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Social Media Week
February 8, 2011 in the literary conversation
Social Media Week, as most of you don’t know, is a multi-city week of panels and events bringing together people from different industries to talk about all things social media. I hadn’t heard of SMW before three weeks ago, and therefore held it in fairly dismissive regard…until my colleague and I were asked to speak on an SMW panel, at which point I held the conference in even lower regard. Any club that would have me as a member, etc.
That said, I’ve attended three Social Media Week panels so far (yes, that includes my own) and have two more on the horizon. I’ll go ahead and eat crow now: these panels have been helpful in prodding me to think further about the intersection of “social” and the act of reading. Some takeaway thoughts and many questions:
- In a panel called The Big Shift, Ann Shoket, editor-in-chief of Seventeen, talks about how her brand expanded from a tangible magazine to the intangible concept of seventeen. This makes me wonder: can book publishers move on from the tangibility of books to become proprietors of intangible content? Seems like they’ll have to—or perish.
- Shoket also encourages publishers to meet readers wherever they are—and, if possible, getting to that place before the readers even arrive. So where are book readers headed now? I’m trying to think of my own reading patterns, and I shamefully admit that I’m spending more and more time on Google Reader. Yikes. What does that imply about where books should go? Into an RSS feed?
- The social book / the social reading experience: what would that entail? I know Amazon tried to make reading social by sharing passages underlined in Kindle books, and GoodReads is a haven for message-board based book clubs, but is there some service out there that more closely approximates the feeling of reading along with other people? I’m not talking about interrupting the reading experience, but enhancing it—and obviously, this isn’t for everyone. Sometimes I read to be alone, too.
It’s so stimulating to think about the way publishing can evolve with reading behaviors, but it’s hard to know how much (not to mention when) these changes will take place.
To be continued…
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[...] Links « Social Media Week [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Pamela Cortland, Susan Halligan. Susan Halligan said: Keep talking! RT @pamml #snwnyc is over! Posts I wrote http://t.co/fsh5zKy & http://t.co/KdgC05K Promise not to say another word abt social [...]