I’m very happy to say that I will be facilitating a roundtable discussion on social technology at the Digital Minds Conference on 7 April at the QEII Conference Centre. Indeed, I will be available throughout the London Book Fair to talk to publishers, small and large, about how we might work together on social technology projects, whether outreach, community building and marketing, or internal communication and collaboration.
The Conversations session at Digital Minds will start at 14.30 in the Whittle Room (PDF), and will continue, with a break, through until about 16:20, so there’ll be plenty of time to discuss lots of topics. There’s no set agenda, so you can come with whatever questions are relevant to you, although if you need a deep dive into a particular area or want a confidential discussion, email me now and book a time to talk during the fair.
Some ideas for conversations might include:
- Getting started with social media marketing: If you’re new to social media, how do you know where to start? How do you pick your tools? Where should you focus your effort?
- Social media reboot: You’ve already got various social media accounts, but you’re not getting the results you want, or you feel lost in the social media forest. How do you get yourself unstuck? How do you assess what to continue, and what to drop?
- What to say on social media: Creating accounts is the easy bit, the hard bit is keeping them going with compelling content that will drive loyalty, sales and traffic to your website. So what sort of things should you be Tweeting and Facebooking? And when?
- Integration with traditional marketing: Social media marketing should not stand apart from the rest of your marketing work, so how do you integrate it? How do you get the best of both worlds?
- Building communities: One of the hardest things on the web is building a genuine, long-lasting and constructive community of interest. Publishers can benefit hugely from such communities, but there’s so much to think about when building the technology, nurturing early adopters and scaling your user base. What tools does a community need? How do those tools affect behaviour? What usage and moderation policies should you have? How much outreach will you need to do? How do you keep people coming back?
- Designing social apps: The tablet is revolutionising the way that we consume and create media, but many book-related apps don’t fully exploit the things that make tablets, and smartphones, different from paper or laptops. How do you start to think about creating a social app? How do you even start thinking about apps, social or not? Is the effort worth the expense?
There are, of course, many more topics we can talk about, so you can bring your ideas to the table and we’ll get stuck in to what I know is going to be a fascinating conversation!
If you want to talk about any of these or other topics privately, or are interested in my workshops, consulting or research, then just email me and we’ll book in a meeting. I’m particularly interested in meeting publishing companies in America, as I’ll be spending a fair amount of time there from mid-summer onwards. And, finally, if you’re not going to be at the LBF, or you’re not in publishing but are interested in these issues, get in touch anyway and we can discuss your needs.