Behind the Buzz - digital and interactive advertising and marketing

Loving Penguin Books

by Rachel on March 19th, 2008

I’m loving Penguin books at the moment, everything they are doing just hits all the right buttons with me on marketing, using digital and social media tools to connect with their customers, building up the brand as well as the individual books. I love books; I grew up with my mom always trying to stop me reading quite as much because I spent so much time reading, it came a running joke that is we ever went to jumble sales, I’d gravitate automatically to the books. I’ll always prefer reading something as a book rather than on a computer, although I can imagine using a e-reader for all of those throwaway holiday novels that I’ll never touch again! But in a world of ready-publishing, where anyone can get their words and stories online at a click of a button, where thousands of words stream everyday in RSS feeds, do books still hold the same relevance for all? Penguin, by connecting in different ways, by using new means of telling stories, are making sure they are relevant. So what have they been up to?

The blog. I first noticed this back in Dec 2006. They’ve used it to promote books to talk about office happenings, to tell us what else they are doing in marketing; the main hub of interaction with book lovers. They’ve also extended into Facebook, which is another place you can find out what is happening with the brand. They’ve also started on Twitter, but as they’re not yet following anyone, it’s not an interaction yet.

Giveaways: something that they are experimenting with. They tried it recently with Clay Shirky’s Here Come’s Everybody, where they used a blog post to offer UK readers an advance copy. I got one and it came promptly with no restrictions on what I can or can’t say. Now I need to do a Amazon review! But short one here - it’s a great book, a look at how web utilities are becoming ubiquitous enough to change social behaviour. I love it and you have to go buy it now! The other main place for this is at Blog A Penguin Classic
. Sign up here and you get the chance to get one of their back catalog and then write a review for the blog. Reading some of the comments it definitely seems that this is getting people to take a new look at their old books.

Using content in new ways. Penguin are publishing a new James Bond story and the associated audio book and ran a competition to create the theme tune for the book, (I wrote about this previously) utilising previous audio clips. The winner was Sal from Cardiff, who produced a great track that I could easily see sitting on a film version as well.

New ways to write a book: in conjunction with de Montfort university, they launched a wikinovel, a million penguins, a colloborative novel writing site where 1500 people made 11000 edits to create a novel, available to all to read.

Targeted sites: One error that is sometimes made with marketing online is to think of what the brand wants to say instead of what the customers want. By using different types of sites for different customers, Penguin avoid that. Spinebreakers, a site aimed at teenagers. More importantly, it’s run by teenagers, a group of 9 aged from 13-18 with many other contributors. Here, Penguin provide the platform and let the book fans run it.

Free Samples: . I was at the ORG Creative Business in a Digital Era Seminar on Monday discussing how creative industries can use different models that don’t lock you down in IP battles, when I saw that Penguin had announced that the first 25 pages of all their books would be made available as a Penguin taster for you to try before you buy. Even better, they’re not locked down to the browser, but available as pdfs for you to take where you need to and send them on to people. As a number of people said on Monday, when releasing their stuff under CC licence, without DRM, it’s not piracy they fear but obscurity. Get the word out there and let people try the stuff.

Different ways of telling stories: We Tell Stories launched this week. Over 6 weeks, 6 different stories will be told in 6 different ways, the first using Google Maps. In addition, there’s a seventh story hidden, using ARG elements to tell a story in yet another way. There’s more stuff about the concept here, at Gamasutra and video at Reuters. This is the a different experiment, most of the digital activity to date has been to get people to read books, this is about getting people to read stories in different ways, to have fun.

Any one of these tactics are great in themselves; taking them all together gives me the impression that Penguin are really serious about their digital marketing and connecting with their readers.

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POSTED IN: Alternate Reality Experience, Branding, Competition, Engaging the Customer, Marketing in General