Books, Blogs, and Beyond

Books, Blogs, and Beyond ... Publishing 3.0 ...

What's that all about?

Well, that's what we're going to explore in this blog, pulling together threads from our earlier separate blogs. From 140 characters on Twitter to 300 page hardcover books ... a blog as your social media base camp ... a book as your business brochure ... what does "publishing" mean in our continually evolving digital world?

Learning about the FTC Endorsements & Testimonials Guides at BlogPaws 2010

One of the coolest parts of working on the BlogPaws 2010 pet blogger conference has been connecting — or re-connecting — with some amazing people involved in the online pet community. That's especially true of the speakers! Today we released a preliminary speaker page, with keynotes including Charlotte Reed (check out her Pet Writing Conference coming up next week), our pet blogging buddy Dr. Larry McDaniel, and Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer.

I'm not going to list the other 18 (and counting) speakers here — that's not why you came — but one of them is Mary K. Engle, Associate Director for Advertising Practices at the FTC. She'll be speaking on a panel disussing "The Dos and Don'ts of Product Reviews." As part of putting together the speaker page, Mary sent me to a page on the FTC site where she's posted a set of videos discussing the FTC's Revised Endorsement and Testimonial Guides. In several of the videos, she speaks directly to how the Guides affect bloggers. Here's an example:

Twitter Libel Suit Dismissed "With Prejudice"

By Tom Collins

A while back (I know, I've been neglecting this blog horribly, consumed with our move to CO and our exciting work on the BlogPaws 2010 pet bloggers conference), I wrote yet another post, More on Lawyers vs. Social Media, criticizing lawyers who seem clueless about the costs and consequences of attacking bloggers with traditional litigators' tools. In that post, I described how the lawyers managed to publicize an allegedly libelous tweet (from a Twitter account with ~20 followers) and expose it to millions of people. 

Today, Wendy Davis reported on MediaPost's Daily Online Examiner that Judge Diane Larsen threw the suit out, ruling that the tweet was "nonactionable as a matter of law."

Who needs a Nook, or Kindle, or Sony e-book reader?

By Tom Collins

I just bought my first e-book specifically designed to be read in an e-book reader. Why? Because I didn't have to buy a stand-alone gizmo to read it! (I've bought other e-books and, for reasons that will be obvious momentarily, I like the O'Reilly model of selling a bundle of e-book formats that doesn't chain me to one gizmo or format.)

Yvonne was sitting in bed last night reading Trust Agents (food for another post) and tossed me a small flyer that Barnes & Noble sent along with the book, with the headline: "Free Barnes & Noble eReader." Having seen the price advertised for B&N's new "nook" entry in the gizmo wars, I was surprised and read on.

A few minutes later, I had downloaded the free PC version (you can get one for Mac, iPhone, or Blackberry, too). It came with several free "classic" books, but what strikes me as the "killer app" part of this app is the ability to use it on a full-featured, full powered, web-connected device: my laptop, in this case. Here's why.

Fun Stuff and Big Ideas from OMMA Global 2009 in NYC

By Tom Collins

Quickly, over lunch, I'm going to share a few of my live Tweets from the sessions, Scott Monty's slides from his keynote yesterday morning, and a video that Terence Kajawa of GCA Savvion Advisors showed at yesterday's luncheon, to give you a flavor for the "radical" ideas floating around here. The theme is "The New Socialism" afterall.

From my tweets yesterday through this morning:

Digital Literacy is an Essential Part of Literacy

By Tom Collins

Yvonne and I had a wonderful dinner last night with our friend and client, Sybil Stershic, and her husband Mike. Sybil found us a quiet little Italian restaurant in Canandaigua, NY, Casa de Pasta, where the food and service were excellent ...

But I digress ... it's a part of the enjoyable conversation we had last night, combined with Gord Hotchkiss' Search Insider piece that hit my inbox this morning, The New Speed of Information, I logged in to write about.

More on Lawyers vs. Social Media

By Tom Collins

If you read the title of this post out loud quickly, you'll get an idea of my personal opinion about lawyers — and their clients — who take a "sue first and ask questions later" approach to the feedback they get from customers via social media. A couple of years ago, I wrote a post called A Blogger in Every Firm, in which I asked, 

"Whether businesses and business lawyers can/should continue to operate in a Web 2.0 world without becoming bloggers themselves, or having one on staff?

The uproar about a Chicago real estate company suing a tenant over her tweet implying there was mold in her apartment prompts me to update my opinion: I think every state should make it a mandatory CLE requirement for ALL lawyers to take a course on how social networks spread information and then participate in a blog, Twitter, or similar social media experience before being allowed to offer advice in this arena.

In the earlier post, I gave several examples where the lawyers' knee-jerk response of firing off a cease and desist letter seemed more likely to harm the clients' public image than accomplish anything positive. In the present case, here's the sequence of events:

Is Social Media the Best Hope for "Publishers" to Survive?

By Tom Collins

Our friend Toby Bloomberg has written a thoughtful and thought-provoking post on how social media and publishers are interacting to sell books. She includes results from a survey that asked the question, "Where did you hear about the book you're reading?"

The #1 answer is (not surprisingly) "Friends." But if you add up all the online sources that can be classified as social media (blogs, websites/review sites, Amazon recommendations/reviews, Twitter, blog promotions/tours) the total is nearly double that of "Friends." And if you consider some bloggers as friends, or if some of the respondents thought "Friends" meant Facebook, the results may be even more dramatic! ;-D

The combination of friends and social media blew away bookstores and libraries and left traditional advertising a not-worth-mentioning afterthought lumped into the "Other" category.

So is social media going to help save publishers? Or is it part of the Publishing 3.0 (r)evolution that will empower authors and readers to connect directly and make traditional publishing irrelevant? I've already left my comment on Toby's post and urge you to go dig into her insights ... and add yours.

16 Flavors of Social Media ROi

By Tom Collins

Yvonne and I spoke recently on social media to Paul Nelson's MBA class in Marketing at the Simon Graduate School of Business. I spent most of my segment talking about the business benefits of social media from a slide with this graphic:

 

This series will explore a multi-faceted approach to ROi that, I think, should drive everything from initial strategy and planning, to your day-to-day online interactions, to what you measure and what you do with the results. The focus is moved away from analytics, toward analysis. Away from automatically counting these and tracking those. Toward understanding how engaging in social media can create business value and then seeing whether your involvement needs course adjustment.

So, what are my 16 flavors?

Business Blogs: Build It and They Will Come

By Yvonne DiVita and George Kittredge

Roughly ten years ago, when businesses started to realize that they should have websites, and decided that they needed to hire professional website designers to build it - their thinking was, "Build it and they will come."

We are reminded of the 1989 movie, Field of Dreams, and that one great scene where James Earl Jones as Terrance Mann says, "People will come, Ray...And they'll pass over the money without even thinking about it."

Ah yes, being on the Internet held tremendous promise - all those millions of eyeballs gazing at your stuff. And they'll come and pass over the money. Many, many businesses jumped on the Internet band wagon and waited and...waited, and...waited, and some are still waiting.

"Find Your Passion and Stand for Something Before You Die!"

By Tom Collins

There's some good advice.

It was given by our dear friend, author, and client, Dr. Claudia Thomas — through tears — as she spoke to a crowd gathered to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Africana Studies program at Vassar College.

Claudia spoke with authority. She risked her future, as a Vassar student back in 1969, leading 33 other young women in the takeover of the college's administative offices. Their purpose was to insist on a list of nine demands, including establishment of the experimental Black Studies program as a degree program with its own faculty and facilities. 

From today's perspective, it may be hard to appreciate how much Claudia and her classmates were putting on the line. After all, they won and their story is an accepted part of Vassar's history.