Imagining a world without book publishers

December 22, 2009 - 17:00

Last week I was invited to sit on a book publishing panel hosted by MediaBistro. The moderator, Andrew Albanese of Publishers Weekly, told me to be "incendiary," so I guess I was.

Here's part of his coverage of the event:

"While publishers may be interested in how to better deploy virality and social media like apps to sell books, Penenberg suggested that most publishers are simply passing that burden directly on to authors and he questioned whether the big houses had the institutional desire to do what was really necessary 'to completely reimagine the book.' Converting print pages to web pages will not capture the attention of future generations (characterized by his six-year-old ‘on-demand’ child, he told the audience.) Penenberg saw current e-book efforts as little more than stopgaps, stressing that books must become multimedia, and offer future readers far richer experiences than mere text on a page or screen.

Read the rest here.





Correction

December 9, 2009 - 13:57

Most authors wish there were a way to change a word here and there after publication. In my case, in Viral Loop--comprised of some 80,000 words--I would like to take back the word "pirated" on page 54, which I used to describe the kind of entertainment that Mary Hodder, a Bay-area entrepreneur, deep thinker and all around good person, downloads from the Web. Mary doesn't download pirated material. She buys TV shows and movies from legitimate sources likeiTunes or streams or rents them from Netflix. I'd fact-checked the chapter with Mary before publication and inputted the change on to the hard copy of the manuscript we used to make final corrections, but for some reason the change didn't make it into the final publication.

I regret the error.





New Term for Viral Winners

November 9, 2009 - 03:55

Last week I published a guest post on TechCrunch, announcing a contest for a new term for "viral." I received more than 300 submissions from all over the world. Some of the more intertesting ones included "unfettered loop," "tidal," "hypersuasion," "sharing cycle," "memetic," "multiplier effect," "contagious content," and "orgasme."

It was a hard decision, but here are the winners: 

First prize ($250): "Social Fan-Out," Roy Oron

Second Prize: ($100): "Pass It On," Brian Heller

Third Prize ($50): "Social Promotion," O-J Dyar<!--EndFragment-->

Thanks to everyone who participated.

 

 





Viral Loop: "Clear-eyed," "solidly researched," "briskly written."

October 26, 2009 - 11:32

Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves
Adam L. Penenberg. Hyperion, $25.99 (288p) ISBN 9781401323493

In this clear-eyed collection of case studies, Fast Company contributing writer and NYU journalism professor Penenberg examines the engine driving the growth of web 2.0 businesses like Flickr, YouTube and eBay to Facebook and Twitter: the viral loop. The concept behind a viral loop is simple—in order to use the product, you have to spread it, thus creating massive, user-driven growth cycles—after all, Penenberg explains, social networks like Facebook are worthless to a user if one’s friends aren’t also using the products. Viral loops are nothing new, of course, and Penenberg has certainly done his homework, tracing the concept back through its analog roots via entertaining and enlightening anecdotes about companies like Tupperware, which used “parties” to turn ordinary housewives into an army of sales reps, to Charles Ponzi—yes, he of the Ponzi scheme, a viral scam recently taken to historic levels by Bernie Madoff. Penenberg truly succeeds, however, in showing how the viral loop has found its groove on the Internet, fueling a wave of billion-dollar companies all built on word of mouth—and, of course, user clicks. Solidly researched and briskly-written, Penenberg at once captures a great business and tech story, as well as a defining moment in our online culture. (Oct.)

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6703674.html?industryid=47159

 





New leaders on Viral Loop app Leader Board

September 24, 2009 - 20:43

The Viral Loop app is spreading. I know this because:

a.) Studioe9, the design firm that created it, tells me so: Thousands of Facebook users have sampled our widget, and the installed base is growing every day.

b.) The leader board published on fastcompany.com, which ranks the top 20 Viral Loop app users by value (shown above), has undergone a drastic shift. Yesterday, the top value was $290, with several users clustered in the $220 to $260 range. Today a value of $290 wouldn't get you listed on the board. In fact, the 20th-ranked Viral Loop value, belonging to Travis Farral, registers $422.40. That's 50% higher than yesterday's champ.

The leading Viral Loop app user has 3x as much value to Facebook as yesterday's leader. Going down the list, I am struck by another encouraging sign: I don't know anyone on the list. Because I was an early adopter of the widget, and invited my Facebook friends to sample it, it wasn't surprising that some of them made it on to the leader board. For instance, #2 on the list was James Hong, co-founder of Hot or Not, with a value of $279. Hong is a social guy, online and off-. On Facebook he has 1,227 friends. Now he doesn't even make the grade.

Here's another observation. Hernan Nadal, #1 on our list, may be an avid Facebook user with thousands of friends, but he keeps his profile private. Think about it: The most social person using the Viral Loop app goes out of his way to protect his privacy.





Mark Zuckerberg Talks About Facebook's Viral Growth

September 24, 2009 - 01:46

While still a teenager Mark Zuckerberg coded and launched Facebook--a digital version of the traditional college facebook--in his Harvard dorm room in February 2004. Within weeks virtually the entire campus had signed up. He and his roommates, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moscowitz, then ported the social networking site to other Ivy League campuses, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Penenberg: When you opened Facebook to other Ivy League schools and you saw the same kind of growth were you surprised at that?

Zuckerberg: There were a couple of things going on. One was that we had a sense of the type of dynamics we were tapping into were pretty universal and could apply in all places. The thing that was surprising was that our implementation, specifically, was so efficient at doing it. We didn't realize the magnitude of what we were onto with our version. After launching at Harvard, a bunch of schools wrote to us and asked if we could launch it at those schools. The first 3 schools we launched at after Harvard, were Yale, Stanford and Columbia and we selected them because they all had some kind of other school community Web site which almost everyone was using. We wanted to make sure that we had an implementation that was so efficient that even though everyone already had something they were using, they would just switch and start using ours. After we launched at those three and that happened within the first couple of weeks and there was a widespread switch from whatever the local one was to Facebook, then we knew that it would be something that could expand really far. So we launched at about 25 more schools that semester and it just picked up really quickly because there was no local community thing at those schools.

Penenberg: Did you notice powerlaw curve. How early was it that you saw that the rate of user acceptance was like that?

Zuckerberg: It was pretty quick. I remember we had these graphs up on our wall about how each school is adopting. They were normal S curves. The bigger the school, the longer it took to get into full inflection. At schools like Cornell, that were a bit bigger, it took about a couple of weeks before it really started taking off. But the nature of it was that in these schools everyone was on it.

Read the rest at Fast Company's website.





Using Facebook and the iPhone to promote something called a ‘book’

September 23, 2009 - 11:42

Nicholas Deleon of Crunchgear and Techcrunch fame posted a pithy piece on Viral Loop's social Web marketing campaign.

"Writing a book in 2009 is a tricky thing to pull off. Never mind the research, the interviews, or the writing, but then you have to face facts: who reads in 2009? Unless you’re Dan Brown or Stephen King or Glenn Beck, odds are your book, no matter how thorough or well-written, isn’t exactly going to fly off the shelves. What will fly off the virtual shelves, though, is an iPhone App. You see where I’m headed."

Through theViral Loop app Nicholas found out he was worth $94.60, "which seems about right, both on Facebook and in real life," he says. "Sell me, and maybe you can buy a nice pair of jeans." Read the rest.





Viral Loop First Review

September 22, 2009 - 16:48

SmartMoney magazine named Viral Loop one of the "7 Best Fall Reads," joining Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol and Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler

"After months of recession, tales of business growth are a welcome diversion. In Viral Loop, Adam L. Penenberg tells inspirational stories about companies achieving growth at such a phenomenal rate that you might be tempted to whip up your own business plan — or at least consult with your broker."