Reading „join the conversation“

As I twittered already: I received Joseph Jaffes new book „join the conversation“ today. Much faster than I thought it would take amazon to deliver it. I have already started reading it and sofar it’s good!

Joe utilized all the means of new marketing (conversational marketing!) to produce and promote the book: Bloggers were helping to design the cover, within a wiki everybody could help write chapter 10 (there seems to be a system – chapter 10 was also the „odd one out“ in his last book the chapter being downloadable as an audio file from his website).

There is also a blog for the book, jointheconversation.us. And in true conversational effort, everyone can be an author in this blog (let’s hope that doesn’t become too messy).

Last week Joe managed an amazing coup of „bumrushing“ the amazon charts by asking all his blog readers, podcast listeners and facebook friends to join the „bumrush the charts“ event on facebook.

This basically meant for everyone to buy the book on one single day, so that the collective effort would push the book up the charts at amazon.com. (This is also why I bought the book last Sunday – I was going to get it anyway, so why not take part in that exercise.)

The last result I could see: #2 in business books (behind Alan Greenspan) and #26 overall. Pretty impressive! It dropped down again to lower ranks in the meantime, as one would have expected with a fairly new title, but let’s see where it will get to over time.

Spendings on conversational marketing will most likely increase.

Joe Jaffe, who just released his new book „join the conversation“ (and very successfully bumrushed the charts on amazon) also conducted a study (together with the Society for New Communications Research and TWI Surveys) on how marketers might shift their budgets to conversational findings.

Here is an excerpt from his blog (the whole study is here):

  • Nearly 57% of respondents report that in 5 years time, what they spend on conversational marketing will be greater than that of traditional marketing.  Another roughly 24% believed it would be the same as traditional marketing
  • 70% are currently spending 2.5% or less of their communications budgets on conversational marketing, but two-thirds plan to increase their investment in conversation within the next twelve months
  • Respondents noted that the primary obstacles currently preventing them from investing more in conversational marketing include: “Manpower restraints” – 51.1% “Fear of loss of control” – 46.9% “Inadequate metrics” – 45.4% “Culture of their organizations” – 43.5% “Difficulty with internal sell-through” – 35.8%

The rest you can find in his new book. I should get mine soon, amazon already notified me, that it shipped yesterday. (I helped Joe bumrush the charts on Sunday … )

Google, Marissa Mayer and the future of search

The Searchnomics Conference just took plave a few days ago. Read/Write Web covers the presentation of Marissa Mayer of Google, who talked about 8 areas Google is currently working on (or has launched only recently), which will define the future of search:

Automated translation: According to Mayer, someday in the future Google could automatically search content in all languages and present all the translated results to the user on the same page, regardless of language!

Book search: they are adding metadata about books, so that Google’s algorithms can understand what the book is about, relevant references, and availability of the content.

Images and video: one of their recent changes is to include all web videos into Google search; it is no longer limited to content within Google Video

Voice search: a free phone service that you can call to perform a voice search. As the usage of this system rises, the increasing number of samples of user input will be used to improve voice-to-text technology; users are, in effect, training the system to recognize voice commands

Universal search: the blending of different types of content, such as images and news, into the main search engine

Maps and local search: There are some interesting new advances in this area – for example, Google Maps now supports traffic display, based on data licensed from third parties…

Client software: Google Gears and Gadgets: Google Gadgets enables third-party developers to create tiny applications that live on the desktop and connect to the web in the background to pull in information from the web. Google Gears provides a browser plug-in that, in Mayer’s words, takes Ajax applications and makes them better.

iGoogle: As an example, Mayer said that although she’s a big fan of Netflix, she probably would not make it her home page; with a gadget, however, Netflix could still establish a presence within her home page

One of the most interesting things for me is, however, how people get so excited about Marissa Mayer:

At the end of the session, I had the opportunity to meet her briefly [certainly one of the high points of the conference for me!]

Admittingly, she is pretty. And supposedly, she is also very smart. But the main things is positioning. She is a pretty and clever girl in a world of geeks.

The future of Magazines

PSFK writes about the future of magazines, mainly about 4 points that I agree with:

1. Not many people seem interested in reading long-form journalism (The New Yorker, NYT Magazine, etc) in front of their screens.

2. Magazines are easily portable for a plane ride, or the commute home. Also, they can be a good weekend digest of the week’s events when you are away from the computer/PDA. Though digital books and interfaces for the consumption of media are emerging, none seem poised to make a significant impact.

3. The medium allows for deeper analysis and context of daily news.

4. The sensory experience that print affords — the feel of different paper stocks, glossy photos, beautiful layout, design — simply cannot be replicated digitally.

Crowdsourcing predictions for books and movies: Media Predict

There is a new prediction market leveraging the crowds wisdom: Media Predict.

Here’s how it works: when users register, they get 5,000 virtual dollars to begin investing. They can scan the markets for book proposals, up-and-coming musical acts, script treatments and TV pilots. Each is valued in virtual dollars per share based on perceived potential. If shares of a particular book proposal are going for 55 dollars, for instance, the book has about a 55% chance of being published. If a project seems like it might take off, a wise investor can put his or her money behind it. Or, conversely, he or she can sell if stock seems like it might plummet. In doing so, players drive the market value—and those who have a keen eye for the next big blockbuster get rewarded for it. When a deal goes through—for instance, if a book proposal gets signed to a publisher—shares pay off at USD 100 each. And on the flipside, when a venture doesn’t succeed, share value bottoms out at USD 0.

(From: Crowdfinding the next blockbuster).

I doubt this mechanism will really display the true future potential of a book/movie. The danger of having typical stockmarket ralleyes is too high.

People putting money against movies, not because they might actually succeed, but only because they can potentially earn some money through the speculation on the Media Predict Website.

In the end, there will be people voting for movies they don’t actually consider worth watching in the first place. This would obviously contradict the purpose of this website.