Show Notes: Report from the Digital Book World Marketing and Discoverability Conference
Joyce’s table-setting address stressed the need for new tools—particularly social listening programs—to monitor to the way customers and potential customers talk about ideas and discover products.
Joyce nodded to the importance of metadata (while noting, poignantly, that “‘metadata’ is like the word ‘plastics’ in the film The Graduate”: lots of people say the word without understanding what it means). Context, he said, is one of the most important factors in the new world of discoverability, espousing the need for new types of recommendation engines. Referencing Arthur C. Clarke’s Three Laws of Prediction (No. 3: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”), he explained that publishers should focus less on what other customers have purchased and more on what the individual consumer wants and needs, helping them to discover not only the books they want, but the books they didn’t know they wanted.