Booksellers Blog

I know, you’re tired of twitter. As much as I love it, I am also tired of incessant press and portrayal of twitter as the service that will save the world. But there’s no denying twitter’s power as a tool for connecting. Josh Christie, a bookseller at Sherman’s Books in Freeport, Maine, has a great [...]

While I’m on vacation, here’s an assignment for you. Read this article: Your Pizza Sucks And … It talks about local search, like Yelp.com. I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth talking about again. Your store should be listed, accurately, on those sites. You should see what your customers (and potential customers) are seeing. In [...]

Chris Brogan has written the easiest and clearest set of instructions for setting up a “listening post” to see what people are saying about you and your business online. It should take less than 10 minutes to set up, and a minute or two to check daily. I’ve written about this before, but Chris lays [...]

I’m sure you’ve heard the buzz about Twitter.  It’s the new “shiny object” in the social media space. And you may have noticed that I did not list Twitter as one of the “tools” in the online marketing “toolbox” in my earlier post. In fact, I deliberately stayed away from any mention of Twitter–because while [...]

In an earlier post, I wrote about the need to determine your goals before deciding on the tools to use to attain those goals.  When you read a newspaper article trumpeting that there are now 150 million members on Facebook, it’s easy to think “oh, my store has to be on Facebook!”  But that may [...]

As I was reading my RSS feeds this morning, I came upon a reference to an October 2008 report from Rubicon Consulting titled: Online Communities and their Impact on Business: Ignore at Your Peril.. Two key findings from the report appear in the introductory blog post titled “Online Reviews Second Only to Word of Mouth [...]

There is much discussion about ROI, or “Return on Investment” for social media activities such as blogging. For booksellers, the investment is primarily time — a resource that we all know is too scarce.  In a later post, I’ll write about various ways of measuring ROI, but I think that there is also a benefit [...]

People are talking about you. Do you know what they are saying? They are talking about your store, leaving reviews, perhaps blogging about a customer service experience they’ve had. You must do this: Even if you never write a single blog post, if you never join a social networking site, there is a key element [...]