Simon & Schuster have teamed up with Marvel to produce a 25 part mini series based on one of Stephen King’s short stories, “N”.  Nice idea.  They’ve made the episodes available as a serial online, partnered with a mobile provider to provide the content for phones and you can subscribe through iTunes (but for $3.99 for the whole lot, despite the fact that it appears the series will be free on the site).

I really wanted to love it, but the more I explored the site the more problems I found.  I have to say I was  surprised to read:

You can watch all of the episodes right here at www.NisHere.com as they become available. Just bookmark this site and visit each weekday.

Seriously?  Ever heard of RSS? They do have a mailing list though, so I hope they’ll be emailing with notification that each episode has gone live, but as they’re asking you to come back and check I very much doubt it.  I would have thought that keeping potential book buyers happy should be prioritised over page impressions.  I registered to watch the first episode and on coming back to the site there’s nowhere for me to login, so I have to register again if I want to see it a second time.  The widget didn’t work for me.  When I tried to access the wap site I got an error message. FAIL.

Come on S&S, this is basic stuff (I’m not even going into the compete disregard for web standards).  This project must have been one of their biggest campaigns, but it seems no one has put any thought into the user experience.

But it’s still good to see publishers experimenting with other ways to tell stories online, and working with media partners to make sure it gets as much exposure as possible.  Hopefully it’ll prove more successful than King’s last big foray into online promotion.

I hate James Bridle*. Not content with an excellent blog about books and technology, he has his fingers in lots of book related pies. All of them good too. He’s clearly trying to make the rest of us look lazy, and succeeding.

When he launched bkkeepr a few months ago, I wasn’t entirely sure whether I’d use it or what benefit it would bring me. I also wasn’t sure whether I wanted my trashy reading habits laid bare for the twitterverse to see. But it’s a simple add-on for Twitterers, a quick tweet with the ISBN logs your reading progress. It’s a great tool for tracking your reading, but for me the best feature is the ability to add your books to Librarything with one click. Genius. I gave up on Librarything a while ago because it would have taken me days to get my books on there. Last time I moved house I tried adding them while I was unpacking, but I gave up after one box. I never got into the habit of adding books when I bought them either. But I can add books via text or form my computer with bkkeepr. Bkkeepr may just make Librarything usable again for me.

And even if you don’t use Librarything, or Goodreads, or Bookrabbit, if you’re as nosy as I am, it’s lovely just to see what other people are reading. I’d really like to see it develop in the future, with more features around sharing and comparing reading lists etc, and I’m sure James won’t disappoint.

It’s also good to see my old employer sponsoring it, and I’m really pleased they’re investing in ways for book lovers to interact online and enhance their reading experience.

*I don’t really, he’s lovely.

I Feel London [via Only Dead Fish], what a lovely, lovely idea. Suggestions on stuff to do in London/New York depending on the mood you’re in.   Will be really interesting once there’s a bit more content.

I would love the same kind of site for books. Anyone fancy making it?

The lovely DFC illustrators have put together some brilliant tips on how to draw their characters for worksheets for festivals etc.  Sarah McIntyre, author and illustrator of one of my favourite DFC strips, Vern and Lettuce, has posted hers on her blog.  I can’t even manage to draw a stick man, but I just about managed it!

Piracy can no longer be thought of as a nuisance. It is the paradigm through which people obtain music. This panel will discuss specific tactics on how piracy can be harnessed to our advantage and why it is a positive thing for the music industry. 

Jason Schwartz Prod Mgr, AngelsoftRandy Saaf CEO, MediaDefender IncI was one of the few people who didn’t make it to Jane McGonigal’s keynote, which sounds like it was excellent.  But, I thought this panel might have some insightful parallels to publishing.  Especially as recently there has been a lot of talk about piracy increasing the sales of books. The panel consisted of two guys who took very different approaches to piracy online.  One worked for a company who, together with record labels, promoted bands by seeding albums on torrent sites.  The other, who also worked in conjunction with labels, spent his time filling torrent sites with as many corrupt files as possible in an attempt to bury any actual pirated material.   Jason Schwartz from Angelsoft explained how piracy can be a positive marketing tool:

•  When seeding content you can track the number of downloads but also geographic data.  Every IP address is logged.  That information is then used strategically to plan tours etc.
• They are using piracy channels to distribute music freely.                                 

A look at how interactive gaming, storytelling and puzzles can engage users with your brand. Movie and TV producers are increasingly using these tactics to promote their entertainment but is it possible for other brands to provide such experiences for their adorers or to attract new customers.

Rachel Clarke, Bibrik Ltd
Dan Hon, CEO, Six to Start
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher, Penguin
Roo Reyolds, Metaverse Evangelist, IBM

Notable campaigns using games

• Cloverfield
• Honda
• Perplex City
• Alleve

• Rather than interruption marketing, games offer a way to interact and converse with consumers.But, Jeremy did point out that Penguin’s treasure hunt game for The Malice Box [Jeremy I'm assuming it was this, correct me if I'm wrong] didn’t work as a marketing tool. But paying bookshops for space did.
• Know your audience and know that there are multiple levels of players. Distinction online between Hardcore and Casual users. But no one ever talks about the Hardcore television audience, the kind of people that are really into LOST or a soap and then go online to find out more.

Convincing brands to use games

• Penguin has an ‘innovations fund’. So projects like ‘we tell stories’ aren’t paid for by the marketing department.[All publishers should do this, the larger ones can certainly find the money. It makes far more sense than using marketing budgets for digital projects as many marketing departments are set up for traditional marketing and really only plan far enough ahead to put together outdoor marketing. Whereas a good digital campaign, whether it's a game, blog or a user-generated project needs a lot of time to plan, execute and fix the inevitable issues that will unexpectedly crop up.] Penguin want to explore the future of the story.

Metrics

• Need to think about how you can use metrics to measure the depth of involvement. Are the traditional results of unique visitors and page views enough?

Games vs traditional marketing

• It needs to be relevant to the core of the brand.
• It’s all about collaboration. The sharing of knowledge and working together to solve a game is a powerful medium.
• Short term campaigns don’t necessarily make sense when you’ve spent time fostering a passionate user base. The Office Max Christmas Elves game was brought back each Christmas and has increased in success year after year. 1 million users first year, 11 million the second year.
• Niche success has an impact, it doesn’t have to have a mass appeal.

Are there brands that can’t use games as a tool?

• Definitely. The game has to be tailored to the campaign and brand.

Points arising from the Q&A

• You have to offer something to the consumer and community, two-way relationship.
• Jeremy made a good point that other publishers aren’t our competition, games are. We need to engage people with other ways of storytelling.
• Educational games can have the same objectives as the classroom. If a child reaches a certain level, or completes a task then we can prove that they have achieved specific learning objectives.

Today’s ‘totally wired’ teens have driven the early adoption of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook as well as many widgets and applications. They are also super communicators who can’t live without their phones. At the same time, they embrace technology for different reasons than adult early adopters. Anastasia Goodstein, founder of Ypulse.com and author of Totally Wired: What teens and tweens are really doing online, will moderate a discussion with six teens (boys and girls) between the ages of 13-17 giving you an opportunity to ask them questions about what works online and on cell phones, and more importantly, what doesn’t.

Anastasia Goodstein Publisher, Ypulse

Favourite sites?

• Goodreads – “I can’t justify spending money on a book without reading other people’s reviews first”
• Purevolume – “I couldn’t live without music.”
• MySpace, Facebook and Hi5 – ‘because you can customise it and communicate with friends.” [pretty much all the panel were on MySpace and Facebook - one of the twelve year old girls was registered on MS as a 16 year-old]
• Digg – “I like keeping up to date with news.”
• Hypster.com – “I can find underground music and make playlists.”
• Seventeen.com – “I can stay up to date with hairstyles.”

What turns you off on a site?

• Ads/pop ups. The entire panel got quite passionate about hating advertising. But interestingly, they wouldn’t mind contextual ads relevant to them. One of the boys would like to hear about the next Halo game or to see as for trainers on NBA.com.
• Sites that take too long to load.

Social networking fatigue. Are you using networking sites less frequently?

• One of the boys said that he used to check his MySpace all the time, refreshing every five minutes but now he only goes there once he gets a friend request.
• The continual updates and add-ons aren’t needed. It’s more dull now.
• It’s just for keeping in contact with friends, if there was a better way I wouldn’t use it.

Do you use email?

• I only got an email account because I need an email address to register for sites.
• Only to contact family and teachers.
• Use on-campus school email for keeping in touch with teachers.
• Have an email account for professional type letters that you can’t use MySpace for.

What about instant messenger?

• Pretty much a resounding no, which surprised me. They seemed to view it as quite a babyish thing that they used when they were younger.

What about phones?

• All the panel except for one had a phone.
• They don’t get ringtones from the internet – they’re too expensive.
• None of them used their phones to get onto the internet, they can’t afford it.
• They all liked to play games like pacman and tetris on their phones.
• Texting seemed to be the main use for their phones.
• Never use wallpapers.
• They do listen to music on their phones.
• They don’t watch videos on their phones, but one of the panel said that they did record video on their phone.

Virtual worlds, do you use them?

• X-box live – likes it because you can play other people.
• Zwinky – Used to use it, but it’s really dull and boring. “People used to ask me where I live and that puts me off.”
• Runescape, Gaia - But $15 a month is off putting, I’d rather buy another game for a console. “I’m in high-school now, I don’t have time for that”
• Yahoo avatar – I like to customise my own avatar

User-generated content. Have you ever produced any?

• This got a really positive response from the panel and was something they’d all be keen to get involved with.
• One of the boys had entered a YouTube competition.
• A few of the panel said that if they had a camera, they would have entered something similar too.
• “It’s really cool because you can interact with something someone is trying to sell you.”
• In response to the question ‘would brands who use UGC put you off?’: “no, it would make me respect them more because they know how hard it is to produce something creative and they think you’re capable of doing it too.”

Do you keep up with the news?

• Yes, I like staying up to date with Iraq etc.
• Interested in the debate for President and uses YouTube, GoogleNews and wikipedia to keep up.
• One of the panel said that The Onion had caught her attention because she likes likes things that are funny or present the news from a different angle.
• They don’t ever visit CNN or The New York Times etc.

Do you use the internet to support charitable causes?

• They liked sites that used games to make them aware of causes.
• “Doing stuff online gets my attention.”

Do you watch movies online? And if so, where?

• One of the panel watched foreign dramas online that she couldn’t get anywhere else. Used them to learn languages.
• Most of the panel used network sites to catch up on shows they had missed. ABC family etc.
• One of the girls watches the Disney Channel both online and on her phone.

One of the audience asked if the panel would get involved in a campaign to stop all advertising.

• They said that the advertising helped fund the sites the visited so weren’t entirely sure that they would help stop it entirely.
• “Ads should match your interests.”
• One of the boys said that ads should only be allowed on sites where you’re actually going to buy something: Amazon, Ebay etc.

Do you visit brand sites? Do you play branded games?

• “I like to play the games. They’re addictive.”
• If they did something interesting, then yes I would.
• They would visit brand sites to enter competitions.

What about flash games, miniclip etc?

• Yes I like to go to addictinggames.com.
• “If I’m really bored I’ll play them. I think they’re cool.”
• “I like to go to any site that has games. People send them to me.”
• Newgrounds I go there to play whatever games that aren’t blocked at school.
• A few of the panel could remove blocks with proxy servers.

Do you make plans to see friends online?

• They all made plans either in person or by text/phone, but not online.
• “You’re not sure they’ll get the message online.”

What don’t marketers understand?

• Unless ads are clever they don’t grab my attention.

It was a really interesting panel. I was particularly curious as to what teens are doing as the project I’m working on is aimed at tweens.  But I was surprised that despite the fact they’re clearly knowledgeable about technology and the internet, they were really only using it for typical teenage things.  Friends, music and entertainment were their primary activities online.

“Better than chocolate, better than sex.” Even if nobody really MEANS it, what would it take to craft experiences our users would describe like that? In this new follow-up to creating passionate users, we’ll look at tools that can help take us there (including some fun science). We’ll cover some new, some retro, and some counter-intuitive techniques to take Cognitive Seduction to the next level. Best of all, we can do a whole lot of user wooing without having to change our product.

Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users

• To make better apps, we must compensate for the missing ‘human-ness’.
• Not about the company or the product, it’s about how the user feels.
• The difference between fantastic and average is not about natural talent but about practice.

1. Use telepathy. You need to feel your users’ pain.
2. Serendipity. We try to find patterns and reasons for things. Add randomness to help serendipity.
   
3. The Dog Ears Principle. Use subtle real-world physics (a dog’s ears move separately from it’s head). For example the little bounce when you scroll on an iPhone.
4. Create Joy. This is normally the last thing we look at after the core functionality. But to the brain this isn’t just the icing on the cake, it’s what will keep us returning for more.
5. Inspire first person language. Make them think about themselves not the product. Passionate users have more ‘I’s.
6. T-shirt first development. What does it say about someone that they are one of your users? Make the t-shirt before you make the product. Where there is passion people will express it with t-shirts and stickers and mugs.
7. Easter Eggs and Other Treats. Use inside references and hidden surprises. Brains thrive on the ‘oh!’ moment of discovery.
8. Tools for evangelism. Your users need to be able to easily tell everyone why they love your product. Justfication. Help them defend this ‘totally lame waste of time’ to others.
9. You are a…(predator). Manage their fight or flight response. We get stressed when we’re under attack, help users manage stress – we can’t think properly under stress.
10. Exercise the brain. The exercise that best helps the brain is physical exercise. Help them improve their body.
11. Give them superpowers quickly. Think about how you can enable them quickly.
12. Speed their knowledge acquisition. Use patterns to help.
13. Focus. Attention offsets. If you create a product that consumes attention (Twitter etc) then offer something that will help them focus too.
14. Make your product documents reflect your feelings. Help and FAQs pages are not enough. Users turn to them when they’re frustrated and the content the find can make the difference between your users thinking ‘oops’ or ‘bastards’.
15. Help with ‘reinvestment of mental resources into new problems’. Experts never stop learning, they add new skills to their list.
16. Create a culture of support. There are no dumb answers. Encourage people to ask and answer questions.
17. Do not insist on ‘inclusivity’. Don’t punish advanced users. Jargon is good, passionate users talk differently.
18. Practice seductive opacity. Brains love mystery, curiosity and anticipation. The digital world has raised the value of physical things. The package is a sexy thing.
19. Atoms are not ‘old skool’. People have many sense. Think of ways for them to use them and interact in different ways. iBuddy etc.
20. Do everything this man does:

Learn the three business lessons of Japanese comics — and get a sneak preview of America’s first all-manga business book.

Daniel Pink author of A WHOLE NEW MIND: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future and THE ADVENTURES OF JOHNNY BUNKO: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need.

• Manga is pervasive in Japanese society: 22% of all printed matter is Manga. It sits at the centre of all Japanese pop culture. Toys, games, anime, TV and retail are all influenced by Manga. But the industry is facing a decline.
• However, amateur manga (dojinshi) is growing in popularity. Dojinshi takes existing characters from licensed manga and remixes it. They take chaste relationships and make them explicit and create situations they would like to see their favourite characters in.
• But these are copyrighted characters so why aren’t publishers stopping them? The publishers and creators of dojinshi have an implicit agreement: “anmoku no ryokai”. Publishers have agreed to look the other way becuase they feel that there in advantage to people using their characters. But they can’t officially state that is in their interest. Almost like an unofficial creative commons agreement.
• Copyright laws are somehow hindering the commercial success of the original creators.
• Both official and ‘remix’ manga are available in the same retailers.
• Donjinshi bridges the gap between artists and readers, it’s needed to keep the manga industry alive.
• Dojinshi has three business advantages for publishers:

1. Customer care. Fans are interested in the original characters and want to know what happens off the page. It gives fans more of what they want.
2. Talent market. Publishers trawl the amateur artists to find new talent for them to publish.
3. Free market research. Publishers can use dojinshi to spot trends.

This session will focus on how to accomplish huge things in little time. From near-overnight IPOs and massive cult followings, to instant NY Times bestsellers and runaway viral campaigns, learn tricks from those who have created monsters of buzz, fame, and fortune.

Tim Ferris, author of The Four Hour Work Week

Mike Cassidy, Benchmark Capital

Evan Williams, Co- founder of Twitter

Cali Lewis, Host and co=producer of Geekbrief.tv

• Make sure all of your meetings are with all the key decision makers in one room.
• Focus on the markets that are already adopting/responding. Get involved with those communities.
• Answer people’s questions and become an expert in what you do.
• Start with a clean feature set, then watch what features people like. Build from user feedback. Ask them what the want.
• Usability testing is key!
• Build the right team. Pay whatever it takes and don’t settle.
• Don’t promote too early, it’ll take a while to perfect a product. Test and then let people know once you’ve ironed out the kinks.
• Don’t skimp on time with people just to get as many business cards as you can. When emailing bloggers, take the time to craft an email. Make clear the connection between them and your product.
• Think about partnering with someone else who knows what they’re doing and stick to doing what you do best.
• It’s important to create great relationships regardless of whether or not you think they can benefit you professionally. Don’t try and develop relationships when you need them, do it ahead of time.
• Have a ‘not to-do list’ to avoid falling into bad habits.
• Focus on one channel and dominate it.