Branding Ooligan Press

In my Magazine Editing class on Thursday, we were fortunate to have an excellent guest speaker, Randy Gragg.

Gragg was the architecture and urban design critic for the Oregonian from 1989 to 2007. He left the paper to become the editor of Portland Spaces. He described his role as editor of the magazine and how he plans to survive in the increasingly difficult world of publishing.

As he spoke about the ways he is trying to broaden the readership and advertising base of his magazine, he called himself a born brander. He is always considering how he can strengthen the public's relationship to Portland Spaces' brand.

Some of his ideas include an informal speakers series and design tours. The idea is to create enough confidence in Portland Spaces that people will show up when the magazine hosts an event. This idea—wrapping an identity around more than just the publication—is important for Ooligan Press.

The program is in the early stages of putting together a spring Open House. The details are still being ironed out, but I think it is a great idea to have an annual event to showcase the press.

It may take a few years to get established, but the Open House could become an important event in Portland , maybe even regional, publishing. Current students and graduates of the program could offer a pitch table—a big success at Wordstock last year, sample edits, and marketing help for new authors to name a few. And the event would provide the opportunity to showcase graduate portfolios.

I think we'd all agree that Ooligan Press needs to be better known in the community and that our fundraising efforts depend on it. We need to produce great books, but we also need to invest in our brand.

A sneak preview

I don't want to reveal too much before the book reports in class, but I've been thinking about something I read in Groundswell the other night. The authors divide participation in social networks into six categories: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives.

Creators create content—they write articles, blog, maintain a web site, upload video or audio. 

Critics comment and respond to content. They write reviews, post comments on blogs, or contribute to forums.

Collectors help to organize the web by saving URLs on bookmarking services (like del.icio.us), voting for sites (Digg), or using RSS feeds. (I don't really understand this category yet.)

Joiners maintain a profile on a social network site. The authors put this group at 25% of the adult online population, but the number is growing rapidly. In an article in the Oregonian, Peter Ames Carlin wrote that the number of Facebook members, age 30+, grew 200% in 2008.

Spectators look but don't participate.

Inactives have internet access but do not participate.

The point the authors make is how important it is to know who you're marketing to and how the different groups interact.

In terms of trying to reach these online "personalities," I have a few questions that I hope the book will answer:

Do people's online activities predict their purchasing behavior? A person is probably a creator only in a particular field or area of interest and participates at a lower level in other areas. But I also image that they tend to be early adapters—always the first to buy new gadgets or try new technologies. We already know early adapters are crucial to product launches and influence public opinion, but how hard (and expensive) is it to influence the influencers?

As online marketers, is it effective to reach these groups in their playground? Are marketing and advertising efforts on the web seen as nothing more than an intrusion and received with skepticism and mistrust?

Are these categories just another way to describe personality types? Or do people behave differently from their personality type online? 

With the online world changing so rapidly, is it even feasible to keep track of all this? I can imagine someone moving quickly from a spectator to a critic to a creator as they become more comfortable with the technology. How do you focus on a moving target? Millions of moving targets?

I'm not sure where I fall on the spectrum of the social networking population. Since I'm blogging twice a week, I'd have to put myself into the creator category at the moment. But my blogging activity will probably end right about mid-March. I guess I'm a joiner, but I feel more like a spectator. I've been a member of LinkedIn for years but never did more than fill out my profile. And recently, I joined Twitter and Facebook, but I don't know that I'll keep those accounts active for long. I don't feel compelled to share much, but I will admit to wasting a fair amount of time seeing who's out there. 

Curious if anyone out there feels like slapping a category on for size. I have my suspicions.

Harder than stuffing a genie back in the bottle

Friend or foe, good or bad, dangerous or beneficial? I feel pretty ambivalent about Amazon's market dominance, so I wrote out a list of pros and cons. I was surprised to find the pros outnumbered the cons by a significant number.

Readers certainly benefit, right? I can't think of anything wrong with cheaper, widely available books. The site helps people network through reviews and recommendations to find more books they might be interested in—I always find myself following recommendation threads to books I probably never would have found in a bookstore.

I would think authors benefit from Amazon as well. Books are available for sale for much longer online than on bookstore shelves, extending the life of most titles. It'd be nice to see an end to the incredibly short sales cycle of traditional publishing.

I can't think of a single drawback to the rise in prominence of print-on-demand. I love the idea that anyone who wants to publish a book can do it at a reasonable cost and make all their friends and relatives buy a copy. I don't really see how anyone gets hurt (other than said friends and relatives). On the other hand, it pains me to think of all the publishing mistakes—any number of miscalculations that can befall a new title—gathering dust in warehouses an destined for the recycling heap. I am very hopeful that print-on-demand will curtail the huge amount of waste in the printing business. Some books are meant to find their audience one digital print at a time.

Amazon must benefit publishers at least a little. Their titles gain the largest possible distribution. They make some money from online sales even after Amazon takes its cut. As mentioned before, books live longer in cyberspace, allowing for a longer sales cycle and providing an opportunity for a belated rise in popularity due to some random twist of fate.

My con list was short, but it included a problem that might outweigh all the pros—bookstores are dying. I read an article in yesterday's Oregonian about a successful attempt to shore up the cash-strapped Broadway Books by promising a burrito to anyone who bought $50 worth of books over the holidays. Really?! In this case, the owner's son and his Twitter savvy saved the day, but for how long? I have no idea what bookstores can do to change their odds for survival. Record stores and video rental outlets haven't gone extinct yet despite predictions of certain doom, but it doesn't look like a viable business model for any of these media outlets.

We are lucky here in Portland—we have Powells. We probably take for granted that we can walk to the greatest new and used bookstore in the states, while the rest of the nation has Borders and B&N as their best option for book buying. If given that choice, I'd shop online, too.