The Post Pub

Make Your Lurkers Work for You

Thanks to Alison at We'll Know When We Get There, I read Virginia Heffernan's NY Times piece on the phenomenon of lurking on blogs and message boards. Lurking means reading without writing -- spending time on a blog or message board without ever posting a comment or otherwise letting people know you are there.

The majority of American participants in digital media are probably lurkers -- according to Pew research, 39% of Americans who use the internet say they read blogs, but only 22% participate in chat rooms or online discussions.  Considering the fact that much of today's online content is, technically, a blog (or interactive in some way, thanks to Web 2.0), most Americans who are web surfing are probably landing on pages where they have, but pass up, the opportunity to say hello and contribute to the conversation.

Why do people choose to lurk instead of providing feedback to content? (And thereby generating content in the process themselves?)

According to this academic abstract, gratification motivates lurking -- as it does just about everything. Some people simply like to take without giving. They don't feel a need to engage and interact with others -- they're OK with observing.  Lurkers are virtual introverts, or "selfish" in the community sense (as Heffernan notes in her piece).  But this doesn't mean bloggers should ignore them.

The key is to remember that mute observers are not inactive, and not even necessarily passive.  They are participating by showing up. They can still be influential over reputation and sales, because they vote with their dollars, their library cards and their site visits.  In a sense, they are purer fans than the visitors who leave comments on a blog, because they are drawn to a site as spectators and not as talkers -- they are more interested in reading someone else's content than they are in generating their own.

So the question is: how can you make your blog lurkers work for you?

HarperCollins and MySpace Co-Brand an Environmental Book

HarperCollins and MySpace are co-branding a young adult book on how to save the environment.

This effort is engineered to succeed, for the following reasons:

1. By co-branding the book with MySpace, HC takes advantage of a built-in, impassioned audience looking for tools to help them make a difference;
2. The message of the book is at the forefront of peoples' minds (and the media's);
3. The book will capitalize on vanity by publishing the name of every single MySpace user who contributes a tip via the book's MySpace page.

I really like #3 -- it brings the phenomenon of user-generated media to the old-fashioned, prestigious world of publishing. Who doesn't want to see their name in a book?  But one has to wonder if the resulting list will drive the page count to 1,000 (that's a lot of dead trees and plastic fiber, recycled or not).

HarperCollins is a subsidiary of NewsCorp, so this was inevitable, and, partnerships-wise, probably pretty painless.  Nevertheless, it's exciting to see someone in publishing doing it right.

On a smaller scale, authors who've acquired a lot of Friends should be using MySpace, Facebook, Goodreads, Shelfari, LibraryThing and other social networking sites in a similar manner:  as distribution channels for getting a message out to an audience that's already proven itself receptive. (And, in the case of bookshelf-cataloging sites, motivated to buy vs. borrow.) 

As for co-branding books with social sites... in the era of product placement, it's an intriguing direction to take.  If users weren't so fickle, it would seem smart for publishing companies to acquire some of these sites.  But users are fickle, and publishing companies may not be comfortable owning social sites that allow readers to promote other publishers' titles.  So... ay, there's the rub.  Still, a trend to watch.

Social Networking in Plain English

Looking for the $20 Powells.com gift card contest?  Click here.

Here's another video tutorial by commoncraft:

A Brief Lesson in Social Bookmarking with del.icio.us

I can't take credit for this video, which is a helpful, visual primer for social bookmarking. It's part of a video podcast series called commoncraft: Explanations in Plain English.  For beginners:

commoncraft offers similar, free video tutorials on subjects like wikis and RSS.

Blogs, Social Media, and Authors: Where to Begin?

When launching a blog focused on discussing how the internet affects the experience of selling, buying and reading books, one can feel a bit overwhelmed by the question, "Where do I start?" 

Let's start with a biographical disclaimer:  I, the Editor, am a blogging and social media consultant. I work with authors to help them establish a foothold in the ever-changing digital media landscape.  In short, I help them construct and brand their blogs, websites, social media profiles, and newsletters.

That's the fun part. 

Then I help them find readers, with the hope that readers of free online content will eventually convert to readers of purchased, hard-copy books.

That's a little less fun... only because it's more difficult. 

Online marketing with a goal of selling books can be challenging, because the readers are everywhere, and they're on the move.  The competition for internet users' attention is more hectic than ever, with over 100 million blogs and many hundreds, if not thousands, of social networking websites in existence.  The internet is fracturing off into "nanoaudiences" centered on very specific interests.  People go where they find a message that resonates with them, and they're fickle; they may not stay for long before moving onto the next thing.

It's for this reason that I advise authors to devote time to building great blogs instead of chasing after the latest hip social networks -- because a dedicated blog readership may stick around for years, whereas a social networking site may lose its core audience within months. (As an example, as of this writing, all of my friends, ages 24-40, have abandoned ship on MySpace and are becoming active on Facebook.  Many of us were active on Friendster before that, and a few of us on Tribe.net.)

Still, blogs take time and savvy to develop.  It's rare for a non-corporate blog or website to command a market share the size of a Dooce.com, HuffingtonPost, or TMZ.  These days, it's not uncommon for an average website or blog to receive a maximum of 80 to 100 visitors a day. 

Using the standard sales conversion rate of 2% -- meaning 2% of your visitors will buy something after visiting your site and reading your message -- that can amount to as few as 2 books sold per day.

Many authors -- some of them frustrated and with very limited time to devote to publicity and marketing -- wonder if it's worth the effort to maintain an active blog or a consistent online presence for a sales rate of 2 books a day. (Indeed, an entrepreneurial sort might be able to sell 2 books a day at a lemonade stand.)

So is it worth it?

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