Get Seen - Marketing a Book

Shannon Vargo and Chris Brogan by Chris Brogan, on Flickr CC BY-NC-SA

Chris Brogan made a great post over on his blog about marketing his book, Trust Agents - Marketing a Book.

I'm remixing his post to give you an update on where I'm at in marketing my book, Get Seen: Secrets of Online Video.

Chris and his co-author Julien, are a few months ahead of me since their book comes out in August and mine comes out in December.

Chris says:

Neither Julien nor I have ever marketed a book like this before. We’ve helped friends promote their books, and we are both avid readers, but the difference between marketing something and liking something are the differences between a marriage and staring at a picture of someone you’ve never met in person. Along the way, I want to share some of what we’ve learned, especially because Trust Agents is a very different kind of book.

That's excellent.

I want to do the same.

The Story So Far

Where I am in the writing process:

I've written the book and sent it in to Wiley. It's being edited now and I expect to get it back shortly to go over their edits and make changes and additions. I'll have two more chances to edit the book before it's final.

If you are reading this and are involved in online video, and have something you are releasing later this year, let me know know so I can consider adding it to the book. :-)

Where I am with marketing:

Site:

SteveGarfield.com/getseen – After talking with my editor Shannon Vargo at Wiley, we decided to host the book's page under my own domain. I put out a survey to my twitter followers to determine whether the book page should be a marketing site or a community. I went with community.



Community:

I built the site with Ning. The splash page has a picture of the book and some marketing info at the top, so it also acts as a marketing page too.

People have already started joining the community. It's going to become a great resource for both readers and non-readers to exchange their experiences with putting video online. I've got a lot of information in the book about cameras too, and this site is going to grow and change with new product releases from vendors. The community has 37 members. Join in to talk about your questions and help others.

Twitter:

@GetSeen – I made a Twitter account for the book to send out major announcements. This account is for people who want to make sure they get announcements about the book on twitter.

People are posting about the book on twitter and I appreciate it.





Facebook:

Get Seen Page – I built a Get Seen Page on Facebook. As of this writing, there are 37 fans. I haven't promoted this page yet, other than having a link to it on SteveGarfield.com and on the Ning Community Site.

Amazon.com:

Get Seen is now available for pre-order on amazon.com.

Speaking:

I'm lining up speaking engagements for this year and next.

I'm also starting to plan the book tour and looking for sponsors for air, hotel and meet up locations.

I've got some ideas about combining the book tour with tweetups and Media Makers meetings.

When I traveled to Phoenix, I brought that community together and this past week I went to Nantucket where they had their first tweetup. I'd love to help kick start ongoing events in your town.

Interviews:

I've started mentioning the book when doing interviews. It's still early for interviews, but if a show is ongoing I'll do an interview now so that the host can see how it goes and have me back on again.

I've recently been on the Mashable Lounge and CNN.com/Live. Appearances there will continue.

Other Touchpoints – Following Chris' example, I edited my email signature to include a link to the book. I’ve added a link to the book into my Facebook bio.

What’s Working?

Here’s some things I know:

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #509,116 in Books

Here are some things I don't know:

I don't know how to see the ranking in specific categories. I'll have to ask Chris how he gets this.

Books > Computers & Internet > Business & Culture > Manager’s Guides to Computing
Books > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership > Systems & Planning

I'm not listed in Barnes & Noble yet.

What's Next

Here are some of the things I'm working on:

Get on National TV. Explaining how to put video online will be a great show segment and I'm starting to contact shows about this. You know I'm already talking to one special late night show.

Recruit other video producers to join the community and to share their skills.

I'd love to hear your ideas and get your help. Thanks!

 

Update:

Here's a short URL you can use to link to the book http://bit.ly/GetSeen

Speaking This Morning at Jeff Pulver's 140 Characters Conference

140 Characters Conference, originally uploaded by stevegarfield. CC BY-NC-SA

I'm speaking at Day 2 of Jeff Pulver's 140 Characters Conference in NYC this morning about twitter: Video at 9:50 AM:

Christian Payne (@Documentally)
Jeffrey Hayzlett (@JeffreyHayzlett) - CMO, Kodak
Steve Garfield (@stevegarfield)
Sukhjit Ghag (@sukhjit)

The sessions are very short to keep them interesting and to allow as many people as possible to talk.

Here's a link to some tests I've been doing with video twitter: How To Add Video To Twitter.

Watch me and @Documentally on twitter for a link to a live stream if we can get one going during our session.

The session will be recorded and posted too.

Twitter TV: Twitter and Facebook Users to Star on New MTV Show

Yo! MTV Twitters with Alexa Chung:

On Monday “It’s On With Alexa Chung” will replace the recently canceled “TRL” as MTV’s live daytime show, one that producers say will integrate Twitter and Facebook to an extraordinary degree, taking viewer interaction “to a new level, making them the stars of the program.”

Any television show, of course, can promote its Twitter account and ask viewers to sign up for Facebook updates. And many networks, like CNN and E!, have incorporated social networking into their programming. But MTV wants — and perhaps needs — to wrap itself in the social Web more organically. To this end Twitter commentary will be featured regularly on the screen, home viewers will be able to submit video questions for celebrities on the show, and stars of viral videos will be shown in regular segments. MTV and Facebook are joining together to sell ads on the show and the Web.

This sounds like a step in the right direction for including people formerly known as the audience in a TV show. TRL used to have a wall of screens with viewers who could go live on the show. CNN is bringing in viewers in their Blogger Bunch segments.

I'll be anxious to see how interactive this is. Are the twitter users on this show actually going to be the stars, or just pieces of content?

It's a challenge to produce an entertaining TV show and allow for the inclusion of the audience as presenters. I think a level of trust has to be built up for this to work on TV, but there's an opportunity for a more free flowing twitter-like live environment to exist on the web.

Video twitter.

We haven't seen this on TV.

The idea of video twitter means that the broadcaster will have to give away some level of control.

I've been testing this out recently with a number of video twitter web chat solutions.


Image courtesy: TinyChat

In my tests on TinyChat I've recognized that the people participating in the video chat are all equal. It's not a democracy either because there's no voting and no one is in charge. Much like twitter the video twitter sessions I've started have been free flowing.

In a recent test, I had the video chat up in a window and started paying partial attention. The chat kept going, and I read some email and visited some web sites. I was listening to the chat stream but not fully focusing on it, being able to jump back in when I wanted.

Mashable has been experimenting with TinyChat too and is going live with it's version next week called The Mashable Lounge. In thier version, an early look indicates that each chat will be based on a topic and hosted by selected Mashable staff members with a text chat area for viewers to particpate.

I think that the idea of video twitter is something that is going to evolve over time. Right now it's fun to experiemnt with it and it will be interesting to see how web and tv shows incorporate the idea of video twitter.

Follow me and Get Seen on twitter to be alerted to future video twitter chats, or chat amongst yourselves.

How To Add Video to Twitter

I'm excited to be going to Jeff Pulver's 140 Character conference in NYC next week.

I'll be on a panel about twitter video on Wednesday with:

Christian Payne (@Documentally)
Jeffrey Hayzlett (@JeffreyHayzlett) - CMO, Kodak
Sukhjit Ghag (@sukhjit)

Here's the full 140 Conference schedule.

Video on Twitter
Video coming to twitter reminds me of when video came to blogging. It's really not that different.

What you are doing is adding video to a twitter post, just like adding video to a blog post.

Keep in mind: You can record video anywhere and just post a link to it in twitter. It's not hard.

The fun part about it is seeing all the ways that developers are trying to make it seamless.

I've been evaluating many of the twitter video solutions and am looking forward to discussing them at the conference.

YouTube
Big news from yesterday, YouTube now integrates directly with twitter, so that when you post a video on YouTube, a twitter post can automatically be sent.

Here's my first video, recorded via the web, directly to YouTube:



Uploads will be posted to your connected services after they have finished processing, which might take a little while.

YouTube auto tweeted this:
I uploaded a YouTube video -- YouTube to Twitter - Webcam Recorded Video http://bit.ly/v7Gd0

You can set this up from your YouTube Video Upload Page. Let me know if you get this working.

Note: I've been trying to get this working but you've got to log in with a Google username and that's confusing things. Not sure why YouTube is requiring me to use a Google sign on to integrate twtitter. It would seem simpler to just ask me for to autorize YouTube to post to twitter like many other sites do.

Update: I got it working. You've got to log out of YouTube, then log in to Google, then go to YouTube and log in with your Google username/password, then log in with your YouTube username/password, then click on twitter to authorise YouTube to post to twitter, or something like that. Way too confusing.

Qik
I've been using Qik from my Nokia N95-3 to automatically send a message to notify my twitter followers that I'm streaming live. That's been running for a long time.

Here are some of my initial tests of services that integrate directly with twitter. These are tweets that the video services sent out:


Hello from 12 Seconds on 12seconds.tv

12seconds - Hello from 12 Seconds http://tiny12.tv/S62KG


Seesmic Needs More Cowbell!... http://see.fm/51A6ppTdXv


Trying out twitvid.io http://twitvid.io/abJ4


Watch my video on twitvid http://twitvid.com/5E39B

yfrog - test 1:
Recorded to yfrog via tweetie Mac application http://yfrog.us/0vfu5z
Oops. [ An error occured during video conversion, please try again later or upload another video ]

yfrog - test 2:


Testing the tweetie mac desktop app with yfrog video integration http://yfrog.us/7hukoz

Note: When using the tweetie Mac app, you can't preview your yfrog video before saving. It's fast though.

Mobatalk Test 1:
MobaTalk which failed to let me upload using Safari 4. I'm waiting to hear back on where the video was recorded locally to be able to upload it. Most of these services use a flash recorder that records over the internet. MobaTalk records locally giving you a higher quality video.

Mobatalk Test 2:

Testing Mobatalk. Nice quality.... http://8lnk.com/t/469

This test used Firefox.

There are lots more video twitter services to test too.

What are your favorite ways to integrate video with twitter?