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38 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed

August 27, 2011 By Zoe Fox Leave a Comment

digital resources


Did the earthquake in Virginia get you behind on your reading this week? Don’t fear, Mashable‘s giving you a second chance to catch up on the big, bad world of digital culture.

And what a week it’s been! Relive the top 10 Steve Jobs moments. Check out greatest geeky gadgets for back to school. Weigh in on whether HP exiting the market means the end of the PC era.

Don’t forget to check back next week for another roundup!

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Filed Under: Facebook, search engine optimization, Social Networking Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

5 Ways Merchants Can Start Utilizing Facebook Credits

August 23, 2011 By John Corpus Leave a Comment

facebook work image

John Corpus is the founder and CEO of Milyoni. Milyoni helps companies monetize fan pages for live concerts, movies or sporting events or by selling merchandise. Follow the company on Twitter at @milyoni.

Facebook Credits are hot. More and more businesses — both large and small — are exploring how they can incorporate Facebook Credits into their overall social strategy. But they all have the same question: How?

The most common use of Facebook Credits has traditionally been to purchase virtual goods in social games, such as Zynga’s FarmVille and Mafia Wars. New digital content from entertainment and lifestyle companies such as movies studios, concert promoters and sports teams has created an even greater awareness for how to use Facebook‘s “social currency.”

Universal Pictures just launched a campaign offering cult film The Big Lebowski for rent directly through the movie’s Facebook fan page. It was made available to rent on-demand for 30 Facebook Credits.

Other retailers are issuing Facebook Credits as incentives in exchange for some type of action, like social engagement, online purchases or brand loyalty. Shoebuy.com, for example, ran ads on Facebook offering 50 Facebook Credits with any purchase from their site. The GAP UK also provided Facebook Credits to customers who signed up for its email newsletter.

As your business looks to get into the Facebook Credits game, here are some things to consider.

1. Sell Digital, Not Physical Goods

Facebook Credits can be used to purchase virtual goods, digital goods and Facebook Deals. They still cannot be used to directly purchase physical goods or redeem anything outside of Facebook. Now, however, there are a variety of digital goods and content available (Skype calls, music, movies, additional ammunition for game battles, etc.). There is an endless list of opportunities to monetize.

2. Incentivize Fan Engagement

While the real value of a Facebook Credit is 10 cents, the perceived value is much more. As little as 30 Facebook Credits can give users access to movies, live concerts, dozens of games and more. Additionally, there are some events and entertainment where Facebook Credits may be the only currency accepted. Credit are a lot like “airline miles” that fans will seek out and accumulate from issuing companies.

3. Think Globally

Facebook Credits are an international mode of payment available in more than 47 currencies. Whenever possible, incorporate the global community in your promotional efforts. While the U.S. still makes up a large portion of the Facebook population, there is significant growth in other countries. Live concerts on Facebook, for example, have drawn participants from more than 25 countries. Recent success stories include concerts by Widespread Panic, David Gray, and even new bands like The Parlotones.

4. Deploy Digital Content

Over time, users accumulate Facebook Credits from many different brands. Think about simple ways to offer fans valuable digital content. Why not host the launch of a new music video or movie release to reward existing fans and recruit new ones? While the average Credit balance may be low today for Facebook users, expect it to grow significantly as Facebook Credits become more mainstream as the social currency of choice.

5. Be a Sponsor

If your app is consuming Facebook Credits, seek out brands and partners that will sponsor or promote your app and offer Facebook Credits to their fan base as an incentive. If you are planning on offering Facebook Credits to entice new fans, consider finding a relevant movie, concert or other credit-based event that you can promote alongside it to make the offer more appealing.

Facebook Credits may seem like uncharted territory, but that also means there’s a wealth of opportunity. With 750 million users, Facebook is the must-use vehicle for companies looking to connect, engage and monetize fans. Those who take advantage of it early can look forward to better relationships with current fans and a valuable tool for earning new ones.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Jakob Steinschaden

More About: business, facebook, facebook credit, MARKETING, social media

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HOW TO: Manage Social Media Accounts for Multiple Clients

August 18, 2011 By Brian Honigman Leave a Comment


Brian Honigman is a social media account manager at LunaMetrics, a Google Analytics certified partner that also specializes in social media, search engine optimization and PPC. You can follow him on Twitter @LunaMetrics or @Brian_Honigman, and read his blog at BrianHonigman.com.

Most brands have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and many other social platforms, not to mention multiple profiles within each service for different store locations, branches, audiences or product lines. As an agency that manages social clients, understanding how to keep these social accounts streamlined and organized is important for the continued success of your projects.

Here are a few tips for keeping the social workflow under control.

Delegate from the Beginning

Your first concern when trying to keep your different accounts organized should be leadership. Without a dedicated project manager delegating to other employees, many details can get “lost in the sauce.”

Immediately after the sales team closes a deal, one project manager should be the main decision maker and point-of-contact. High-level social strategy decisions should be the responsibility of that person, while they delegate implementation and welcome strategic suggestions from the team.

Hypothetically, your agency has American Express as its social client. It would be vital to keep the content and engagement consistent throughout each of the client’s profiles and social accounts. Leaders on the project may choose to delegate a geographic territory, such the profiles associated with American Express’ Asian market, to a specific team. Delegated work flow based on the market or platform helps to lower the chances of cross-pollination and inconsistency across the client’s accounts. The disbursement of responsibilities among different employees will help identify problems quickly and avoid confusion.

Organization is Vital

Keep the client’s administrative details, usernames, passwords, assets, graphics, essential links, etc. in a unique location for all project contributors to quickly and easily access. Dropbox, Google Docs and Basecamp are helpful tools for this type of online collaboration, helping to keep your entire team on the same page.

Organize a concise editorial content schedule for each client’s social accounts. Remember to account for overall strategy and unexpected announcements as well. Plan no more than a month’s worth of content ahead of time. In fact, two weeks worth of advanced planning is ideal. Designate when and on what platform content will be tweeted, shared, posted and viewed – timing is crucial to prevent mistakes. However, planning too far ahead of time can hinder post relevance and newsworthiness. It’s a delicate balance, but necessary when managing multiple clients across their numerous accounts.

Management Tools

Dedicated leadership and organization can only go so far when helping manage a client, especially one with a robust social media following. Social management requires additional tools to keep track of brand mentions, ensure continued engagement, and connect branded accounts with brand advocates. Here are three useful tools to consider:

Monitoring Brand Mentions

The size of your agency and its resources will help determine which of the many social media monitoring tools fits bests. Enterprise level agencies might try Sysomos, a tool that determines brand discussion and engagement by keyword. Associate particular clients to keywords, and then monitor the resulting groups. This way you can focus on tracking the activity and buzz around certain key phrases.

Google Alerts is another tool well-suited for all sized firms – especially because it’s free. Google Alerts logs new content based on infinite keyword variations. The service sends alerts to your account whenever your specific key phrases are mentioned on the web. Alerts gather insights from bloggers, forums, public social profiles and other websites. They can be especially helpful when that content relates to your clients. Register separate email accounts for each client’s alerts. For instance, set clientXalerts@gmail.com for one client and clientYalerts@gmail.com for another – the designation will help keep your alert system organized.

Keeping Track of Engagement

Being responsible for dozens of social media accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers can appear overwhelming, especially when you attempt to engage with every wall post, comment and retweet. A social media management tool like HootSuite can help ensure that your team doesn’t miss a single chance for fan engagement. For example, if a Facebook wall post or a tweet needs a response, managers can assign a particular team member to answer that content. Once the team member engages with that post, a “replied” notification appears in the HootSuite interface.

Connecting Brand Advocates with your Brand

Twitter’s Advanced Search is a wonderful way to search the Twitter universe for brand mentions, even if a user hasn’t specifically @mentioned your client. Let’s use the Bacardi brand as an example. Most of the first-page results for “Bacardi” aren’t linked to their account, but the brand is still mentioned in many other tweets. Reach out to these newly discovered brand advocates, and follow interested customers for future conversations. Go out of your way to find and organize brand mouthpieces across your various accounts, and engage them to foster activity around your clients’ accounts.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, scanrail.

More About: brand management, business, MARKETING, social media

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HOW TO: Personalize Your Marketing With Social Data

August 12, 2011 By Patrick Salyer Leave a Comment


Patrick Salyer is CEO of Gigya. Gigya makes sites social by integrating a suite of plugins like Social Login, Social Analytics and Game Mechanics into websites. He can be reached on Twitter @patricksalyer.

The term “permission marketing” seems pretty self-explanatory. It encompasses activities like someone opting-in to receive emails from your company or promotional offers from partners. Simple enough. But evolutions in social data gathering have advanced the concept and opened a treasure trove of ways that brands can effectively reach and understand their audiences.

While social data opens up a world of opportunity for marketers, it’s also important to balance gathering data on your customers and, well … creeping them out.

One of the easiest ways to gain access to social data is to enable social login on your website. Visitors can log in to your site without needing to manually fill out registration forms and you get a glimpse at their social graph. Below are some ways to effectively gather and use social data via social login while doing right by your customers and prospective customers.

Transparency is a Good Thing

Gaining access to social data doesn’t have to be a shell game. Your users will actually appreciate the transparency of a social login because they benefit from their social identity being pulled into your site. It allows them to see if their friends are also on site via activity feeds, game mechanics or whatever other social elements you have on your site. When you’re pulling in their social data, show your users exactly what you’re accessing and give them a sense of what you’re going to do with the data.

Don’t Get Greedy

Social network profiles come with more information than you really need. Don’t tick off your visitors by taking more than is useful — for example, their profile and interests may be more than enough. Facebook, however, offers 39 specific permission object queries (78 if you count looping in a user’s social graph) and LinkedIn has more than 200. You probably don’t need to see that much from your site visitors and, in fact, asking them for more than four specific permissions during authentication can lead to a significant decrease in conversions.

So just ask for the pieces of profile data which you think will be most helpful to your business. If you decide that you want to gain access to different pieces of profile data, you can always go back and change the permissions.

What to Do With Social Data?

Gaining access to social data is only half of the equation. Once you have that information, you have a number of options for cleverly and tastefully keeping your users active on your site and eventually marketing to them. One technique is to use the friends list data to show them what their friends are doing on the site (via activity feed) or show them their rank relative to their friends and other users (via game mechanics). Once they see that their social graph has been pulled into the website, your site visitors will be much more likely to engage with content and share with their friends.

After you’ve built a healthy user base, you’ll be able to pick out your power users and influencers. For example, if you own an online sporting goods store, you can use social profile data to dig into your visitors and establish which influential users (those with high numbers of social network friends/followers) are interested in basketball. Having that information is incredibly valuable as you can subsequently offer those specific sets of influencers relevant, targeted content. This will make their experience that much more enjoyable and entice them to share with their social graph.

With Great Data Comes Great Responsibility

Hyper-specific ad targeting is another means to monetize social data in a safe, non-invasive way. However, as with collecting that data, ad targeting should be done without violating your individual users’ privacy. This is especially important in ad targeting since their data is handed to third-party advertisers. Advertisers salivate over the prospect of being able to target influential and high-intent consumers. Consider segmenting your users by degree of influence and essentially place a value on each of those segments so that advertisers can decide how they want to spend their money. This way, you can target without releasing your visitors’ identities.

Social Data Doesn’t Have to Be Creepy

Marketers don’t need to act like Big Brother in order to effectively gather and use social data to benefit their business. Your site visitors shouldn’t feel like their privacy is being violated when they log in. Instead, they should feel like they’re entering a tailored experience. That trust needs to be nurtured through transparency and moderation. Permission marketing is set to grow through the next few years. However, marketers will quickly find that collecting and using social data is done best with some restraint.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, kizilkayaphotos

More About: MARKETING, permission marketing, social data, social media

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Social Network Wars: How The Five Major Platforms Stack Up [INFOGRAPHIC]

August 10, 2011 By Sarah Kessler Leave a Comment

Most people don’t have the social steam to power a presence on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr. Sure, there are handy apps like Twitterfeed and Hootsuite that can help spread one post to all of your networks, but that ignores the individual strengths and weaknesses of each platform.

When it comes time to pick and choose where you post, this chart can help you decide what’s appropriate for you.


Infographic design by Emily Caufield.

More About: Google Plus, linkedin, social media, tumblr, twitter

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PGA Championship 2011: How To Follow Every Stroke Online

August 10, 2011 By Stephanie Buck Leave a Comment


The 2011 PGA Championship begins Thursday morning at the Atlanta Athletic Club in Georgia. To allow you to keep track of the proceedings at home, work or on the go, we’ve rounded up a variety of resources for following the season’s last major golf tournament.

The first featured marquee threesome, which includes Tiger Woods, Davis Love III and Padraig Harrington, is scheduled to tee off at 8:45 a.m. ET Thursday. Coverage will continue through Sunday at 7 p.m.

SEE ALSO: 8 Mobile Apps for Golf Season

Share some of your favorite PGA web resources in the comments below.


1. PGA.com Live Online




Beginning August 11, PGA.com will air live coverage of the events.

The first featured Marquee group composed of Woods, Love III and Harrington will tee off at 8:45 a.m. ET Thursday. McIlroy, Clarke and Schwartzel's threesome will tee off at 1:45 p.m. ET Thursday.

The PGA.com coverage will include a 360-degree camera that will span the panorama of the course. And the Video Highlight Hub allows viewers to customize their experience by searching and filtering by player, round or hole.


2. TNT & CBS Broadcasts




TNT and CBS Sports will broadcast the tournament from August 11 through August 14.


3. PGA.com Snap




While watching the championship events on PGA.com or TNT, viewers can "snap" coverage and share their own instant highlights on Facebook and Twitter. Turner Sports and the PGA partnered with SnappyTV to provide this service.

Note: The image of Bugs Bunny above is a preview.


4. PGA Championship iPhone app




According to Turner Media, the PGA Championship is the first major tournament to allow mobile devices on the course. Even if you haven't scored on-site championship real estate, get into the game via the free iPhone app, which offers live coverage and push notifications when a favorite player birdies, etc.

The site and its live player are also optimized for iPad.


5. PGA.com Mobile Web




PGA.com's mobile site offers nearly everything you'd find in its full browser version, including real-time scoring, player locator, spectator alerts, Twitter ticker and the aforementioned Snap feature.


6. SIRIUS-XM Radio




Hear the latest tour coverage and highlights on SIRIUS-XM.


7. PGA Tour Official Twitter




Follow the PGA Tour's official Twitter feed, which will not only provide championship updates, but also posts expert analysis, sweepstakes and player stats.


8. PGA Tour Official Facebook




On the PGA Tour's super interactive Facebook Page, you can find polls, video interviews, contests and player profiles.

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8 Tips for Health Care & Pharmaceutical Companies on Facebook

August 8, 2011 By Augustine Fou Leave a Comment


The Facebook Marketing Series is supported by Buddy Media, Power Tools for Facebook. Are you posting blindly? Use our insights to help you deliver the right content at the right time and get the results you need. Download our data report now.

Pharmaceutical and health care companies have been understandably cautious about using social media for marketing purposes.

While the FDA provides little concrete guidance, some social media marketing is permissible.

Here are a few tips and best practices to consider if your health care company is embarking on a Facebook presence.

1. Is Your Product Consumer-Facing?

Determine if your brand, drug or service is “consumer facing” — whether consumers are the ones making the purchase decisions. This factor applies more to over-the-counter products that consumers can buy themselves (such as Advil) in stores and less to prescription drugs for which doctors are the ones writing the prescriptions. Consumers tend to go online to research products before they buy — and they want to be able to reach the manufacturers directly. Physicians, on the other hand, don’t (and can’t legally) talk about work on Facebook. So, pharma advertisers should determine if social media marketing is even relevant to their product in the first place.

2. Provide Useful Information

People go to Facebook to socialize, not to “friend” Lipitor. If pharma companies are to earn the attention of any modern consumer, they should provide useful information and value to the consumers instead of asking them to do things or give personal information. “Information” includes accurate details about the product, including side effects and risks.

3. Ask Intelligent and Related Questions

Once consumers voluntarily give their attention and visit the pharma companies’ Facebook pages, then pharma has the right to ask intelligent questions and listen to the feedback from the community. Instead of telling, asking and listening is a way to earn the dialogue with consumers and fans.

4. Have Real Experts Lead Discussions (Not Marketing or PR Reps)

Consumers are very savvy and have learned to sniff out marketing and “bad acting.” When they interact with advertisers, they expect complete transparency and candor. This goes for pharma as well. So instead of having marketing or PR representatives field questions from users, it’s important for pharma companies to have real experts (scientists, MDs, etc.) answer questions and concerns from consumers. If your company doesn’t currently do this, organizational processes should be put in place to enable it.

5. Create a Publishing Schedule

Many brands have made forays into social media. But beyond just buying display ads on Facebook, it is important to have something new to talk about periodically. This not only means creating valuable content and providing information about new products, but it also can be asking the right questions. The key is to do this consistently and regularly, thus creating a publishing schedule of both content and questions that can be delivered through your Facebook page. This way, users have an expectation for new content on a regular schedule, which will bring them back to the page and give them a reason to talk and share.

6. Establish the Right Success Metrics

“Doing social media” does not mean placing display ads on social media sites like Facebook. You need to engage and measure success to see what works. But the number of fans or Likes are not the best success metrics. Consumer engagement and vibrance of the community are more important and yield more value over time. So for those pharma companies that are using Facebook for marketing, tips two through five above will collectively enable you to better engage the community and create longer-term ties. Metrics that involve actual actions of the users — the number of conversations, the number of repeat visits, the pages viewed per visit — are better than one-off actions like clicking the “like” button.

7. Make a Social Media Commitment (Not a Campaign)

Social media is media created by the conversations of people. Advertisers have to earn the right to participate in these conversations by creating a community with valuable content. What your followers say — whether good or bad — is now permanently recorded online for all to see. So advertisers should be prepared to make a “social media commitment” instead of a “social media campaign.” The efforts in social media should not stop as if it’s a marketing campaign. As advertisers embark on social media “commitments,” they should see them as the opportunity to create relationships and assets of lasting value, both for consumers and pharmaceutical companies.

8. Monitor For Adverse Events

Finally, for the pharmaceutical industry in particular, advertisers must monitor for adverse events in the sites and pages they own and control — including their own Facebook pages. This has seemed an onerous task in the past, but monitoring tools and services are making it easier to collect, detect and act. In addition, there are four criteria that must be met to constitute a reportable event.

The FDA requires that four criteria be reported in each adverse event report:

  • 1. Who is the patient affected?
  • 2. Who reported the event?
  • 3. What was the adverse event?
  • 4. What was the product that is suspected of causing the bad reaction?

Most comments on social media sites do not meet all four criteria. So companies should use the tools to gather relevant, potentially reportable comments and have their own medical and legal departments review and provide guidance.

Conclusion

The use of social media is not only appropriate, but also highly effective and efficient in certain cases. So pharma and health care companies should make plans and take specific steps to leverage social media on platforms like Facebook.

Series Supported by Buddy Media

The Facebook Marketing Series is supported by Buddy Media, Power Tools for Facebook. Are you posting blindly? Use our insights to help you deliver the right content at the right time and get the results you need. Download our data report now.

More Facebook Marketing Resources from Mashable:

- 4 Ways to Set Up a Storefront on Facebook
- HOW TO: Create a Facebook Engagement Policy
- HOW TO: Engage and Mobilize Facebook Fans Beyond the “Like”
- 5 Creative Facebook Places Marketing Campaigns

More About: facebook, Facebook Marketing Series, MARKETING, medicine, pharma

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Measuring Clout: 4 Music Charts Powered By Social Media

August 7, 2011 By Brenna Ehrlich Leave a Comment

music image

Fifty-three years ago this week, Billboard launched its “Hot 100 Chart,” which at the time tracked top singles based on radio play and sales. A lot has changed since 1958 when it comes to measuring the popularity of tunes. Namely, now there’s this thing called the Internet all up in the music business’s business.

Granted, the “Hot 100 Chart” has been anything but stagnant over the years. Since it proclaimed Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool” tops on August 4, 1958, it has introduced alterations such as the addition of streamed and on-demand music to the chart’s forumla. The chart ranks the week’s most popular songs across genres based on radio airplay audience impressions as measured by Nielsen BDS, sales data as compiled by Nielsen SoundScan and streaming activity data provided by online music sources.

Although the chart is still a major indicator of musical success, there’s now a bevy of other tools that take into account the social aspect of a song’s popularity. Read on for four ways you can track musical success based on social media clout.


Next Big Sound




Next Big Sound launched back in March 2010. It gauges the popularity of bands and artists via fan activity on a variety of social networking sites, as well as traditional sales data, radio plays, traffic to an artist's website and P2P activity.

The website is basically a tool for fans, artists, music industry professionals and journalists to track the popularity of an artist across sites like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, Soundcloud, ReverbNation, Pure Volume, etc. Casual users can sign up to get weekly stats about their favorite bands sent to their inboxes and even compare bands' social clout on the site. More hardcore users -- like bands and labels -- can sign up for the premiere service for even deeper data mining.

NBS also recently partnered with Billboard, in order to bring you the second entry on on our list ...


Social 50




The "Social 50" is Billboard's newly minted chart. It measures an artist’s popularity every week based on social networking activity mined from Next Big Sound.

Like NBS, the Social 50 ranks artists using such metrics such as weekly additions of friends, fans and followers, artist page views and weekly song plays. Rankings are also influenced by measuring the ratio of pageviews to fans. if you're more of a curious fan than a hardcore music head, this is likely the chart for you. It's also usually packed with more mainstream acts, so if you're looking for more esoteric fare, you might want to check out ...


We Are Hunted




We Are Hunted is both a music chart and a community. At its core, the site features a chart that tracks songs' popularity every day based on blog activity, mentions on social networks, buzz on message board and forums, Twitter talk and movement on P2P networks.

It also features the ability to build your own charts, which you can share with friends and other music lovers, and a “Discover” tool, which helps you find new music based on what you like and dislike on the site.

Recently, We Are Hunted has been rolling out a bevy of apps, including an iPad app for music discovery and a number of offerings that integrate music intelligence company The Echo Nest's API, including the appropriately blasé Pocket Hipster.


MTV Music Meter




As part of MTV's quest to put the "music" back into "MTV," the network recently released its Music Meter, which seeks to highlight up-and-coming artists by ranking them based on their social media status.

MTV worked with music intelligence company the Echo Nest to develop an algorithm that combs through blogs, social media, video and more traditional metrics (like radio plays and sales) to determine which bands are receiving the most attention on any given day.

MTV also rolled out an app for iOS and Android iteration, letting users go mobile with their music discovery.

Image courtesy of Flickr, craigCloutier

More About: Billboard, billboard-hot-100, mtv-music-meter, music, music charts, next-big-sound, social media, social-50, wearehunted

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The Price of Internet Fame [COMIC]

August 5, 2011 By Matt Silverman Leave a Comment


Mashable Comics are illustrated every week by Kiersten Essenpreis, a New York-based artist who draws and blogs at YouFail.com.

More Mashable Comics:


1. The Earliest Social Network Ever Discovered





2. First-Generation GPS





3. There's a Badge for That





4. It Was All Just a Huge Misunderstanding





5. Stand-Up Web Developers





6. HOW TO: Survive Those Awkward Online Moments





7. Obi-Wan Kenobi: Mobile Sales Rep





8. The 19th Annual Internet Meme Convention





9. Online Predators





10. HOW TO: Parent a Digital Native




More About: comics, facebook, fame, humor, mashable comics, poke

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Book Marketing: How 4 Authors Are Finding Success With Social Media

August 1, 2011 By Andy Meek Leave a Comment


Andy Meek is a senior business reporter for The Memphis Daily News. You can follow him on Twitter @AndyMeekTN.

The book industry is in upheaval. The recent news that Borders will liquidate and shutter all of its 399 stores is the latest sign of print’s unstable market.

In many ways, tech advancements have forced the industry’s deterioration. While print struggles to catch a foothold, tech-savvy authors are managing to bridge the gap. Therefore, I’d like to introduce four tech-savvy authors whose statuses range from rookie to bestseller. Thanks to social media, they’re writing their own rules about branding and fan engagement.


1. John Green – The Fault in Our Stars




Author: John Green

Twitter: @realjohngreen

Facebook: John Green

Website/Blog: JohnGreenBooks.com

John Green’s latest book, The Fault in Our Stars, is riding high on the charts. It recently landed the number-one spots on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. But here’s the thing – his story won’t be published until 2012.

Green promoted the book to his 1.1 million Twitter followers, according to The Wall Street Journal:

On (a) Tuesday afternoon, he posted the title of his new book on Twitter, Tumblr and the community forum YourPants.org. An hour later, he upped the stakes by promising to sign all pre-orders and the entire first-print run, while also launching a YouTube live show. Mr. Green discussed his plans for signing the book and also read a section to give viewers a sense of what The Fault in Our Stars would be about.

On the same day of the WSJ article, Green responded by tweeting, “I am genuinely uninterested in marketing, but I am VERY interested in being part of awesome communities.”

Publisher @penguinusa also tweeted the news: “did you hear? @realjohngreen’s new #ya novel THE FAULT IN OUR STARS is #1. One catch, he’s still writing!”

To which Green could not resist shooting back: “@penguinusa HAHAHAHAHA Don’t make fun of me corporate overlord or I will refused to finish it! ;)”


2. Laura Hillenbrand – Unbroken




Author: Laura Hillenbrand

Twitter: @laurahillenbran

Facebook: Laura Hillenbrand

Website/Blog: LauraHillenbrandBooks.com

Earlier this year New York Times bestseller Laura Hillenbrand – the author of Seabiscuit – participated in a new media experiment to promote her new book Unbroken, which follows a WWII pilot who was shot down, only to survive a Japanese prison camp.

NPR produced what it described as a “book club-meets-social media experiment” across its Facebook, Twitter and web presences -- places where Unbroken was widely discussed. On the NPR Books Facebook Page Hillenbrand also contributed to the discussion.

By achieving direct access to the author, readers like Robin Politowicz became inspired to write back:

Laura,

Was there a moment in your research that just stopped you in your tracks? A particular incident or injustice or cruel twist of fate (of which there were so many) that gave you pause? Wonderful book – listened to the audio version on a long vacation drive, and had to think of errands to run once we got home so that we could finish listening :-)

–Robin Politowicz

Dear Robin,

Good question! There were so many breathtaking moments in Louie's story. I think the one that was most striking to me was the one when he was on the raft, and the Japanese bomber began strafing him and his raftmates. This was incredible enough, but in seeking cover under the raft, Louie ended up having to fight off sharks, striking them in their noses while the bullets showered down. I can't imagine that there's been another man in history who has been simultaneously fired upon and attacked by sharks. That he survived it continues to amaze me.

–Laura


3. Blake Northcott – Vs. Reality




Author: Blake Northcott

Twitter: @ComicBookGrrl

Facebook: Vs. Reality

Website/Blog: BlakeNorthcott.com

If you’re a new writer who’s looking ahead to a seemingly daunting publishing task, take a tip from Toronto writer Blake Northcott.

She recently self-published Vs. Reality, a work she’s calling a “comic book-inspired urban fantasy novel.” The Kindle version is now available through Amazon.com.

During the nine months spent writing her comic and movie blog, she amassed a 16,000-strong Twitter following, and collected more than 1,700 personal Facebook friends. Furthermore, in the space of one week earlier this month, her re-launched blog got 4,500 page views.

To put the numbers in perspective, her Twitter tribe is roughly the same size as that of publisher Image Comics. And a few days ago, Goodreads.com notified Northcott that she is the tenth most-followed Canadian on the site.

Northcott’s social media presence includes what she describes as an “instant feedback mechanism that tells me people are listening.”

“People are so passionate about books, comics and movies,” says Northcott. “When you connect with them on their level, and they know you’re legitimate, they respect you a lot more. Social media facilitates the ‘secret handshake’ where you get into the club, and people know you’re one of them.”


4. Duane Swierczynski – Fun and Games




Author: Duane Swierczynski

Twitter: @swierczy

Facebook: Duane Swierczynski

Website/Blog: Secret Dead Blog

If Quentin Tarantino ever decided to put down his camera and pick up a novelist’s pen, the result might read like the action-packed work of Duane Swierczynski. He writes hard-boiled thrillers that have the inventiveness, colorful characters and crackling dialogue of comic books.

His latest book, Fun and Games, was released a few weeks ago. To coincide with the release, Swierczynski devised a promotional contest that met with great fan approval.

To boost his pre-order numbers, Swierczynski invited fans to send him a confirmation once they had pre-ordered the book. In return, he randomly picked winners to which he sent personally chosen prizes - for example, signed copies of his five previous novels, a copy of Rockstar Games' recent title L.A. Noire, and even the right to name a minor character in the third book of his current trilogy. Additionally, he sent everyone who pre-ordered his book an offbeat postcard he picked up from the road, complete with a handwritten note of thanks.

“I was just talking to a friend the same age as me [late 30s] about how much harder it was to find like-minded people back in the early '90s,” says Swierczynski. “Sure, there was 'zine culture, but other than that, you couldn't help but feel kind of all alone in the universe ... Social media makes it so much easier, and so many people I've met online have turned out to be good friends in real life. So [social media] is not really a ‘strategy’ – it's a matter of craving that hive-mind experience. And as part of that hive-mind, you should give as much as you take.”

Image courtesy of Flickr, matthileo.

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