In the meantime, I’ve been meaning to mention some upcoming all-day workshops that we’re running in Vancouver and Victoria:

Building on the sold-out course we taught for UBC Continuing Education this winter, we discuss the dos and don’ts of social media marketing; look at successful marketing campaigns; introduce the social media tools every marketer should know about; and cover online communications etiquette.

The first ones we scheduled sold out, so we’ve added a second Vancouver date and will probably add a second Victoria one as well (we’re also considering other Canadian cities).

And besides, we’ve had other, more papery fish to fry. A few months after we released our ebook, we got a contract from No Starch Books to write a dead tree version of our ebook for publication. So–along with our busy day jobs–that’s what we’ve been doing.

In fact, we’re probably soon going to move this blog over to a new domain which reflects the new title for our book. I can’t quite divulge the title just yet (the dust hasn’t settled), but stay tuned.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share some information that I thought might be of interest. Since we launched, we’ve been tracking conversion data in Google Analytics, to get a sense of where our book sales are coming from.  Here are some conversion rates for the sites that sent us the majority of our traffic over the past 14 months. Where relevant, links go to the particular pages that are sending the most traffic within that domain.

Capulet (our professional site) - 7.9%
YouTube - 6.4%
Facebook - 6.2%
TopRankBlog - 5%
Direct (reflecting offline marketing, mostly) - 4%
Common Craft - 2.9%
Web-Strategist - 2.5%
Flickr - 1.27%
DarrenBarefoot.com (for a while I ran an ad on all 4500 of my archived pages) - 1%
Seth Godin - 0.8%
Google (organic search) - 0.7%
Twitter - 0.7%
StumbleUpon - 0.0%

A couple of notes about these numbers:

• Most of these numbers reflect what I see in our client sites. One exception is YouTube, which, based on my experience with other video projects, seems surprisingly high. Julie suggested that it might be because visitors have clicked through to YouTube from another site, and the video ‘closed the deal’ as it were.
• We more or less stopped promoting the ebook in March or April of 2008, and started spending that time researching and writing the new book. That’s possibly why, for example, Twitter is converted so poorly. Or, equally possibly, visitors who follow links from Twitter are transient by nature.
• Obviously the nature of the content on the source site matters a lot. A single link is unlikely to convert as effectively as a profile or positive review.

What do you think of those results? Are there any surprises in these numbers for you?

• “According to Forrester, 11.2% of online adults in the U.S. publish a blog at least once a month. Of the same group, 24.8% read a blog and 13.7% comment on a blog at least once a month.”
• “The numbers are higher for youths. Of online youths, 20.8% publish a blog, 36.6% read a blog, and 26.4% comment on a blog at least once a month.”
• Technorati Chairman Dave Sifry says that the site monitors about 112 million blogs, but only about 12.3 million of those have been updated in the last two months.
• FeedBlog CEO Kevin Burton thinks two to four million blogs is a more accurate number.
• “Sifry estimates that fully 99% of the blog posts reaching search engines are spam.” Does that mean that 99% of the aforementioned 12.3 million blogs are splogs? Probably not, because splogs would generate posts at a much higher rate than humans. Plus, Technorati tries hard to keep splogs out of those that they monitor.
• Tim Bray “says that 4,000 bloggers at Sun, about 10% of the workforce, have had virtually no problems.” Of course, your technologists are going to be savvier than the average blogger.
• Mike Kaltschnee runs Hacking Netflix, and gets treated like a journalist by both Netflix and Blockbuster. His site gets 300,000 to 400,000 unique visitors per month.
• “Research company eMarketer reckons the market for podcasts in the U.S. was 18.5 million people in 2007, and will reach 28 million in 2008. Advertising revenue for podcasts totaled $165 million last year.”
• Federated Media, an ad network for about 150 popular blogs, earned $22 million in 2007.

It’s unanimous. Publicists think online is the way to go for promoting their authors’ books, but before you cancel your next pub party, read on: Publishing Trends polled publicists at publishers, independent publicity firms, and agencies, and sent a companion survey to members of the book-related media to find out what publicists claim they’re doing, and what the media report they’re actually doing. Nearly all (70.9%) publicists said they devote up to 50% of their resources to online marketing. The remaining said they do even more.

There’s so much wrong with his paragraph. Remember that these are people who work with words. You know, for a living. :

• “Unanimous” means “fully” in agreement, not “slightly more than two-thirds”. Because, speaking accurately, that’s what 70.9% is.
• By the same token, 70.9% does not mean “nearly all”. It means 7 out of 10. If I eat “nearly all” of a chocolate cake, it means my sisters only get a sliver, not more than a quarter of the thing.
• Also, if 7 out of 10 publicists devote “up to 50% of their resources”, it’s not a foregone conclusion that “publicists think online is the way to go”. Let’s illustrate these numbers. Say that “up to 50%” averages out to, generously, a 30% online spend by those 7 out of 10 publicists. Now imagine that 100 of the surveyed publicists each had $10,000 to spend. According to these results, they would spend just $210,000 or 21% of the total budget online. Clearly publicists are still pretty centered in the offline world.

I have no stake in these results either way. In fact, given my day job, I’d probably support this kind of online boosterism. But this is a bit silly, don’t you think?

I’m not saying this survey is without merit or interest–just that their approach to describing the results is faulty. I don’t know what Publishing Trends’ motivation is here. Maybe they have a stake in promoting online publicity in the book industry? Or maybe they were just looking for a way to frame the survey results. That’s important if you want to make it palatable to the media.

If so, they picked the wrong frame.

The saga began when a blogger from ShapingYouth.org contacted Target about a questionably-designed ad showing a woman splayed across a large Target ‘bull’s eye’ pattern. Target’s PR team responded by saying, “Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets.”

The PR person really should have shown the blogger the same courtesy any Target “guest” would have received if they had contacted the company about an ad they found offensive. Instead Target put up a barricade, got considerable blogger backlash, and is now featured in the New York Times for their new media faux pas.

The lesson is twofold. First, treat bloggers the same way you’d treat customers or journalists. Second, it’s common for news from the blogosphere to bubble up into the mainstream press, good or bad.

Thanks to ATIS547 for the photo.

Seth Godin discriminates between ‘important’ and ‘passionate’:

Unleashing the Ideavirus didn’t spread because ‘important’ people endorsed and promoted it. It spread because passionate people did.

One more reason not to obsess about the A list in any media category. Worry instead about people with passion and people with lots of friends. You need both for ideas to spread. That was Malcolm’s point all along.

Meanwhile, publishing industry guru Monique Trottier references a pitch I made to her, and the results:

In internet land, my blog post is a very small blip in the Brother Printer landscape. Although SoMisguided is the first result for the search “brother printer wireless”. But down on Earth, everyone who comes into our office comments on our fancy printer and I mention it’s a Brother Printer and that I like it very much. It does an excellent print job. I also comment that I wish it did more…

So was it a waste of money for Brother Printers to hire Darren and to get a bunch of bloggers test driving their printers? I don’t think so. Again, it comes down to trusted sources and timely feedback on something people were interested in.

It is worth mentioning that Duncan Watts, the smart dude between the anti-influencers theory, isn’t stirring the pot without reason. As Thompson writes:

He has developed a new technique for propagating ads virally, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people–and ignoring Influentials altogether.

Ironically, the influencers are talking about his approach.

In the film, the protagonist Juno talks to her friend on a phone shaped like a hamburger. It’s a charming illustration of her quirky character, and there’s even a joke about it in the script.

The producers of Juno apparently sent a hamburger phone to journalists to entice them to review the film:

It looks like you can get your own on eBay. Photo courtesy of KPBS.

My own research suggests that GH is no more or less credible than Amazon’s other “celebrity reviewers.” Harriet Klausner, No. 1 since the inception of the ranking system in 2000, has averaged 45 book reviews per week over the last five years—a pace that seems hard to credit, even from a professed speed-reader. Reviewer No. 3, Donald Mitchell, ceaselessly promotes “the 400 Year Project,” which his profile identifies only as “a pro bono, noncommercial project to help the world make improvements at 20 times the normal rate.” John “Gunny” Matlock, ranked No. 6 this spring, took a holiday from Amazon, according to Vick Mickunas of the Dayton Daily News, after allegations that 27 different writers had helped generate his reviews.

Elsewhere in the piece, Garth seems a little surprised that his publicist solicited Harp’s review, and that the Amazon reviewers may be actively gaming their own (and their friends’) rankings. Garth may be feigning his surprise for the sake of the article. Such behaviour shouldn’t come as a shock to anybody who’s participated in any sort of social network with abstract popularity valuations. People will struggle to accrue the most karma points, cred or (as is the case on Amazon) ‘helpful votes’. These currencies also help marketers like us identify and target the influencers in a community.

This reminded me of a point we make in the book about identifying niche communities to engage:

Most important to the marketer, there are many websites that only cover a particular industry or category. It may be more valuable to identify the niche social news website in your industry and focus your efforts there. If you run a winery, then 1,000 oeniphiles from Cork’d or OpenBottles are probably more valuable than 15,000 users from Digg.

Amazon reviewers hardly constitute a niche, but I’m sure there are top reviewers for very specific book categories. So if you’ve got a book on terriers, for example, don’t necessarily pitch the top reviewers. Pitch the top reviewers of pet books instead.

UPDATE: Matthew’s discussion of the furor over recent Digg algorithm changes highlights how hotly contested such topics can be.

We asked friends of DeSmogBlog to write a letter to their great, great grandchildren about their vision and hopes for their world in 100 years, in the context of global warming. Will we all be underwater? In outer space?

To kick off the project, we contacted some prominent bloggers, climate scientists and writers. We got about a half-dozen letters from these ‘experts’, and those letters became the backbone of the project. That drew some attention, and we since have received a bunch more letters.

Beginning with experts does a few things for you:

• It gives a nascent project instant credibility.
• It may drive traffic if those experts are active elsewhere online and link to the project.
• It can attract mainstream media attention.

The reason I’m writing about The 100 Year Letter Project now is because it was referenced in two different spots–a blog and an article–by The New York Times. That’s terrific, but frankly not necessarily reflective of the project’s relatively low visibility.

In my experience, the media loves big, easy-to-articulate ideas. My odd pop art web projects like Get A First Life and Dear Rockers have received a surprising amount of media attention for this reason. They tell a good story, and make for good sound bytes. The same is true, I think, of the 100 Year Letter Project. Of course, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without the letters.