PR 2.0
Everyone in book publishing knows that PR and publicity are important for book sales. As I mentioned previously, if you are interested in selling books today, you must understand how online social media are changing the very PR ground underneath all us (read Brian Solis’ manifesto here.)
Embedded in Brian’s manifesto is a link to a post by Chris Anderson, author of my favorite business book of last year, The Long Tail (get a copy today if you haven’t read it.) Chris’ post on How to Do Publicity Without a Press Release (Or the Press) is a further exploration of online PR and is oriented towards the book business. Read it here.
One thing that struck me was that even with all of this new technology, it still takes an enormous amount of work to get the buzz going on a book. So that kills any dreams we all may have had about writing a few blog entries and getting the same results as having a large budget, traditional PR campaign. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that you can and should be doing this for yourself (if you are the author of the content.) You now have an opportunity to directly express how you genuinely feel and think about important issues. This type of communication has a power in it that can draw others (a community or even several communities based on the facets of your interests) to you both now and in the future (the “persistence of blogging” effect.) And while you can make these important connections on your own, you’ll need to know the new PR protocols as one can easily offend the blogging hierarchy (imagine the noise to signal ratio for an influential blogger and you’ll quickly understand why they may not suffer fools gladly.) Luckily, Chris’ article and several of the comments go into many of the do’s and don’ts of online PR etiquette.
Required reading.
Gary Ward
Topics: Brian Solis, Chris Anderson, Marketing, Technology |
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