It’s getting harder and harder to find examples where social media does, actually, sell stuff. One area where it is NOT hard to find examples is in publishing. Now I’m a bit biased here, as I landed a book deal with Crown Publishing specifically because I sold a few thousands books on my own using nothing but social media (so this is a simultaneous full & open disclosure, combined with a shameless self-promoting plug — the best of both sides of social media in one fell swoop).

But outside of the unique success stories of social media rags-to-riches stories like David Wellington and David Wong, let’s take a look at how a big-time publisher used it to sell books.

Now right off the bat, our example blurs the lines, because the example is RULE THE WEB by Mark Frauenfelder, published by St. Martin’s Press. If you haven’t heard of this guy, he’s a co-founder and regular blogger for BoingBoing.net. If you haven’t heard of BoingBoing.net, put down your abacus and stable the horse, it’s time for you to get caught up. BoingBoing.net is arguably the most-read blog on the planet (and since we only know of blogs on this planet, that makes it the most-read blog in the universe … nice work, Mark!).

So clearly, Fraunefelder (pictured at right) is a digital native with a big following of other digital natives. Even so, St. Martin’s didn’t rely on that alone to sell the book.

“We built a dedicated Web site for it,” said David Moldawer, editor of RULE THE WEB. “We used a blog to offer the same advice as the book, as well as a live podcast with interviews and a traditional, short, regular podcast with Web tips.”

They built the blog with TypePad, and hosted the podcast with BlogTalkRadio. They tried leverage Fraunfelder’s name along with the book’s website to multiple channels.

“We did extensive blogger outreach, both to people in our personal networks as well as to bloggers in the lifehack/Web tip arena,” Moldawer said.

RULE THE WEB peaked at #2 on Amazon’s “Computers & Internet” list, and hit #51 overall.

When it comes to these results, it’s impossible to tell if social media links happened because of the book’s content, or because of Frauenfelder’s status as internet royalty.

“It hit those peaks when the book was mentioned on sites like Lifehacker and 43 Folders,” Moldawer said.

And, of course, Fraunfelder posted about the book on BoingBoing.net, but the big sales peaks came when other heavyweight sites talked about the book.

“While Mark’s own posting about the book on Boing Boing certainly also boosted sales on Amazon, the mentions on the other Top 100 lifehack sites definitely had a sharper effect,” Moldawer said. “The lesson, which many of us already know, is that having other people talk about you is always more effective than talking about yourself.”

And don’t forget the obligatory video book promo on YouTube. The one listed here generated some 13,000+ views.

JUDGEMENT: DOES IT SELL BOOKS?
Hard to say. Frauenfelder would have sold a boat-load of books with or without the extra efforts by St. Martin’s Press. The spike charting on Amazon that coincided with online media mentions in Lifehacker and 43Folders, however, does point to a strong correlation.

Those mentions, though, are more PR than social media initiatives - if you count Lifehacker as an established media outlet, which I do. Getting a post in Lifehacker is not a “social media initiative,” - it’s the same things as a New York Times book review, an established media source talking about a product.

The past two days I’ve been attending/blogging the Strategy & Innovation Forum, a conference focussed on e-commerce which is hosted by Shop.org. When you get 500+ e-commerce folks in one room, the basic question, “How Does it Sell Stuff?” (props to Scott’s blog).

The photo above is from Andy Nulman’s session on mobile marketing. His message was direct and to the point, just like the message above.

Retailers are notoriously slow to adapt (sound familiar). One speaker joked that retailers always say, “We want to innovate…so, who else is doing this?”

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It’s funny, it’s so easy these days to become enamored and enthusiastic about a “web project” that you tend to quickly underestimate its technical plausibility.

For this I blame you, web 2.0.

Seriously, here’s the thing, I think most of us are experiencing a better web today, one that’s regularly[ishly] tickling our minds and imaginations and showing us that we can and should extend our own understanding and expectations for what the web can do for our marketing and communications programs.

New platforms, new protocols, new web services, new mashups, new plugins, and the like are reminding us everyday that there are some kick ass things we can do with the web that even just a few months ago might not have otherwise been possible. And that’s exciting stuff.

Just allowing yourself to imagine a bit is arguably a healthy thing, but here’s the buzzkill, this imagining of yours and mine has to be tempered and grounded with an understanding of the technical limitations and real-world cost restraints that come with web development work — particularly some of the higher-level new media projects. And that just begs the question:

How do bring really cool web projects to life?

For most folks, the easy (and sometimes only) answer is to rely on in-house expertise to get the job done, which inevitably comes with its own set of issues and challenges. For example, does the corporate web team have the time to take on your project, and if they do, how confident are you that they will do it really well? Oh, and how quickly can they get it done? All are important factors to consider.

The alternative is to bring in some outside help, which again, comes with its own issues and challenges, not least of which is, say, the headache of choosing between a consulting shop with web development capabilities, or a web shop with consulting capabilities. Oh, and the cost of it all. It’s all very messy.

Ultimately, there’s a very visible gap that I’m poking at here, one that’s annoyingly dividing ideas from implementations, concepts from experiences, thinkers from makers, etc., you get the gist.

We need to close this gap.

I have some ideas that I’ll be blogging more about here in the weeks to come, also some related Voce news on our approach to this problem. More to come….

I’ll be live-blogging for the next few days from the Strategy & Innovation Forum, hosted by Shop.org. You can follow the blog-action at blog.shop.org. The photogroup is here.

The big topic is of course social media and Web 2.0. Retailers want to know how his new world impacts their online commerce initiatives. The posting for the live-blog is mostly session recaps, but I’ll come back later this week and post a wrap-up.

Now that we’ve fully jumped into 2008, I thought it would be a good time to take a quick look at what social media is, or has become to this point. You’re probably thinking, “tired topic” or “you’re about a year or more late to the party.” But look, I’m not looking for one final definition of the tools and methods that make-up what social media is in the communication setting. Rather, what I would like is to see how the topic is being talked about generally by those who claim they provide it as a communications service. No, this isn’t yet another post on what social media is, despite the title. The definitions of the tools and tactical applications are many and the many are varied. Below is a small handful of descriptors from other agencies of what social media is or involves from their own unique perspectives.

• “There’s an evolution going on in the way people access, digest and share information, and we’re developing programs that incorporate new online and digital communications tools like wikis, podcasts, blogs and other new media to reach this ever more elusive consumer.”
• “From helping to define your social media strategy, to generating online buzz, to monitoring and shaping what is said about your company in the blogosphere, we will help you optimize the PR opportunities of blogs and social media, while minimizing the risks.”
• “We offer a range of digital tools and programs, from expertise in blogging and online measurement to virtual pressrooms and digital storytelling, to drive and measure successful communication strategies.”

These few short descriptions paint an interesting picture for me where …

• We can all agree that something has changed. Ok, well, duh.
• Buzzwords are fun! … Not really.
• Saying you do social media, no matter how you definite it or what you call it, instantly means you do *it all*.

So, what’s the point? Point is, new media, social media, digital media, whatever word and “media” after it you can think of, is still the new frontier. There still are no experts. There still is no one leader. While we, as an industry, continue to build out and refine our social media programs and services, especially those that may just be getting started, we need to be careful we do it right. Just like with anything else, going too fast or jumping from no experience in social media to actually doing it and doing it well can be a tough proposition. Since many companies are still toying with the idea of implementing social media programs, but are hesitant, we all need to be diligent in our practices and back those practices up with experience.

It’s pretty clear that there is still quite a ways to go until we collectively decide what social media really is. Maybe we never will reach what can be called a consensus. I have a feeling what may be more likely is an ongoing discussion about what social media can be, or become, as the tools and methods continue to evolve and change with time. But no matter how you define it, if you say you can do it, you better be prepared to prove it.

Welcome to the third installment of our video series 5×5, in which we introduce viewers to companies that are offering interesting, practical and useful services or products. In 5×5 we cover about five questions in around five minutes, without any hype.

In this video, I interview Renn Vara, COO/VP Business Development and Founder of SNP. Renn talks about executive communications and how SNP helps companies tactically implement components of their marketing strategy through podcasts, videocasts and an assortment of other things such as communicating to sales forces.

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I fell in love with the blogosphere a few years ago. Here was a place, an environment, where it seemed that people freely shared and exchanged opinions and ideas, and in many ways was like a free-for-all graduate school program – lots of passion, lots of idealism tempered by a healthy dose of reality, and a no-holds barred approach.

Sometimes the ideas expressed were outrageous, intentionally so, and that was ok, as long as no one got hurt. And to a certain degree, considering blogging and other online communication tools’ relative newness in comparison to older, more traditional communication outlets, the desire to shock and gain attention was not unexpected.

But when it’s shock value without a positive purpose it becomes both just plain boring and potentially detrimental to everyone else who inevitably gets lumped in with the perpetrators.

Why am I writing about this? Well, it’s something I think about quite a bit – where should the line be drawn, and by whom, and does that line change over time and depending on the circumstances? There is also that little incident that happened at CES this week that many people are talking about and that brought the whole topic of “online shock” back into the forefront.

This isn’t the first time, nor will it be the last, that an individual blogger or a site will do something that many feel pushes the envelope. I see it on a regular basis and most of the time just shrug my shoulders and move on.

But I’m also looking forward to the day when, in response to saying I’m a blogger, I no longer hear even the occasional “you’re one of those?”

Does social media tend to drive people towards more isolation from the real world or the opposite? I was asked this question recently in an interview. What do you think?

I answered that it can do both, depending on the nature of the individual, i.e. if you’re already a bit of a loner then online communication can help drive your further away from society. However, I think from my experience that interactions online also help foster new real-world relationships and communications. A great example of this is conferences and events.

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So despite all the hype I and others wrap around social media programs, there remains a very raw, very real and very unsexy part of this line of work that seldomly gets discussed — and that’s the ugly, but critical custodial maintenance of the social web.

This is what I jokingly, err, awkwardly refer to as “Janitor 2.0″

Like it or not, the creation and adoption of social tools for business, be they blogs, forums, wikis, or otherwise, each comes with their own unique maintenance needs — and yeah, those needs must be tended to; often by a quiet, nameless pool of marketing, PR and web folk who work pretty damn hard to ensure everything else works as it should.

Broken links. Comment spam. Trackback spam. Invite scrubs. Inconsistent tags. Email filtering. Page overloads. Server balancing. Browser incompatibilities. And the list goes on, you get the gist.

It’s all the unspoken, unexpected and undervalued stuff that must happen every day to keep a healthy “conversation” going.

For this reason, it’s a huge defining factor between the success or failure of a social media program. Fittingly, it’s also an important defining factor between those “new media experts” that know what they’re talking about and, well, those that use the word “easy” a lot.

My advice?

Using social media is a powerfully messy business. Anticipate and over plan for the maintenance, upkeep and clean up of every social tool you use, and generally speaking, accept the fact that you have yet another hat to wear, a blue one this time, in this messy middle. Good luck.

[Cross published on Media Guerrilla]

Voce has been selected by AlwaysOn as the official press organizer for the upcoming OnMedia event, scheduled to occur on January 28-30, 2008 in New York City. Please visit the conference website for more info on this year’s event. We’ll be updating this blog with select pieces of conference coverage, live from the event. Much more to come, stay tuned!