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Are Blog Tours Helpful or Just “Hype”-ful?

November 6th, 2007 | CSFF, blogging, blogtour

conversational marketing looks like thisI’ve been emailing Austin Boyd back and forth a bit this week about his blog tour, trying to get his impression of its value. He gave me permission to post his comments here on my blog.

To set the context, Austin Boyd’s book The Return was featured on the Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog Tour two months ago. (Go here to read my blog’s Page One review of the book from the tour.) Austin has a little bit of perspective on the event, and I asked him the hard question:

Now that the dust has settled on the CSFF blog tour, I’d be curious to hear how you felt about it.

Was it helpful or just “hype”ful?

Austin said, “The blog tour was quite effective.” Then he explained what he perceived as the qualitative and quantitative values.

For the quantitative value, he is looking to see any effect on book sales. That’s the key, right? Do blogs help facilitate general market awareness or can they be used for direct marketin? Here’s what Austin said:

I can’t monitor the sales increase, per se, because the publisher tells you so late what your sales are, and only by quarter. However, what I intend to look for in the quarterly reports is a spike in sales activity in this quarter. I won’t hear about that until spring time.

When Austin figured the qualitative value, I was shocked at the brilliant simplicity of his measurement tool. Best I can tell, he has an automatic google search run each week into his RSS feed reader. Rather than track the google rank or the traffic to his actual blog, he wanted to see whether search engines would pick up the blog reviews when people when looking for his book online.

I found that the traffic on the site, the # of emails and calls, and the interest from the publisher, of all things, went way up. The blog activity shows up as the top first couple of pages of activity when I do a search on “Austin Boyd” “The Return”. I do that search every week… and it’s amazing how much new material is out there thanks to your blog activity.

Immediately, my mind started wondering whether blog tours could embed keyword metadata into the links we agree upon. Would such data help search engines understand that we are all working together? Could it possibly be perceived as trying to “game the system”?

Regardless of how search engines viewed the blog tour, the blog activity was buzzing strongly in Austin’s favor over the last two months.

The blog activity spiked in a huge way, with two separate blog tours, involving nearly 60 bloggers total. For 7 days in the past month, with your tour and another, I was in the top 3 on Technorati links, and was #1 for two days running during your tour. That’s good press, because people look to see what’s winning and then check out those sites.

I’m not sure what Technorati links Austin was looking at specifically. That’s a tender point between CSFF and me, since I don’t trust the validity of Technorati’s book page as a measurement of success.

I wonder about other social media tools, though. What would happen if everyone on the tour “stumbled upon” or “digged” or “del.i.cious”-ed Austin’s page over the same day? Would that send a traffic spike to the author? Would search engines see the connection between the blog tour and the social media tags? Would it possibly be perceived as trying to “game the system”?

Finally, Austin gave a few comments about the lessons he learned from the whole process.

I noticed, among the 60 or so bloggers in the past month, that more than half had not read the book, but said something nice, or mentioned another site to review. Of the remaining 30, 20 did complete reviews, and 10 had read part of the book. Of those reviews, they generally ran very positive. This is similar to people who ask for my book here in town… about half want the inscription but don’t read the book. However, I’ve traced the source of the problem in blog tours to not receiving the book far enough in advance. I’ll get that fixed next time I do one. It was not the blogger’s fault.

Bottom line? Austin Boyd believes in the power of blog tours. Obviously, we still have a lot to learn. According to the Center for Media Research’s recent article on conversational marketing, social media adoption is “clearly in its infancy.” 70% of the marketers they polled only spent 2.5% of their communications budget on this kind of marketing. But listen to this: “81% of marketers believe that in 5 years they’ll be spending as much or more on conversational marketing vs. traditional marketing.”

What’s the primary challenge? Manpower restraints. Tina, Mary, and Becky can tell you. These things take a lot of people a lot of time.

In the end, Austin Boyd summarized his experience like this:

Blogs drive net discussion. When an interested person wants to know about me now, they get back LOTS of activity on blogs. That activity is enduring, as long as those blogs remain in your archives and are active. That’s free advertising for me, and when the blog carries a nice review, it’s super nice. It’s also a big boost for your blog, because the review drives the reader to other material on your site. Everyone wins.

Here’s the million dollar question. What is a blog tour worth? I know there are good people running powerful blog tours out there. But my gut tells me that a lot of people are making promises they can’t keep. What’s a new author to do?

Authors, if you have a new book coming out, would you take it on a blog tour? Would you pay someone to organize the tour?

Publishers, how are you planning to include conversational marketing in the next five years?


Viewing 10 Comments

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    Pay? Do people pay to have someone run a blog tour??? How have I not known about this??? LOL ;-)

    Becky
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    I'm curious, by the way, if Austin had any stats to report about the CFBA tour that just concluded. Did he see the same spikes? (I wish I understood all that).

    Oh, and a comment re. Technorati. I actually agree with you that a high ranking is not a primary goal or a hard-and-fast evidence of the success of a tour. The thing is, it remains one of the few tangibles, so it gives a little immediate feedback.

    Brandilyn Collins' reaction to her book being high on Technorati's list was that the cover was out there for an additional group of people to see, and that wasn't bad, certainly.

    Becky
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    You can either pay to have a tour done, or do it yourself, or ask a web savvy friend to help you.

    Another way to analyze hard data is to sell books directly on your site. Then you can see whether book sales spike or not.

    Mary
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    Of course, I find all of this extremely interesting (and will link to it on Blog Tour Spot). As we saw on Mary's tour, I think it was effective in creating some buzz and reaching new audiences. I know that even within my circle of influence - including people who do not have or read blogs - we talked about Mary's book because I was working on her blog tour, and it consumed part of my life for a short period of time. Measuring the impact of word of mouth seems so elusive. We can get some sense of hard data to make general observations, but I doubt we'll ever be able to get our arms completely around it. The internet is just to huge and too viral.
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    I. Just. Don't. Know. It doesn't really feel like something I'd be inclined to do. Because of the sense I think blog tours give. They feel too overt. (Is "pushy" too terrible to say?) Maybe if my publisher did something, but me personally... I'd rather that readers who truly love the book do their own things.
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    Becky, you are such a good blogger, coming over here to comment when I link to you. If you aren't charging anything, you might think that through a bit. It's a nice service and all, but at least take up a love offering or something! He said both tours had about the same effect.

    Also, I agree that the Technorati page is a good tangible measurement for the uninitiated. I just worry that people may misunderstand what it measures.

    More and more, I think these blog tours ought to include an additional social media tool like stumble upon or smartlinks. (Those might be really cool.)

    Mary, and if the book sales don't spike, is the tour a failure?

    spaghettipie, measuring word of mouth is elusive, but surely it can be done! I won't accept that it can't. I just won't. : )

    L.L., you have to be true to yourself. Certainly, it doesn't bother me to do blog tours for others. Tina ran Mary's tour as friend to friend thing. That is one of the reasons Becky's CSFF tour is so good, I think. The loyalty to the genre supercedes any perceived schmooziness.
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    That's an interesting comment about loyalty to the genre. It suggests that attention to something larger than ourselves (our own personal works, books) can find a larger, more sympathetic audience. Now, how to apply that... hmmm.
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    This has been an interesting thread to follow, seeing as I participate in both the CSFF and the CFBA blog tours, as well as Mary's tour.

    As a participant, I can say that if I fall in love with a book, then I'm going to give it several mentions on my blog, as well as recommending it personally to people IRL. I would suggest that this phenomena is not unique to me in these blog tours, and that there is a lot of hidden benefit when this happens. I know that you are trying to find objective benefit, but I thought this was worth pointing out.

    Occasionally I'll come across a book that I don't like. I can't deny that since I was sent the book for free, there's a little internal pressure to review it benignly, but I feel it is an integrity issue to be truthful. If someone comes to my blog, I want them to think that they're getting a fair assessment. I haven't seen negative blogging mentioned, but it is probably even harder to measure.

    A recent book even incited me to cause it to be a little controversial. The CFBA did the book Illuminated, and I felt it was gratuitous in its violence and said so in my review. I even started a series on violence in the CBA off of it. For those who like gritty stuff, this may be a positive, but others who are squeamish may avoid it. It may be like the old Tootsie Roll Pop commercial - "the world will never know."

    I'll be watching for more analysis. Thanks Marcus.
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    LL, your first comment about not being "pushy" with our books intrigued me.

    Our aim is not to promote ourselves in a "Hey, look at me!" fashion, but it is to promote our business-that of writing books and selling them. That's the way I look at it.
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    I have not tried a blog tour. I am able to monitor my book sales on a daily basis, so it would be possible to get a rough idea of the impact of a blog tour on book sales. That could be an interesting experiment. I think blog tours work, but I am uncertain how well they work.

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