The New Social Culture Will Market Your Book - Learn It

Social Media Power is
Worldwide!

Social media (SM) as a marketing tool began rather inconspicuously. At first SM was a loose and rather disjointed platform where people just kept in touch with friends and family and exchanged pictures.

But, as most now realize, it has exploded into a genuine news and marketing goldmine as well as a conduit to keep in touch.

Per Wikipedia: Social media includes web-based and mobile technologies used to turn communication into interactive dialogue between organizations, communities, and individuals. Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as "a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content." Social media is ubiquitously accessible, and enabled by scalable communication techniques. 

Classification of social mediaSocial media technologies take on many different forms including magazines, Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking. By applying a set of theories in the field of media research (social presence, media richness) and social processes (self-presentation, self-disclosure) Kaplan and Haenlein created a classification scheme for different social media types in their Business Horizons article published in 2010. According to Kaplan and Haenlein there are six different types of social media: collaborative projects (e.g., Wikipedia), blogs and microblogs (e.g., Twitter), content communities (e.g., YouTube), social networking sites (e.g., Facebook), virtual game worlds (e.g., World of Warcraft), and virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life). Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing and voice over IP, to name a few. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms.

The honeycomb framework defines how social media services focus on some or all of seven functional building blocks (identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups). These building blocks help understand the engagement needs of the social media audience. For instance, LinkedIn users care mostly about identity, reputation and relationships, whereas YouTube’s primary building blocks are sharing, conversations, groups and reputation. Many companies build their own social containers that attempt to link the seven functional building blocks around their brands. These are private communities that engage people around a more narrow theme, as in around a particular brand, vocation or hobby, than social media containers such as Google+ or Facebook.

Patents

There has been rapid growth in the number of US patent applications that cover new technologies related to social media. The number of published applications has been growing rapidly over the past five years. There are now over 250 published applications.^[4] Only about 10 of these applications have issued as patents, however, largely due to the multi-year backlog in examination of business method patents.

SM has indeed exploded!

Newbie (and not so newbie) writers are always asking "How do I market my book?"

SM is the new and future blueprint for moving all types of publishing and building your audience for even better success in the future.

Bob Cohn, editor of Atlantic Digital, gives us a great looksee into the growth and technical use of SM to master marketing for publishers:   

Welcome to the Sharing Economy

A year ago, the main sources of referral traffic to our flagship site, TheAtlantic.com, lined up in this order:

• Typed/Bookmarked (readers who type our url into their browsers or follow their pre-set bookmark);

• Links from aggregators and other content sites;

• Search engines;

• Social media (a roll-up of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, and LinkedIn)

Then something interesting happened. The social line began rising, first passing Search and then flying by Other Sites and finally, in late 2011, moving beyond Typed/Bookmarked. Now, TheAtlantic.com receives more than one-third of its referrals from social media, topping all other sources.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not long ago, optimizing your site for search, and for the algorithms that determine which stories get featured on Google News, was thought to be the key to generating audience. As a result, Web editors were learning to parse metadata and resigning themselves to writing headlines for machines. Companies like Demand Media were on top of the digital world, suggesting a future in which search requests would replace journalists as arbiters of what stories to publish.

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