I have been on a blog sabbatical for the last couple months, much against my goal for this year. Too many baseball games, work and not feeling like I had anything worth saying. Of course that’s not entirely true; I was essentially lazy.

A recent article on the Old Spice social media success motivated me to write this post. I find it interesting, because Old Spice is a large company that has successfully integrated social media into their marketing strategy.

In a very short amount of time, Old Spice has generated 73,000 followers on twitter resulting in 13 million YouTube views. Talk about getting the viral thing working. Amazing. This is one of their TV ads.

No doubt it helps that Isaiah Mustafa is the shirtless Old Spice pitchman. He responds to some tweets via YouTube, shirtless of course. Check out a YouTube Tweet response:

Pretty clever. What do you think?

This post is part of a continuing series on how we are using social media at Thomas Nelson. We have looked at Max Lucado’s Community, BookSneeze and Amish Fiction. This post looks at what we are doing with Tommy Nelson, our Children’s products.

Tommy Nelson’s site is a place for parents who are looking for guidance and materials to help them raise their children with Christian values. Parents can hear from experts and authors, share ideas with other parents and get resources for their kids.

The Tommy marketing team built the site with help of Jon Dale. Abby Barnhart manages the site. It launched in January 2010.  Thanks to the use of twitter(@tommynelson, +1600 followers), Facebook and an active blog, the site is already getting around 3500  visitors each month, including one month with almost 7,000 visitors. Not bad for a site that’s not even four months old.

About 40% of Tommy Nelson’s traffic comes from other sites’ referrals, probably Facebook being an important source. 44% of the traffic is from direct traffic, which is likely due at least partially to the interest garnered from Twitter.

Blogs are updated multiple times each week by authors, moms, experts and the Tommy Nelson team. One regular blog theme is a series that helps parents answer the tough questions kids have about faith. The Tommy team is hoping to maybe dovetail these efforts into a community.

If you have kids, check out the free goodies on Tommy Nelson’s site.

Tommy Nelson also has an iPhone app.

The app has videos from our children’s DVDs.

The app has videos and other information about our our book products.

The app can even direct you to where to buy our products.

The app also provides the latest feeds from Tommy’s twitter and Facebook posts.

The real value of these social media efforts is the direct relationship we are building with our end-consumers. For years, we made the products, but then relied on retailers to get to our products to the customer. We can now talk directly to 3500 people that are passionate about our product and our mission. That’s big for us, and has all sorts of implications from product development to direct sales opportunities.

Tommy Nelson is making good progress quickly to build it’s brand. Check out the app and web site and let me know what you think.

Thomas Nelson’s fiction division gets the essence of social media: Find a passionate tribe and feed that passion with valuable content and services. That is what our fiction division is doing with their new community site Amish Living.

Amishliving.com is an online community created for those people who love “All Things Amish.”  Members can create a personal page, post content, and share photos.  Best of all, there are abundant resources available, including recipes, Amish Fiction authors, Amish business information, and an Amish Fiction bookclub.

Built by Jon Dale, Ashley Schneider is overseeing the site. Check out what Ashley has to say about it:

Amish Living already has over 750 people signed up for the community and engaging in their common passion…all things Amish.

BookSneeze is a website where bloggers can register to receive free Thomas Nelson books in exchange for an honest review on their blog and on a consumer website like Amazon.com. Currently we have 13,000 registered bloggers from around the world.

Here’s how it works: Bloggers sign up for a free account, choose from a list of available titles, read the book and then post a review of 200 words or more, and provide links back to their reviews so that they can select another book to review.  

If it is a good book, word will spread more quickly. If it is bad book, of course, word about it will also spread more quickly.

BookSneeze was the brainchild of our CEO Mike Hyatt to build awareness about our books. Lindsey Nobles was the architect of the site and maintains it today.

Check out BookSneeze. If you are passionate about books, and meet the criteria, contact Lindsey if you wish to be part of the program.

So many love Max Lucado’s messages. I can personally say that few authors impact me like Max does. Susan Ligon, David Moberg, David Schroeder and team thought, “What if we built a place where those who love Max’s messages can connect?” Thus the Max Lucado Community built by Jon Dale.

The Max Lucado Community exists to provide a way for the core fans to connect with each other.  Within the site, fans discuss information and topics from Max’s books as well other issues like faith at work, marriage, prayer, being encouraged in a fearful world, etc.  We are utilizing the site for giveaways and to inform people about Max’s media interviews and connect them to tour events for future books. 

Launched in January 2010, Max’s community had 2000 fans sign up in the first 24 hours. Each person on average invites four other friends. In four months, the community now has over 4300 fans.

Here are just a few other interesting facts about Max’s community:

• 23% are ministry leaders
• 73% of members are in the USA, 27% international.  Canada has the largest outside of US with 134 members.
• 66% female, 44% male
• 20% 18-34, 50% 35-54, 30% 55+
• 12% are active bloggers

If you are a fan of Max Lucado like I am, check out the Max Lucado Community. You will love it.

Roland Lange recently presented Google’s book initiatives to employees at Thomas Nelson. Mike Hyatt discussed the three hour seminar in a recent post, Why Authors, Agents, and Publishers Should Embrace Google Book Search.

Yesterday, Aimee Hong from Google put on a marketing seminar for our sales and marketing teams. With 1.8 billion Internet users spending 12 hours on line each week searching for information, it is clear that consumers need to be able to find our books. Aimee focused on three areas:

1. How To Enrich Your Web Site
2. How to Drive Traffic To Your Web Site
3. How to Measure The Effectiveness of Your Web Site

I have four pages of notes from the marketing seminar I am happy to share with anyone who wants them. Too much for this blog. Just shoot me at email at tshuttleworth@thomasnelson.com if you would like a copy of the notes.

In summary, however, these are the key points Amy outlined for each of the three areas above:

How To Enrich Your Web Site

1. Blogs – The more relevant content you have, the better chance you have of driving the kind of traffic you want.
2. Google Calendar – Especially effective when used with promotions
3. Google Preview – The book’s content becomes part of the standard search for all Google queries. Our books may be the answer to query.
4. YouTube Direct – Embedding videos a popular item with readers.

How to Drive Traffic To Your Web Site

1. Google Books – Our book content becomes part of every relevant search query. Gotta love that!!
2. YouTube – Done right with a relevant title, description and key words can drive traffic to your site.
3. AdWords – You only pay for click through when a consumer specifically clicks on your ad.
4. AdSense – A chance for relevant ads to show up on your site and you get a cut of the ad revenue.

How to Maeasure The Effectiveness of Your Web Site

1. Alerts – emails you about relevant topics you wish to be kept informed
2. Trends – Monitor who is talking about your content
3. Insights for Search – Measure which words and phrases best resonate
4. Website Optimizer – Allows for testing of various types of content such as images, titles, content and design that maximizes traffic to your web site
5. Google Analytics – Measures many aspects of the sites performance from where traffic somes to what pages are most and least popular, where people leave the site, etc.

It was a great session.

Nelson employees – I would to hear your comments below on the most important takeaway you had from the seminar. The best one gets lunch on me.

This will also help Aimee, as she is looking for feedback from the presentation.

Thanks to all the Nelson employees who attended.

John Cain from Thomas Nelson’s Digital Division shared an interesting YouTube video from two innovators at O’Reilly Media, Brett McLaughlin and Mark Reese. The video storyboards what a book library and functionality could look like on the iPad.

This is good stuff that makes you think about new opportunities and possibilities. What I like most about the concept is the functionality. There is so much you can do with a book on the iPad. And, you can do it in what I think will be a very friendly, portable interface.  I can definitely see myself using the iPad with this functionality and library format.

These ideas could impact nearly all our businesses at Thomas Nelson. I think, however, one of the biggest winners could our Bible and Reference business.

Does this give you any ideas for what we should be doing at Thomas Nelson?

I recently had the pleasure to listen to Rana Sobhany speak at the 2010 Tools of Change Conference in New York. There are approximatley 4.6 billion mobile devices. The most important mobile platforms a publisher needs to consider when making an app:

1. iPhone
2. Android
3. Windows Mobile
4. Symbian (Largest – outside US)

Ms. Sobhany suggests these are the critical components to building a successful mobile app:

Consumer Research – Know thy brand and who is the target audience for the app. What mobile platform do they use? What app stores do they visit?

Honest Intentions – Choose an app and platform that you feel like you can do well and set realistic expectations.

Plan – Have a 12-month plan for building, but more importantly, marketing the app. Make sure you have a solid build plan.

Budget - Clearly define app functionality and get multiple bids. Make sure you are spending enough to do it right. Consumers sense cheap.

Quality Control – There will be bugs. Make sure you do sufficient debugging prior to launch.

App Store Selection – Choose the app store that best fits your client based on your consumer research. Make sure you are in an app store that they shop.

Pricing - Make sure the pricing is appropriate for the consumer and platform. $4.99 is a sweet spot for many platforms; $2.99 for Blackberry.

Launch – This is one of the biggest mistakes most app publishers make. Make sure you have a holistic marketing/go-to-market plan. Successful apps have spent a lot of time working this out. Speak to the press two weeks prior to launch. Provide plenty of screens shots and a clear value proposition.

Innovation – Be innovative, but not too innovative. To many features and videos kill a good app.

Brand Building- Apps are a critical component to building your brand. Make sure you have a consisient look to your app library. You shoud have a style guide.

Measure- Everything is measurable. Make sure metrics are defined in advance and someone is held resposnible. Note correlation between marketing initiatives and sales spikes. (or lack there of)

If you fail, fail quickly and adjust. And, you will fail at least partially. It is important to adjust quickly.

How well are we following these steps at Thomas Nelson?

There has been a degree of pessimism about the future of publishing. In fact, I wrote just a few weeks ago about The Inevitable Decline of Book Publishing.

Others have argued that with evolving technologies the publisher will become irrelevant. It will be so easy to self publish that “even a caveman could do it”, to steal a line from GEICO.

I don’t agree. Supporting that view is Jim Selby, CEO of Naxos. Naxos is the world’s leading publisher of classical music. I had a chance to spend a couple of hours with Jim Friday. – A fascinating, courageous entrepreneur that has lead his industry with innovation.

Here are a few reasons why I believe publishers will continue to be relevant. Several of these thoughts are shared by Jim as well. (OK, maybe I even stole a couple from Jim.)

Content Filter – We are skilled at finding the best content. Retailers, whether brick & mortar or online, will still look to publishers to bring them the best content. They want to merchandise what will have the best chance to sell, and we are that filter.

Content Creation – Quality content available in multiple formats (audio, eBook, hard cover, soft cover, etc.) will continue to be important to maximizing a book’s potential. And, that content must be done well. Again, publishers leverage experience to provide a better product in multiple formats. Few authors could do that on their own.

Distribution – An author or an agent could go out and try and strike a deal with the hundreds of brick & mortar and online retailers, but it will not work. There are a myriad of issues that have to be dealt with on a daily basis. That’s what our customer service and sales people do every day. We will always do it more efficiently, because we bring scale to it.

Back Office- Someone has to do all the less visible functions in publishing, such as accounting, credit, production, warehousing, distribution (digital and physical), etc. These are very critical components to successful publishing.

Core Competencies – Most authors’ core competency is writing, not doing the important functions mentioned above. I’ll bet many of them would not want to do these other necessities to successfully publish their works.

Yes, our traditional business book will decline. Other areas of the business are and will continue to grow, especially online retailing and digital delivery of our content. Our job is to adapt so that we can continue to be relevant for our authors and the market.

Do you agree that great publishing is not so easy that a caveman could do it? Enjoy the YouTube below.

Dan Lynch, Thomas Nelson’s VP of Specialty Marketing and Family Entertainment, sent me this really cool Wired Magazine iPad demo.

I can see Thomas Nelson doing this in several book genres. But, we have a few challenges:

1. Do we have the skill sets to create like this? I think we need partners initially to help us and maybe longer.
2. Do we know how to sell this to consumers? Our social media platforms are a start, but we will have to expand our thinking.

What challenges do you see?