Twitter in less than 140 characters.
Over the coming months, I am sure that we’ll see many more blog posts about Twitter’s demise. They are likely to be partly right. What we see as Twitter today and the realtime microblogging of the future may look considerably different.
Likewise, I suspect that people that said that horseless carriages were a passing trend were right. The model T looks considerably different from today’s hybrids.
(Originally published at DigidayDaily.)
Numerati, Creatives and the Human Condition
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/09/2009 - 17:00Yesterday, Stephen Baker, author of the book Numerati spoke at Digiday:Target, a conference in New York City about targeting online advertising. As he started off, he was given the challenge to find the individual in the mountain of data. He spoke about how if you put people in enough different buckets and then tried to find people in specific combinations of buckets, you could probably get to the individual. He compared a chain of these buckets to the genome. Each bucket is common with many people in them, but a specific combination of buckets can be used to uniquely identify someone.
For example, if you target fifty year old white males of a specific education and income level in Woodbridge, CT that own a dog, a cat, a hybrid, and have children in gifted education programs, I suspect I may be the only hit, even though there are plenty of dog owners, cat owners, hybrid owners, and so on in Woodbridge.
If you do find an agency that is targeting people in the demographic I just described, have them call me. It is probably something I’m interested in. This illustrates another point about targeting. Mr. Baker suggested that if you talk about targeting people, they will feel invaded, but if you talk about customized service, they feel rich. Anyone trying to hit a demographic as precise as I just described has to be offering a customized service.
For others, this level of targeting could raise some privacy issues. However, this isn’t a level of targeting that most ad agencies are interested in. Mr. Baker noted that there just aren’t enough creatives to do one-on-one advertising to 100 million people.
Yet this is where I think a lot of targeting breaks down. The other day, my seven year old daughter went to a local art museum. She was intrigued by a portrait of a woman that no matter where she stood, the woman looked directly at her. I am sure that the creative that painted that picture wasn’t targeting suburban seven year old girls.
In other sessions, speakers noted that too often false assumptions are made about audiences. Just because someone did a search on “a dark blue 1998 to 2003 Mercedes Benz CLK-320 coupe” doesn’t mean that I have any intention on buying one. I might simply be reading up more about a horrible hit-and-run fatality in New Haven.
Likewise, determining why people purchase products can be fraught with false assumptions. Some people might buy Portuguese wine because it is inexpensive. Others might buy the same wine because they have Portuguese ancestry. Another speaker described the shock that a client had when they were shown pictures of their fans on MySpace. Too often, people may be targeting the wrong demographic.
It reminds me of a great line from the play Travesties by Tom Stoppard. In it, a Dadaist artist has a wonderful line to the effect, “It is the responsibility of the artist to laugh, and jeer, and howl, and belch at the common delusion that infinite generates of causes can be inferred from effects.”
Perhaps creatives at ad agencies need a little more Dadaism in their own work. Instead of targeting fifty year old white males of a specific education and income level in Woodbridge, CT that own a dog, a cat, a hybrid, and have children in gifted education programs, they should target people that want to feel like they are accepted and belong to some group, people that are concerned about the economy, people with complicated emotional ties to their families, people that feel a little self-conscious when someone seems to stare at them from across the room, the way the painting stared at my daughter, or so many other demographics that don’t really narrow things down very much but instead reflect the human condition.
From this, you can get people to feel a personal connection. They might even want to join a discussion others touched by the product or even help an ad go viral.
If we keep focusing more and more on narrowing demographics, we might find the people most likely to be interested in our products, and at the same time, we just may alienate them enough to drive them to our competitors. In the sixties, people had tee shirts that said, I am a human being, do not bend, fold, spindle or mutilate. Perhaps a similar tee shirt today would say something like, I am not a demographic.
(Originally posted at DigiDay.)
#digiday Arbitraging Advertising Exchanges
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/08/2009 - 21:55Today, I viewed yet another digiday conference from of a small content provider, or publisher, a participant in various blogger advertising networks, an advisor to politicians considering media buys, and an old Wall Street techie. It is from this vantage point that I wish to offer a few out of the box ideas.
