Viral Marketing
with Widgets
Nizar Jamal
CTO
Impelsys Inc
1

Agenda
Case Studies
Trends & Challenges
Formulating your Strategy Questions?

Who is Impelsys?
• From inception till 2008, Impelsys has powered more than
2000 projects for large and small publishers.
• We have invested in our core products: iPlatform,
VirtualPages and iDAMS and built them over the past 4
years. These products are serving millions of readers
worldwide.
• We launched iPublishCentral (ipublishcentral.com) as a
Software as a Service (SaaS) model leveraging our years of
experience. The goal is to bring down costs of delivery so
that any publisher can build an online strategy.

We serve 200+ publishers across geographies & segments.

Key takeaways from this presentation
Experiment Discoverability
Control Relationship

Trends

Trends in Reading
Reading and buying trends of
books not encouraging
Less than 6 Italians out of 10 read 1 book a month
Strong readers, who read one or more books a
month, read (possibly buy) more
Not including “soft reading” and other types of
reading
(Source: Elaboration AIE Research Department based on Istat data. doi: 10.1390/gdl1008UK_Reading)

Trends in Reading
Availability of different types
of media - vying for reader's
attention and wallet-share

Trends in Reading
How do you get to understand
your customers?
The web is changing
consumption and your future
markets will change.

Web is changing reader behavior
Trend is towards searching
and foraging for information
Increased use of Google and
Wikipedia for reading and
research
Bits and pieces of information are
weaved together from multiple
sources like scent trails
(Source: Xerox PARC, http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/%7Eechi/papers/chi2000/scent.pdf)

Web is changing reader behavior
Is making content visible the
first step in the solution?
Will it provide a strong enough
“scent” for people to browse
and ultimately buy?
Google Book Search

Web is changing reader behavior
You must give the consumers
what they need/require
Provide content and
not “books”
From „Merchants of Venice‟ to
the „Fashion industry of Milan‟
?

Search
Trends
The number of people searching
to know more about ebooks has
doubled in the last 4 years
according to google trends.
Source: Google Trends

Source: Google Trends (June 22, 2009)
http://www.google.com/trends?q=ebook%2C+ebooks%2C+e+book&ctab=0&geo=all&geor=all&date=all&sort=1

Source: Google Trends (June 22, 2009)
http://www.google.com/trends?q=ebook%2C+ebooks%2C+e+book&ctab=0&geo=it&geor=all&date=all&sort=1

Reference Reader Trends
Do you prefer using online resources or print for your research, class presentation
and instruction? No. of respondents 831
1 in 2 people or around 50% prefer doing research reading online.
(Source: Global Faculty eBook Survey, 2007, February
(http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=wS8CU8W9N_2fIwRuMq5gNMsw_3d_3d)

Market trends
US Trade Wholesale Electronic Book Sales
Source: IDPF Industry Statistics (http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm)

Consumer Expectation
Interactive: Participative:
audio, video, animations “I matter and so does my opinion”
Cost: Available:
Anywhere, Anytime
micro-payments
(source: www.idpf.org/events/presentations/Frankfurt08/FBF08_RandomHouseUK_Duggan.ppt - )

Source: Vincenzo Cosenza
http://www.vincos.it/world-map-of-social-networks/

Source: Compete.com
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com+myspace.com+blogger.com/
Source: Compete.com
http://blog.compete.com/2009/02/09/facebook-myspace-twitter-social-network/

Source: Compete.com
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/goodreads.com+librarything.com+shelfari.com/

Source: Forrester.com
http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/ladder.html

Italy Social Technographics Profile
Source: Forrester.com
http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html

Trends
Challenges

Challenges of going digital
Multiple formats, hardware devices, software
Which one will win? What formats? How to reach customers
and provide content „Anytime‟/‟Anywhere‟?

Challenges of going digital
Production Marketing
Tagging/Metadata (how deep?) From Broadcast
Time to Market To Conversations

Challenges of going digital
Cost and Risk
Cost of experimenting and risk of competition

Challenges of going digital
Challenges in depending on others
Who controls it?
Who is gaining insights into user behavior?
Who understands the market needs?
Who can develop products that meet these needs?

Case Studies

Anatomy
of
a Widget
Source: Alex Iskold
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/random_house_widgets_and_web_services.php

Case Study:
Harper Collins
Browse Inside

Harper Collins It brings powerful features Amazon, who pioneered offering
launched their Browse that retail aggregators, like samples on a large scale in
Inside program in 2006, Amazon, offer on their site 2003, reported about 9%
becoming one of the increase of print sales across
first publisher to do so 120,000 titles in 5 days after the
Search Inside capability was
available on their site
(http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_/
ai_109467316)
Experiments: Harper Collins Browse Inside
Harper Collins had a similar experience with sales They were also able to
gain valuable insights into
Harper Collins reported print sales increase of 30% and 250% what the market wants
for specific titles using their Browse Inside functionality
(http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook08/lHulse08.pdf)

Experiments: Harper Collins Browse Inside
Browse Inside PDF Free Download
Visitors 83,102 20,000
Visits 85,867 30,000
Downloads 0 15,000
Page Views 3,827,306
Avg Page Views per Visit 46
Avg. Visit Duration 15:55
Clicks on Buy Link 1,177
Emailed to a Friend 16,236
(Source: Experiments with free digital content, presented at IDPF Digital Book 2008 by Leslie Hulse, VP Digital Business
Development, Harper Collins, http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook08/lHulse08.pdf)

Experiments: Harper Collins Browse Inside
Source: Alexa.com (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/harpercollins.com+randomhouse.com+eharlequin.com)

Case Study:
Random House
Insight

Random House Insight widget
2,824,527 184,444 254, 383
Book Pages Viewed People who have viewed a widget Number of widgets viewed
Random House has effectively increased page views and in
turn the popularity of their content by being visible
(Source: Matt Shatz, IDPF Digital Book2007,
http://www.idpf.org/events/presentations/digitalbook07/Matt%20Shatz%20-%20Random%20House.pdf)

Case Study:
Harlequin

Experiments: Harlequin
Source: Alexa.com (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/eharlequin.com)

Experiments:
Harper Collins
Case Study:
Browse Inside
MIT Press

MIT Press, started on
iPublishCentral as a beta customer.
They helped us refine the system
and have been partners in trying
out what works and what does not.

They went live in March 2009 and
offer 400 titles for sale in the
electronic form through
iPublishCentral.

All that MIT Press needed to
launch was their title PDF, ONIX
metadata and book covers.

They now have an electronic
book store through which they
can sell to institutions and
individual subscribers.
They also offer free content
samples that can travel as
widgets.

Since launch...
Nearly 18000+ pages have been previewed

Since launch, towards the end of March...
Visitors from about 180 countries have viewed
widgets

Since launch...
Visitors from nearly half these countries have clicked
on the widgets to see book preview pages

Since launch...
Total time spent on the book preview
pages is 462:34:59 hours

Since launch...
Average time spent per visit is about
4.5 mins

Since launch...
Google alone has crawled through the
sample pages more than 3500 times,
apart from other search engines

Since launch…
Nearly 2% of unique visitors who saw
the preview pages have ended up
buying a title

Formulating
your
strategy
51

Why should you experiment?
• Others are doing it, so should
you
• Run your own program, along
with other existing strategies – it
does not hurt
• It helps in gaining visibility and
establishing a relationship with
your readers
• The world is changing and you
can leverage this change
• Your networks are your future
currency

Increase Visibility
• Increase visibility by being
available where your
readers are
• Be relevant and useful
• Introduce your books and
create brand awareness
• Increase page views to
gain SEO and SEM
• Get insight into what your
readers are doing
• Offer value to potentially
increase sales

Establish Relationships
• Relationships matter
• Listen, understand and
respond
• Own your readers and their
mind share
• Reach out to readers with
news and updates
• Word-of-Mouth works and
social media is the easiest
way to get it started
• Targeted marketing is better
than broadcast advertising

Control
• Who controls these
relationships?
• Is it sufficient to have
retailers like Amazon and
search engines like
Google manage them?
• How do you build your
infrastructure for the
future - the investment
does not have to be great

Key takeaways from this presentation
Experiment Discoverability
Control Relationship

Thank You
Nizar Jamal
Email: nizar.jamal@impelsys.com