Crossway seeks bloggers to review new book

Christian book and Bible publisher, Crossway, announced last week that they are giving bloggers the opportunity to review an upcoming book (John Owen's Communion with the Triune God) through a free download. The announcement came via Justin Taylor's personal blog. Justin is an associate editor for Crossway.

The fact that Crossway is using bloggers this way is a great step for them and one that more publishers will likely pursue in the future. Crossway isn't trying to force bloggers to do anything (which indicates an understanding of blog culture) but is simply providing them with an opportunity to get something early in exchange for a review. Crossway can also look forward to the positive Google search results that will ensue. I commend Crossway for taking advantage of Justin's blog readers. It's a great (and informal) way to promote the new book to the very people who are most willing to talk about it. Justin's readers fall right in line with the types of books Crossway produces so they've got a marketing advantage that many publishers can only dream of.

As good as this idea was I think there are two things that would make Crossway's free download promotion even stronger:

1. Seek to identify and target bloggers with larger numbers of readers. It's great to get bloggers talking about your book. It's even better to get bloggers with a lot of readers to talk about your book. If Crossway identified ten bloggers with significant numbers of readers, it will have a more immediate impact on book awareness and will lead to even more blog posts from the readers of those select blogs but don't forget there's a right way and a wrong way to pitch the idea to the bloggers too.
   
2. Don't quit sending out the PDFs after October 1. I expect there's concern within Crossway that they will hurt sales by sending too many digital files of the book. Though that's an understandable concern, I don't believe it should hinder more free reviews of the book. In fact, I would recommend they give the book away as a PDF regardless of whether someone is going to review it or not. I heard Seth Godin say once that he gave a book away as a free PDF and it was downloaded over two million times. It went to #5 on the Amazon.com Best Seller list and he said he made more money on this book than his previous book that was marketed more conventionally. The hard back version was what people wanted after they read a few pages of the free download and decided it was worth the $40 price. Though it's counterintuitive to give it away, what's really being given away with a free download is the initial impression of the book not the book itself. If the reader likes the impression the book makes they'll be sure to get the real thing.
   

Great iGoogle Gadget: Outlook Integration

Like many people I use Outlook professionally and Gmail personally. For those of us who have adopted Gmail and the full service of Google applications, we long for more integration between our various email accounts and calendars. I know one person who goes so far as to double up her professional calendar on Lotus Notes with her personal Google calendar. I'm personally not willing to do that much double work so when I heard about the Outlook gadget for iGoogle I knew I had to check it out.

Basically, this gadget (not to be confused with a "widget" which is the same thing though Apple has cornered the verbiage on that word so companies like Microsoft and Google have adopted "gadget" to say the same thing) brings your Outlook email, calendar, tasks, and contacts right into your iGoogle page. It's really pretty handy. If there's any drawback to this gadget it's that you have to open the tab in Internet Explorer if you're a Firefox user. The instructions give you a step by step process for how to do that and it's easily done in about two minutes.

I've been using this gadget for a week now and have been happy with it for the most part. If there's anything I dislike most it's just the fact that I have a tab in Explorer and anything I click within iGoogle now opens up as a new Explorer tab. It's not a big deal most of the time but I use the Del.icio.us extension in Firefox and it's not compatible with the Explorer tabs. Like I said, it's not usually a big deal but it has been a speed bump a couple of times. All in all, the benefits have outweighed the drawbacks so I plan to stick with it.

[HT to Ray for the link with other great iGoogle gadgets.]

Video of the Week: The Jena 6

I debated as to whether or not I should use this as the video of the week since I usually do something funny or entertaining but yesterday I was driving through downtown Nashville and passed a car that said "Free the Jena 6" on the back. That's all I needed to know this would be my video this week.

The fact is, racism is very much alive in our country and I was saddened to learn that something like this is still happening even now. Though I would never condone the fight that led to the prosecution, the charge doesn't appear to fit the crime and the reason certainly seems racially motivated.




For more information you can see additional video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwcj3RQcyu0

Here's some info on the upcoming march before the sentencing:
http://www.naacp.org/news/press/2007-07-20/index.htm

Link for the feed readers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuoiZnr4jLY

Is a blog successful with only a handful of readers?

Last week I posted a template for defending the success of a blog and I still have some thoughts on this. There is a prevailing attitude in some circles I've been in recently that a blog for business uses must establish success metrics before the blog is started. As I stated last week, the only reason I can imagine this number is even important is that the organization wants to know how and when to determine that the blog is unsuccessful. That being said, let's look at a scenario that shows why an arbitrary blog success metric just doesn't make sense.

Let's say our example company, Slug Works Incorporated, is interested in a corporate blog but wants to establish metrics of success before they get started. As with any good company, Slug Works Inc. measures all new projects from the outset to determine whether the goals are met in the end. Slug Works management creates a quarterly SWEAR (Slug Works Evaluation of Attainment Report) which is distributed throughout the silos departments to review progress.

Slug Works has decided not to put too much pressure on their blog so they have determined that there must be at least 25 readers from outside the company who are reading the blog regularly. They know they can track this through RSS feed subscriptions and some other services like Blog Flux.

After six months of blogging they decide it's time for a significant evaluation. The marketing Sluggers and performance analysis Sluggers prepare a SWEAR and conclude that the blog is unsuccessful because it hasn't achieved its goal of 25 regular readers. They see that only 12 people actually seem to be interested in the Slug Works blog regularly. They decide to shut the blog down and conclude that blogging is useless because it couldn't even reach half of their moderate goal.

What the Sluggers didn't realize, however, was that they never determined the quality of the readers. They didn't consider that reaching a quantity of readers (in this case an arbitrary quantity of 25) means less than the quality of readers (people who would add to the discussion about their company and extend positive exposure for the company.) In their case, 6 of the 12 regular readers of the Slug Works blog were bloggers themselves who would post about the company from time to time and link back to blog posts on the now defunct blog. Each of those 6 bloggers had relatively few readers of only 12 readers themselves. Though that doesn't seem like much exposure at first glance, the cumulative view reveals that the Slug Works blog had an indirect influence over an additional 72 regular readers by virtue of these other bloggers. When added to the 12 readers the Slug Works blog already had (including those 6 bloggers), the total direct and indirect regular readership is 84 people which is more than three times their original goal. Where the Sluggers saw failure they actually achieved success. Had the Sluggers realized this they might have a different perspective when they look back at the blog and SWEAR.

Video of the Week: Gorilla + Drums = Chocolate Ad

Link for the feed readers:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=iKdQC-hbY7k

Template for defending the success of a blog

I was in a situation recently where I was asked to determine how we would measure success for a new blog project for one of our clients. Though the client was generally in favor of blogs there was still a bit of skepticism about their usefulness and ultimate payoff for business purposes. I was peppered with questions about:

• establishing how much traffic the blog would generate
• how many comments the blog would receive per post
• how many RSS subscribers we could expect
• how many links would be generated by other bloggers
  
• how many links would be sent to the client's website
• how much revenue could be generated with the blog

Fortunately these questions were in an email so I had some time to think about the best way to respond and I ended up with the text below. Since the blog is brand new for this client there is really no way to predict what kind of success the blog will have. I also knew that wasn't going to be a satisfactory answer. I believe statistics are very important for a business blog but my concern was that the client was going to weigh this infant blog down with expectations that would kill it before it was really up and running.

All of this got me thinking about what an unsuccessful blog would be. After all, that's what they were really asking. They really wanted to know when they should pull the plug on it and consider it a failure. I know of a few other bloggers and blog advocates in corporations who are dealing with this same issue right now so here's a template version of my response to the client should you find yourself needing to defend the development a blog in the future:

Dear [company representative]
You have asked some very important questions about determining the success of the new blog. Given the relative new nature of blogs within [company], we don't know what kind of numerical impact the blogs may have on website traffic, content distribution, or the business as a whole. We are tentative to even speculate on what the numbers might be. From a marketing perspective, blogs are another venue for [company] to provide meaningful content to [target customers] who are looking for [company's services].

Though we don't know what the numbers of success looks like yet, we do know what an unsuccessful blog will look like. An unsuccessful blog will have zero readers, no comments, no RSS feed subscribers, no posts that can be found on the first page of a Google search, no links from other bloggers, and no new awareness of [company's] attempt at positioning itself as the best [company's services] resource online. If it is unsuccessful under this definition after six to nine months, the blog should probably be closed due to inactivity and lack of interest.

Thanks for the email. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Video of the Week: Shadow Puppetry

Sure, we've all played around with a flashlight and made shadow puppets but probably nothing quite like this...



Link for feed readers:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=6zK2Y-Rmv5Q