While I was on vacation a couple of weeks ago, I was the recipient of one of the most professionally handled and forward-thinking social media outreach efforts I've yet come across, and considering that I've done social media for a living on more than a few occasions, that's saying something. Even more impressive, the outreach didn't involve LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or any other buzzword standard-bearer of the overhyped social Web.
The outreach effort was from Tor books (the sci-fi imprint under Macmillan) in relation to their online bookstore. You read that right: A dead-tree book publisher most definitely has a clue of how to play in the digital sandbox, as I'll explain below. The entire communication took place over e-mail, with nary a tweet or friend feed in sight.
I know what you're thinking: Where was the social media? As Chris Brogan and my colleagues at Social Media Explorer (Jason Falls and David Finch in particular) continue to preach but no one seems to hear, social media is about the connections, not the tools. Twitter is a means, not an end, and the Tor group was much better served in reaching their goals through old-school e-mail than overly asynchronous tweetspeak or Wall-to-Wall missives.
What goal, you may ask? Getting an insanely insignificant blogger to give a damn about the new Tor book store. In other words, they wanted me to know about Tor's new project, and went through no minor effort to inform me.
It is no false modesty to say that I am the smallest of small potatoes in the blogosphere. I no longer have my still-not-giant Geekend megaphone, and even my appearances on TechTalk and my tweet exchanges with some moderately well known names in sci-fi and comics don't crank my annual unique visitor levels into the four-figures-a-month range. I'm nobody, and I only barely know a few somebodies, all of whom Tor could much more effectively speak to directly. Using me to ping Mary Robinette Kowal, Lar de Souza or David Gallaher is a pointless effort. Tor has or easily could get all their phone numbers, and they'd all be happy to take the call.
So why waste time with me? Because there is nobody too small in social media. One of my Nerd Words columns made the weekly roundup on Tor's own sci-fi blog, and that was all the validation the digital marketing team at Macmillan needed to consider me worthy of courting as a press source. In the land of Google, every incoming link is worth chasing, and Tor put no small effort into getting some links from little old me.
Not that they ever asked for any link love, mind you. Macmillan's digital marketing manager, Ami, wrote a very brief and straightforward initial e-mail (and the only way to get the address she used would be to read all the way through my bio post) which linked to the new store and the press release covering its launch. Totally professional, but friendly and with enough personalized content to prove she knew who I was and demonstrate this wasn't a blind e-mail blast. Top marks so far, but nothing that out of the ordinary, right?
At no point did Ami ask me to buy anything, pimp anything, or link anything. It was a simple "thought you'd like to know" mail, like she was mailing the New York Times and not Mr. Bloggy McSmallTime, along with a promise to answer any questions I had.
Oh, and the pitch? Tor was launching a sci-fi/fantasy-only online bookstore that carried books from every major publisher, not just Tor/Macmillan. They were selling their competitors stuff side-by-sdie with their own. The boldness of the idea was intriguing, and worthy of its own (future) post.
Naturally, the idea of someone taking on Amazon in the book space when B&N, Borders and Books-a-Million are hemorraging cash intrigued me. I'm a sci-fi geek, aspiring author, and once-and-future Web entrepreneur. Books plus Web plus sci-fi was right in my wheelhouse. So I asked Ami a lot of follow-ups, with lots of gotcha specifics.
She answered the same day -- by looping in the store's project manager who would speak to me directly about the site. Pablo got back to me the next day -- asking me to elaborate my questions -- and he answered them a couple days later with some very thorough responses. He then invited me to ping him again, directly, if I had any future questions.
So, to recap, a major book publisher reaches out to a smalltime nobody with a press release about a bold new Web initiative -- with a personal invite, no less -- and then kicks him higher up the chain when he has questions. At no point do they ask for press, cross-linking, or even a simple purchase. There is no quid pro quo. Everything is professional and pitch-perfect. Oh, and they had to do some research to contact me. No direct, immediate or large payoff, just online community goodwill and knowledge dissemination.
That's how you do social media outreach, boys and girls.
And for what it's worth, it worked. From now on, my Nerd Words column will link to store.tor.com instead of Amazon for my book citations, which is a big deal for me, since I'm an Amazon Associate. I'm leaving (a very little) money on the table because the PR efforts impressed me so. The store is pretty good, too, but we'll discuss that later.
Social media is about socialization, not the media. Remember this and you will succeed.
There's a pretty decent argument to be made that the Internet is killing the midsize and smaller science fiction conventions of the world. Unless the convention is local--and sometimes not even then--why haul out to spend a weekend with 500 or so fans and maybe one sci-fi/fantasy author or artist when you can stalk 500 geek stars from the comfort of your RSS reader? The only cons worth going to now are those that have a critical mass of stars and attractions: Comic-Con, PAX, DragonCon, Origins, GenCon. Right?
Bullshit.
Yes, the Internet has made one of the primary reasons to attend cons disappear--once upon a time, the only way to connect to fellow fans and creators was in person at cons, but now you've got more geek friends in you World of Warcraft guild than you ever met at Mid-South or APolloCon. Except that chatting online and actually hanging out with people are still two very different experiences. And despite our reputations as introverted, girl-fearing basement trolls, geeks are social creatures, too, and crave real-life human contact. Mostly.
The problem with fandom in the Internet age is that most conventions refuse to adapt to Web 2.0. They work against the Internet, rather than with it. For example, I can conjure up a list of dream convention Guests of Honor--something I've done before-- strictly from my Twitter follow list. Social media makes reaching these people easier, not just because I can ping them in Twitter easier than I can penetrate their spam filters, but because by following them, I know how to approach them--what their interests are, what their preferences in terms of con attendance are, and a sense of their availability. Plus, I can appeal to their vanity by namedropping any of the recent projects they've pimped on Twitter. That's so much better than a blind e-mail.
And that's just one social media tool, making no mention of Facebook, Pownce, MySpace, or any other buzzword-compliant online community.
If I were to get any decent number of the people I tweet-stalk to attend my convention, they'd all Twitter and/or blog about it whilst attending, instantly creating a digital megaphone of free publicity for my con, which parlays into the next year's attendance and a desire for other guests either to officially attend or just hang out of their own accord. (This is especially true of the non-television and film folks, who tend to make more use of conventions as chances to promote their work.)
Since I know the Profilactic guys (name-dropping!), I could probably arrange for a credential-neutral signup system that let participants in any online community connect. More to the point, I'd invite the Profilactic team, along with geek-centric Web 2.0 people like Jake McKee (he's got serious Lego street cred). If PenguinCon can combine sci-fi and Linux, why can't my local ConGlomeration combine sci-fi and Web 2.0? Why not let the artists and the engineers comingle, to everyone's entertainment and benefit?
Cost is the general answer, of course. The Convention Committee pays for airfare, room, and a meal per diem to guests, and in the case of those that require it, an appearance fee and/or accomodations for the guest's family. Thus, most cons can only afford two or three guests, so attaining critical mass of several really cool guests means many of the celebs must pay to bring themselves, which means the con needs to be big enough for it to be worth their while to attend as a promotional expense, which is a chicken-and-the-egg problem.
Except I seem to recall that physical attendance is no longer a barrier to participation in the Web 2.0 age. Yes, I know this contradicts the "actually hang out with people" angle of my earlier statement, but what if you could do big-screen multiparty video-conferencing at our Convention 2.0, with panel sessions involving a mix of live and online attendees, Jedi Council-style? Maybe I can't afford to bring Charles Stross to the states, but if I can get him on a panel discussing space opera sci-fi with, say, John Scalzi physically in the room, that's worth signing up for, right? Or maybe having Internet-friends (with each other, not with me) Warren Ellis and Wil Wheaton discuss music and comics and blogging, with only Wil in the room? Who wouldn't want to get in on that? And if we made the conference virtually accessible, so you could buy a cheap online pass to the virtual sessions, wouldn't folks buy a few of those. We could also archive the recorded panels for free distiribution after the con is over, pimping out the coolness as a viral advert for next year's party.
This is just me spitballing, of course. The video conference expense and tech resources may end up costing as much as a couple of guests, but if those resources got us ten big-name panelists instead of two, and those panelists had an online presence that pimped us to the masses for free, isn't that a net gain? Besides, I'd love to finally meet the guys from SFSignal, or put a voice to Rich Lovatt after conversing with him on and off for a while now.
But most of all, as a guy who loves to read literature about the future, it would be nice if my fandom finally starting embrcing the futuristic tech of the present. If sci-fi conventions want a future, they're going to have to.
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