Webcasts: A Hot Marketing Tool
Online video needs to be short, engaging and “e-mailable,” notes Simon & Schuster’s Fleming. She quotes TurnHere’s Inman as citing a rule of thumb: “what you can get away with watching before your boss catches you.”
For Schuster’s authors, the “quick dip” into who they are inspires the viral marketing component, aided by strategic cross-marketing, syndication and search engines. For those who visit the BookVideos.TV site, cutting-edge interactivity will keep them there, including opportunities to comment, join discussion groups, blog—both with text and video (via Web 2.0 applications)—essentially, as Inman puts it, “using the latest Web tools to create a conversation.”
In the end, the cutting-edge approach really represents a new wrinkle in a very old book-marketing strategy.
“It’s word-of-mouth in general, and I think that’s how movies succeed, and music and books,” Kania says. “It’s going back to what made books successful in the first place, and that’s peer-to-peer recognition.” BB
James Sturdivant is an award-winning freelance writer based in Philadelphia, Pa.
