Michigan Publishing Marketing Guide
From MPublishing
Contents |
Marketing & Promoting your Publication
We start from the idea that each of the publishing parties has expertise in different areas and that by working together, we will be most successful in marketing and promoting your publication. Already, authors promote their work widely by talking about it at conferences, teaching it to students and engaging in the scholarly conversation. In addition to these usual activities, we’d like to ask you to consider using Internet tools to draw attention to your work, and can provide you with guidelines to help you use these tools.
We also very much welcome your suggestions for how best to draw attention to your work. Filling out our marketing information form will help us promote your publication to the broadest possible audience.
MPublishing’s primary goal for your work is to enhance its discoverability online so that anyone who is interested in it can easily find it and read it. A fully searchable electronic version of your text will be freely and permanently available through our publishing platform. The publications we host are indexed by search engines, which help readers find your work.
As a library-based publisher, MPublishing has expertise in the library community and works to let libraries know about your journal. We catalog publications prior to publication and make the records available to libraries worldwide through WorldCat
MPublishing is pleased to work with you to further promote your publication upon launch. Here's what we do & what we need for you to facilitate this process.
Getting Started:
What MPublishing does for all publications:
- Create metadata for the resource to be cataloged and indexed by aggregators such as OAIster
- Add the resource to our website and posting a notice on our blog
- Would you be interested in participating in an author/editor Q&A, for the MPublishing blog? If so, would you prefer to write the questions and answers yourself or to have a MPublishing staff member write the questions for you to answer?
- Add an RSS feed so that readers can subscribe to automatic notifications about the availability of new issues
- Notify our local community at U-M about the resource, as well as our publishing & library peers
- Where applicable, add the resource to online directories of scholarly resources (like the Directory of Open Access Journals)
How we can work with you to increase visibility:
- Write a press release with you to announce the new resource.
Please download and complete the MPublishing Marketing Checklist (Media:ItemsforMPubchecklist.pdf) to help us craft a press release, blog post, and other announcements to promote your publication.
If you're interested in seeing how people are using your publication:
- We collect statistics about usage of our publications, which you can access through our stats system. Instructions for doing so are on our wiki.
- Google Analytics reports are available upon request.
- You can set up a Google Alert for the name of your publication to monitor how your publication is being talked about on the web.
After your publication launches, here are some things you can do to help get the word out.
- Setting up a e-mail address that you can use to facilitate the regular communication needs of you publication. MPublishing can provide you with such a group e-mail address or listserv upon request.
- E-mail Signature: a great way to help get the word out about your publication with minimal effort on your part is to create an E-mail Signature in your email account with the name and URL of your publication. This can be done using most email providers. If you do not already use your email signature tool, here’s how:
- Access the “Settings” or similar feature of your email provider. For example, for Microsoft Outlook the menu route is “Tools”->”Options”->”Mail Format.”
- Proceed to the “Signature” section and include a message such as “Visit The Journal of Baubles and Trinkets here: [link to publication home page]."
- Build a rich network of links to your publication. (In an increasingly saturated information and media environment, it's a useful filter and is needed to compete for those scarcest of resources, time and attention!)
- Encourage friends who are bloggers to write about and link back to your publication.
- Encourage those Wikipedians that you know to add content to Wikipedia that links back to your journal. (This may not help in terms of your overall links, but we do get A LOT of hits from Wikipedia.)
- If your publication has a website hosted elsewhere, please link to the publication's website hosted by MPublishing.
- Add links to the publication wherever it appears on the web; from your CV (if it's online), your departmental homepage, or your personal website or blog (if you have them).
- Encourage contributing authors to do likewise!
- Set up accounts on social media sites for your publication. [See Specific Media Guidelines]
Social Media Guide
The use of the following major social media websites is a huge boon to authors looking to publicize their works. While setting these account up may seem overwhelming at first, once created, these social media website require very little upkeep. Below is a guide to establishing a presence on three common fronts: Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia.
[U-M Social Media Strategy Outline]
It's worth considering the following before you begin:
Goals and Objectives
- Why are you establishing a social media presence?
- What do you plan to achieve with this social medium? Inform? Encourage dialogue? Share information? What kind of information? What platform(s) will you use to achieve this?
- Who will be reading and commenting on your social media? Who are you trying to engage?
Execution and Maintenance
- Who will establish the social media site?
- Who will be the administrator and maintain the site?
- How often do you plan to update it? (Sites should be updated at least once to twice a week, and depending on the type of social media, more frequently.)
- How will you make connection to other U-M websites?
- How will you measure the outcomes to know that you have met your goals?
Wikipedia
Strategy
- To make your publication and its content available as a resource for others.
What to post
- Background information about your publication, such as when it came into print, major plot points or theories, or a detailed description of your work. You will have to cite your information for Wikipedia to consider you a valid and trustworthy source.
- According to Wikipedia's About page, "Wikipedia content is intended to be factual, notable, verifiable with cited external sources, and neutrally presented." It is important to cite the information you include in your article, linking to the sources you use where possible.
Getting Started:
- First you will need to create a free account (to make a page otherwise this is unnecessary) by clicking the Create Account button in the upper left hand corner.
- From here you can create a page for your publication or search Wikipedia for articles related to your publications subject and add it as a reference.
- When creating a new article be sure to take a look at Wikipedia’s Manual of Style to be sure that your article meets its standards
Remember: Wikipedia is maintained by a an open community of editors, so once you post a new page others will be able to edit your work or criticize your formatting. It is wise to check on your page regularly to be sure that any updates that have been made by others are relevant and correct.
Strategy
- Communicate with students, potential students, alumni, and interested community members the way they want to be communicated with. Take advantage of the viral nature of Facebook—spread the word through our “friends” networks.
What to post
- News, events, comments on happenings in your department/unit. Be sure to respond to questions/concerns your users post. Facebook is an interactive medium—not a broadcast system. Cordially respond to comments and interact with your fans. Encourage discussions and postings throughout your page to encourage people to return to your page as much as possible.
Understand the lingo
- Page—standalone page; mimics the Profile page of a Person but designed for an entity rather than an individual; followers are called Fans rather than Friends
- Group—collections of Persons under a common purpose, can be private
- Cause—collections of Persons who may join under a common goal, usually to collect money
- Person—individual people who get a Home page update list and a Profile page where they can add optional applications; followers are called Friends
Facebook naming conventions
- Think first and foremost about searchability. Search engines such as Google and Facebook’s own search engine will pull up accounts based on keyword relevance. Pick something obvious and relevant. That’s how you’ll get followers.
- Tip: For those affiliated with the University, it does help to include University of Michigan or U of M in your name.
- Long Option—facebook.com/UniversityofMichigan[department]
- Shorter Option—facebook.com/UM[department]
- Tip: For those affiliated with the University, it does help to include University of Michigan or U of M in your name.
Customizing your page
Facebook lets you choose your profile photo which will be seen in search results and by your “friends” because of this your photo should be easily recognizable to your target audience. For instance your author photo or the cover of a well-known publication. Facebook also gives you the option to fill in your interests as well as a variety of biographical information. Keep in mind when filling this out that all of your “friends” can see this information so don’t post anything you wouldn’t feel comfortable with seeing such as an address, phone number, etc.
Available options
- Wall postings—messages, photos, videos, links; allows fans to comment on these. All comments show up on every Fan’s Home page list.
- Discussion board—a no-frills message board; allows Fans to post comments that are visible on the Discussion Page.
- Events—each Event gets its own page, so it becomes a micro-site. Each event page has its own set of options, including an invite option that you can push out to all of the Page Fans. Fan responses to those invites are posted on all Fan Home page lists. Event pages are opened and closed by date and then archived as past events on the home Page.
- Links—post links to http:// locations; includes option to include a summary, image from the Web page, and your own comment. New links activate a Fan notification; notifications are ‘on’ by default and may be forwarded both in and outside of Facebook.
- Notes—this is a longer copy option that is similar to another page and allows text, photos, links, and ability to link to other Groups and Persons. New notes activate a Fan notification. These act similar to blog postings and are archived within your page.
- Video—post a video library accessible from the Page that streams the video directly on facebook. New videos activate a Fan notification.
- Photo gallery—new photo albums activate a fan notification.
- Other custom applications including RSS readers, news feeds, and custom HTML
- Listing by URL (Ex: www.facebook.com/universityofmichigan for our main page) is available after your page has 100 fans. This option is not available for groups.
- Email capability to all Fans for direct communication.
- Insights—allows you to see traffic to your page, user demographics and interactions. Only available for pages. Requires 48 hours for new data to be available.
Strategy
Twitter is, in essence, micro-blogging. From a business point of view, it’s a news wire in 140 characters or less. Use Twitter to release brief news and to provide links to additional information. Use Twitter to inform your followers and pull them to your website, blog, or facebook page.
Twitter naming conventions
- Limit 13 characters
Think first and foremost about searchability. Search engines such as Google and Twitter’s own search engine will pull up accounts based on key word relevance. Pick something obvious and relevant. That’s how you’ll get followers.
- * Tip for University Affiliates: Try a name that starts with UM or Umich to affiliate your unit or department with the university.
Understand the lingo
- Tweet—the status that you update on your twitter profile. Contains a maximum of 140 characters.
- RT—re-tweeting is when a person or entity copies a tweet and posts it from their own profile. Credit is given to the original author by preceding the tweet with “RT @username”
- @username creates a direct link to a twitter profile page. This is a great way to collaborate with other twitter pages, give credit to other twitterers, respond directly to posts and track when others tweet about you.
- #hashtag—a # or hashtag is used to identify a post as part of a larger idea or conversation. End a post with a hashtag (like #umich) to track trends about your topic. Use sites like Tweetchat to follow hashtags in real time.
- If you need a little extra help check out Twittonary.com for a searchable Twitter term dictionary.
Adding URLs, links, or images to your Tweets
You will see that there are many shortened links in tweets across Twitter. This is so people have enough characters left to tweet a message as well as a link. Try shortening your url at http://bit.ly where the site will automatically track click-through rates to your links and what devices they are coming from.
- If you need image hosting to supplement a Tweet, you can use a service such as Twitpic, which lets you share photos on Twitter.
Feeding Twitter to your Facebook and other social media
Third-party applications allow you to link your twitter updates to automatically update your Facebook status. Contact socialmedia@umich.edu at MM&D for help linking Twitter to your other social media outlets.
Building Credibility
Building credibility on Twitter is important because there are many active spam accounts and it is easy for someone to create an account in the name of your department or unit. Become more credible by filling in all appropriate information on your profile and customizing your page. Follow credible sources that are pertinent to your department and begin posting and citing your tweets.
Customizing your page
Twitter provides you with a variety of backgrounds to choose from but you also have the option of importing an image to use as your background. You can also use outside applications to customize your background and profile such as Themeleon.
- For UM associates:Stick to simple graphics that represent the U-M brand. Contact MM&D for help with graphics and design for your Twitter page, or visit the Communicators’ Forum web page for logo permissions and information.
General Social Media Tips
Based on the University of Michigan Social Media Guidelines.
- Respect:
- You are more likely to achieve your goals if you are constructive and respectful.
- Thoughtful Contribution:
- Only post information if you are sure it will be of interest to others.
- Focus:
- Engage in open discussion about your publication or your areas of expertise.
- Clarity:
- Clearly state your role and goals, it will help others understand and contextualize your content.
- Caution:
- Always think twice before posting and double check your information.
- Made a Mistake?
- Be upfront and correct yourself.
- Balance:
- Be mindful of what response your posts may provoke.
- Keeping Up:
- be sure to regularly check your social media site for new comments and to add new material!
- Speech:
- Talk to your readers like you would talk to real people in professional situations.
Overall, be kind and genuine and try to help conversation along!
Credits
These guidelines are a collaboration of third-party documents and U-M policies. Thanks to the following sites for providing insight and outline for these guidelines:
