Eating My Own Social Media Dog Food-My First Ebook

So I’ve finally taken a page out of David Meerman Scott's playbook and developed an ebook. But we didn’t do an ebook for the sake of doing an ebook. We actually had a few marketing challenges. How does a growing software security company like Lumension Security establish a thought leadership position around its brand and raise the security discussion across the CXO suite. An ebook seemed like a perfect solution for the following reasons:

1.       We could communicate a more strategic message

2.       We could use this vehicle to start a conversation with bloggers, and other communities relevant to our message

3.       We could make it viral and extend our message for little cost

4.       We could leverage our communications investment to drive a PR campaign around our message

5.       We could add in rich media to add new dimension to our message and increase our content relevancy across various communities and search engines

In developing the ebook we put some investment into it. We worked on our message, we hired a professional writer, we interviewed customers and analysts, we utilized secondary research and we had a designer add the finishing touches. We also wanted to add rich media to the ebook. Why not take advantage of the digital platform to have rich media embedded into the ebook. So we did a series of videos related to key ebook topics.

  

There was extensive debate over registration and if we should put the ebook behind a registration all. I took a page out of David Meerman Scott’s playbook and said no to registration. Can you believe it? A marketing guy saying no to inquiry generation, especially an old school marketing guy like me. We did this as we wanted the ebook to be accessed without any barriers or friction. Again to go back to our goals. Our goal was not a demand gen goal, but rather a thought leadership and messaging  goal. So why add barriers to the message getting out.

We did however want to ensure we leveraged as many opportunities as possible to get our message and relevance enhanced. For example we created a YouTube channel and this is where we host our ebook videos. Our ebook videos actually pull from our YouTube channel. As the videos are played our video on content gains more relevance on YouTube and Google. We also embedded the same videos on our website so our web now has rich media and our SEO gains additional relevance. We created a special video with our CEO just on the topics within the book and this already has 156 views in one week on our channel without any launch of the ebook itself. Okay so it’s not 1M, but its more than 1.

We did a prelaunch of our eBook to bloggers first and then did a soft launch within our company newsletter. Our official launch doesn’t start until next week. Again no request for bloggers to post or comment just wanted to share our message and thoughts.

We will be doing a social media release next week, and will include the html code to a special ebook badge should people want to place the ebook on their blog or web page. It’s a great content offer and we want people to share it and use it. In fact we even placed a Creative Commons license on the ebook. We will also tie into a extensive communications campaign through the 3^rd QTR and leverage our CEO to expound on his message. It the tie in of social media and traditional communications is where a little new school meets some old school. But who cares if it’s great content lets leverage all our channels more effectively.

Our metrics are # of downloads, # of blog posts, # of interviews, # of mentions. The metrics tend to be more towards the communication side of the house as this initiative was really about the message getting out and not demand generation.

So there we are. We focused on creating a conversation, we’re reaching out, we’re web centric, we didn’t use registration pages, and we created a powerful message vehicle for not a huge amount of investment. In fact there is no media investment within the ebook. Stay Tuned and Nuff Said.

Comments

[David Meerman Scott]

The ebook looks great. Congrats. You should keep a running tally of the metrics and do another blog post in a month or two telling us where the downloads come from.

Good luck with it. David

[Bob Ferrari]

Hi Ed,

Great concepts and I like the eBook approach for a topic such as security.

In my last role leading marketing for a supply chain software provider, my board member investors would have gone ballistic if we didn't include a sign-up utility for content, so I admire your willingness to attempt something different.

Great work and keep us posted on progress.

Bob Ferrari

[Jon Robinson]

I totally understand the desire to lock content behind registration, but I for thought leadership content, you definitely want it free.

http://jonsnetwork.com/2007/04/vendors-unlock-your-whitepapers/

[ED]

HI Jon
Yes you’re absolutely correct and that is what we did. There is no registration required for the content.

However there was some debate to that as some more traditional views would have placed a registration wall in front of the content.

ED

[Sean Bohan]

killer how-to on ebook distribution and promotion... love the fact that you cross-connected the youtube channel with the e-book.

Nice work

[ed]

Thanks Sean for the point of view