This morning I attended a monthly breakfast meeting of professionals using social media to market their product, service, or ideas in Waterloo Region. This month’s topic was a debate on the role of Return on Investment (ROI) in social media decisions. Arguing the position that every business needs to consider ROI in every marketing decision was Chris Eh Young, a business consultant and strategist, and arguing that a unicorn dies every time we talk about ROI in social media, and that there are other equally important benefits, was Alan Quarry, CEO of Quarry Integrated Communications.

Both sides made excellent points, and indeed were not far apart in their positions. The debate seemed more like fun than anything else. But there were some differences. Chris argued that social media use must start and end with analytics, meaning that you know your baseline before you run a campaign, you monitor the clicks, and the transfer of clicks to an increase in sales. You must figure in the time spent by yourself or employees as a value and be looking for a return on that value. Alan, on the other hand, sees value in increased exposure and an increased awareness by the public/market of your company and/or product. Marketing is dead, says he. Nonsense, says Chris. Social media builds on traditional marketing.

One extremely valuable point that Chris raised was about knowing who your customers are and not straying too far from your base. Chasing after smaller markets and neglecting your base will only lead to trouble. He also said that if your customer demographic is not using social media, it’s not smart to try and reach them that way. Lots to think about.

For his part, Alan Quarry believes the roles have changed. No longer is there a place for top-down marketing in which a company makes a product and sells it to the consumer without including the consumer in that experience. By which he means more than ever the consumer is a participant in the process, a partner, a member of the team. Involving your customers and forging relationships with them on social media platforms is crucial to success in today’s world, he says. Equally important is internal branding, team-building within companies rather than a traditional hierarchical approach.

Questions raised over breakfast and on Twitter centred around social media use for organizations that don’t necessarily sell a product, such as not-for-profits, municipal services, charities, and so on. How can we apply these tenets to our audiences? One answer is that you need to know your audience, of course, and to clearly articulate your goals. And next month’s Social Media Breakfast will focus on not-for-profit organizations and expand on their particular issues. Watch their website for details.

As a member of the academic community and also engaged in selling a product, we as an academic publisher also need to think about who our core audience is and use our time appropriately. As more and more academics move to a social media platform and use twitter, blogs, and personal pages to disseminate research to their audience, we need to be in that space as well. The trick of course is to balance that with tried and true methods of reaching people in ways they have come to expect. We thank the organizers and speakers this morning for providing some tools to explore these channels further.

Team Unicorn (Alan Quarry) won the debate, by the way, but it was a narrow victory. There was certainly value on both sides of the floor.

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Kobo e-book retailer is currently running a promotion on titles from independent Canadian publishers, including selected titles from WLU Press. It’s a backlist bonanza, and while you’re stocking up on titles you may have missed, your name will be entered into a draw to win a Kobo Touch e-reader. Click here for a complete list of eligible titles. But don’t delay, the contest only runs until 11:59 p.m. on January 22, 2012.

WLU Press titles include (but are not limited to)

Love and War in London: A Woman’s Diary, 1939-1942 (Kobo price $8.69)

Must Write: Edna Staebler’s Diaries (Kobo price $11.19)

Watermelon Syrup: A Novel (Kobo price $10.09)

Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski (Kobo price $7.69)

Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier (Kobo price $7.69)

If the chance to win a new Kobo Touch e-reader can’t persuade you to give e-books a try, you can still purchase any of our titles from your favourite bookseller or order them directly from our website and save 25%.

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Our new catalogue is here and it looks fantastic! There’s a beautiful cover image taken from the cover of the forthcoming Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay, by Travis V. Mason. Inside there are a number of outstanding new titles. I hope you’ll click through and take a look.

Featured Titles:

Not the Whole Story: Challenging the Single Mother Narrative
Lea Caragata and Judit Alcalde, editors

Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace
Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli, editors

Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling
selected with an introduction by A.F. Moritz

Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect
Bruce Elder

Canada and the Second World War: Essays in Honour of Terry Copp
Geoffrey Hayes, Mike Bechthold, and Matt Symes, editors

China Interrupted: Japanese Internment and the Reshaping of a Canadian Missionary Community
Sonya Grypma

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We’re moving offices here at WLU Press. It’s an internal move, so our institutional address stays the same, but we’ve been in the same offices for more than twenty years and we have accumulated a LOT of junk. I mean stuff. I mean valuable archives.

We’re packing up said archives and deciding which will come with us, which can be stored off-site and which are ok to recycle/shred. Printouts of emails that say “let’s have a meeting tomorrow at 2″ can probably safely be discarded.

Sometimes you come across treasure, though. Yesterday I was moving author files from the file cabinets to the moving boxes and a postcard fell out. It’s from Stan Brakhage, the late American experimental filmmaker. In 1999, WLU Press released The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson, by R. Bruce Elder. The postcard from Brakhage was to thank us for his complimentary copies. The message shows a man full of grace and gratitude for the attention paid his films, and I reproduce it here:

I am very appreciative of the extraordinary insights into my film-making which Bruce Elder has provided therein, and deeply grateful to Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press for extending these insights to the public-at-large. The book is beautifully balanced in the hand, IS a beauty on sight, the print exactly right (it seems to me) … the whole FEEL of it, from paper to cover, of an excellence rare today. In short, I am overjoyed and meaningfully honored.

What a joy it was to find this in the files! I’m going to keep it in mind as we slog on and hope that more treasure like this comes our way.

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Last night I attended the first “meetup” of people organizing or interested in the 140 Character Conference taking place in Kitchener on September 15, 2011. What is that, you ask? Well, it’s the first Canadian conference based on the 140conf held recently in New York. The 140 Character Conference explores the state of NOW, how the real-time internet is making an impact on how we communicate and how we do business.

The first Canadian conference will be held at The Tannery in Kitchener, a repurposed heritage building that now houses Google, Desire@Learn, Communitech, and numerous smaller start-ups in the region. It’s a happening place and a fitting place to hold this ground-breaking event. There is a Call for Speakers out now, and with 10-minute rule on talks it looks to be a day that moves as fast as your Twitter feed.

Not convinced yet? Follow the #140confON hashtag on Twitter and keep up to date on speakers and meetups as they happen. Me, I’ve got my ticket already and am looking forward to showing off what Waterloo Region is up to.

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