BrandingFire Blog

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If you’re a fan of history and/or gardening and you’re going to be in Georgia next Tuesday (August 12th), you should drop by Berry College’s Oak Hill for a Historic Gardens of the South seminar. Oak Hill is an old plantation home owned by Berry College and contains The Marth Berry Museum. It’s a registered Historic site and a AAA Star Attraction. My cousin Jennifer Word Dickey is the director there and will be giving a free presentation on the historic gardens of Oak Hill. It starts at 7 p.m. and is FREE and open to the public.

You can get more information by calling 706-368-6775 or going here.

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So, the sesquicentennial (150th anniversary) of South Carolina’s secession (you know, that little event that started that whole War Between the States thing) is just 2 years away. The sesquicentennial of the Civil War is just under 3 years away.

If you’re involved with a historic organization, Civil War-related historic house, museum, Civil War author, etc and you’re thinking, “So what?” - YIKES!!! Now is when you should be planning out a heavy series of events, anniversary books, documentaries, tours or whatever. Don’t be like those retailers who wait till Halloween to start thinking about their Christmas promotions. Those guys lose out then wonder what went wrong. The time to plan your Christmas promotions is March or April… May at the latest.

Likewise, the time is now to plan for what I expect to be a major spike in War Between the States interest. Don’t find that the date is suddenly upon you and you don’t know why everyone else is getting attention and you’re being passed over.

Have you given this any thought at all? What are you doing to get ready? If you have ideas to share, drop me a line or share them in the comments section. That’s what it’s there for.

OK. It’s not history-related, but I’m so excited I jsut had to share. Startup Weekend Nashville has been scheduled for October 10-12 and I am SO there!

I first learned about Startup Weekend (SW) close to a year ago through someone’s tweet on Twitter. Since then, I’ve been anxiously waiting to see if Nashville could make the cut. The idea behind SW is to pull together entrepreneurial people who break up into teams of 5-10 people each. They develop a product idea and see if they can build a viable product and business structure in just over two days. Most teams don’t get their product launched by the end of SW at which time many of the products and companies die. However, a few companies have persevered and a few products have actually launched. However, despite how backward it sounds, the successful launch of a business and product takes a backseat to the experience of SW for most attendees. Even for teams that don’t survive the end of the event, team members say the experience and challenge of the event was more than worth the time and effort invested.

So, if you have a strong interest in new media and Internet technologies, you might find this event to be a blast. You don’t have to be a tech geek (though developers are a major part of it) to take part. You can get more information at the new Startup Weekend Nashville online community at http://nashvillestartup.ning.com. From there you can decide if you want to take part in the weekend and register. If you do join the community, be sure to stop by my page, say “Hi!” and friend me.

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It’s a well-known concept among hardcore marketers that economic downturns and recessions are the worst time to cut back on marketing. While it seems logical to cut back on all expenses during economic difficulties, the truth of the matter is financial downturns frequently offer your best opportunities to grab market share. Why? Because your competition is busy doing the logical thing and cutting back on their marketing.

It seems the state of Georgia and New York City are taking note of this marketing concept and making a move to draw in tourists. On July 10th, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Georgia is making more than $1 million in grants for state tourism development through their Georgia Tourism Foundation. The grants aren’t going specifically to history organizations, but they are in the mix including the Augusta Museum of History.

Likewise, I’ve commented recently that with gas prices skyrocketing, now would be a perfect time for historic sites to try to pull in local tourists. Especially since many of us tend to miss seeing local sites in favor of trips to other places. New York City is doing just that. They’re encouraging people in the area to “Go Local” and visit the many tourist sites within the five boroughs of NYC.

I hope somewhere along the way, we get to hear back how successful these endeavors are. Maybe they will inspire other communities and organizations to do the same.

Eric Wittenberg is an accomplished Civil War author, cavalry authority and fellow blogger, in addition to his day job as a lawyer. Eric has more than a dozen published books to his credit, including his newest One Continuous Fight:
The Retreat from Gettysburg and the Pursuit of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, July 4-14, 1863, and more than two dozen published articles. Eric is often called on as a speaker on the subject of cavalry and as a guide for tours.

A couple of months ago, Eric published a really good series on his blog titled “Things I Wish I Knew Then But Know Now.” The series discussed the lessons Eric has learned over his years as a published book author. The series inspired me to do an interview with Eric about marketing history books from the author’s point of view. (BrandingFire Note: I’ve never been a published author, but I have several years of experience on the distribution and publisher’s side of things.)

 
BrandingFire (BF): My friend, author Dan Miller, has told me several times that authors need to be prepared to do their own book marketing. He says that unless your name is John Grisham or Stephen King, publishers just aren’t going to invest the time and money needed to market a book properly. Do you find this to be true?

Eric Wittenberg(EW): Sadly, it’s absolutely true. The truth is that most Civil War books don’t sell sufficient copies to give publishers much of an incentive to invest a lot of money into major marketing campaigns. There are, of course, exceptions, as occasionally a Civil War book will hit the bestseller lists—Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals comes to mind immediately—and then the publishers will spend the necessary money.

 
BF: I know you’ve gone to the trouble of putting up your own websites to promote your books. Is this something you’ve always done?

EW: No, it’s something we started in 2006 with the release of Plenty of Blame to Go Around: Jeb Stuart’s Controversial Ride to Gettysburg.

 
BF: Do you build your own sites or do you hire out the job?

EW: I have no competence for that sort of thing, so it’s much better for me to hire a professional to do that work for me.

 
BF: When you put up a site to support a title, what is your goal for the site?

EW: Sell books and spread the word.

 
BF: How long do you leave a site up?

EW: Good question. I actually haven’t had to address that issue yet. Plenty of Blame continues to sell well two years later, and as long as it does, we intend to leave the site up.

 
BF: Have you tried any book marketing tactics that didn’t work? If so, will you share any?

EW: I have found that taking books to Civil War Roundtable meetings generally doesn’t work well. There are only a few I’ve encountered where people are hardcore book buyers, while most just don’t care.

 
BF: What other marketing tactics do you find to be successful?

EW: Honestly, there is no substitute for word of mouth marketing. Having someone say “this is a great book and you need to read it” is without question the best marketing tool that there is. I try to encourage that sort of thing as often as I can.

 
BF: How important do you think author signings are for promoting a book?

EW: I think that they’re critical. People like to collect signed first editions of books, and in-person signings are the best way to meet the public and sign for them. The location of the signing and the promotion work done by the sponsor is, of course, critical. If nobody knows about, it’s a waste of time, but if the promoter does a good job of getting the word out, a good book signing can be one of the very best ways to sell books that I know.

 
BF: You and I first became acquainted through your blog. How important are blogs in book promotion? Any advice to authors considering or involved in blogging?

EW: I have found that blogging is a great way to make and maintain contact with the readers of my books, and I have also found that it’s a great way to remind people of one’s work. If authors feel that they have something to say that’s not just shilling their books, then I would definitely encourage them to try blogging. In September, I will have been blogging for three full years, and I have a large contingent of regular readers. It never ceases to amaze me how many people invest their valuable time into reading what I have to say each day.

 
BF: How much do you consider the marketability of a subject before you write a book on it?

EW: Some of my projects are carefully calculated to try to select topics that I know will sell, but others are strictly pursuing things that interest me, nothing more, nothing less. As an example, this week, I decided to tackle a tactical treatment of the June 10, 1864 Battle of Brice’s Crossroads, and in part, I selected that topic because I know that books on Nathan Bedford Forrest sell well, and I’d like to make some money on the one of these projects.

 
BF: Do you have a set marketing budget before you start promoting a book?

EW: No. It all depends on the book and how well I think it might sell.

 
BF: My personal experience with publishing is that going through traditional mass market distribution channels is very difficult. The discounts distributors like Ingram, Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble, etc. are steep and leave little room for profit. Has this been your experience?

EW: Not at all. To date, all of my work has been published by conventional, commercial publishing houses, and I wouldn’t even consider a publisher that didn’t use the traditional mass-market publishing channels as the primary means of getting books out there.

 
BF: What methods of distribution have you found more effective than the “mainstream” ones listed above?

EW: To be honest, none. Short of selling books on the Internet, I can’t think of another means of selling books that is more effective.

I’d like to thank Eric again for kindly contributing his time and experience. If you haven’t read his blog, The Rantings of a Civil War Historian, you should. You can also find Eric’s books at major bookstores, including Amazon.com. I should also mention that Eric and author J. D. Petruzzi are leading a tour at Ted Alexander’s Mother of All Gettysburg Seminars on July 23-27. If you want the chance to have Eric and J.D. give you a personal tour of some of JEB Stuart’s cavalry ride during the Gettysburg campaign, you should sign up ASAP. It’s filling up fast.

In the July/August 2008 issue of Fast Company is a good article on the new visitor’s center at the Gettysburg National Military Park. Setting aside personal feelings you may have about the new center (some I know don’t like it), the article does a great job of explaining why designers of the center went with the choices they did. • Basically, the goals were to:
• Increase tourism revenue for the town
• Increase average trouist stay in town
• Engage younger visitors
• Better inform visitors about the battle and the soldiers who fought it
• Increase revenues

The article correctly states that historic sites are having an increasingly difficult time vying for the attention of our increasingly attention-deficit citizens. Americans are used to microwave cooking, fast food, 30 minute entertainment shows and 5 minute thrill rides. Taking day-long tours of sites where something happened decades or even centuries before they were born is almost too much to bear.

“While a movie studio can roll out Indiana Jones sequels, there will never be a Gettysburg 2: Robert E. Lee’s Revenge. The best they (historic sites) can do is to modernize their presentations.” (from the article)

“Most people aren’t visiting to learn. They want to have an experience, to be immersed in something.” Elliott Gruber, vice president, Gettysburg Foundation

You can read the full article here.

read more | digg story

Image via Wikipedia

I found another interesting blog from the folks at the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It’s called Show Me the Money and it’s all about federal grant opportunities that may help out organizations active in historic preservation. It’s a worthy read for any group needing money.

As a side note, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has really embraced blogging as a way to communicate important information to history sites and garner feedback from readers. Their willingness to open up to this process (as opposed to shutting it down and trying to control the conversation) is astounding, inspiring and should be applauded.  They are really living their mission to the fullest online and I personally thank them for their leadership in the wired world!

Downtown St. Joseph, MO

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StJoeNews.net published an interetsing story on Sunday, June 29th titled “Museums look to the future“, noting that St. Joseph, Missouri has a number of good museums (including the Patee House Museum and Jesse James House Museum), which is both a blessing and a curse. Culturally, it’s great for the city, but the museums are having to compete with each other for limited visitor dollars. Many are starting to look harder at the possibility of getting government tax support. One museum director said museums will need to receive 28% of their income from government support. That’s a staggering number. Nearly a third? Other people the reporter interviewed wouldn’t give numbers like that, but they generally all agreed that government support is needed.

And the thing is, this isn’t just in St. Joseph. It’s like this all over the country. Museums are generally struggling to make ends meet and the task is getting harder as the economy staggers along and gas prices skyrocket. But is the answer government tax support? Raising admission prices? Corporate sponsorship? A combination of these tactics? Or some other solution? I think all history-related organizations are going to have to start getting creative with ways to bring in money. I also think they’re going to have to reevaluate their organization from the top down. Are you telling a good story? Are you telling a cohesive story? Are you working to personalize the story so that it engages your audience? Are you approaching your finances from a business standpoint (even if you’re a non-profit)? Notice in the St. Joe story, this quote:

“If they (the museums) are going to last, you have to operate them as a business.”

Terry Oldham, director of the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art.’

Another good point made in the story is that one of the most costly expenses for many museums is simply finding good help. Volunteers are extremely helpful, but they’re hard to find and not always available, the way paid employees are. Good help is not only hard to find, but it can be expensive.

So, is your organization looking to the future and wondering how to handle rising costs and dwindling customers? Have you found any ways to start dealing with the money crunch? What is your organization doing to bring in more dollars or protect the dollars you already have?

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Over the past two weeks I’ve witnessed two product rollouts (from the consumer side) and learned a lot from them - especially how many things can go wrong. The most unfortunate part of it is that a lot, if not most, of the problems could have been avoided… or at least contained. You may be wondering what this has to do with history. Every day, across the globe, people are rolling out new history books, movies, music and artwork. Historic houses, museum and organizations are rolling out plans for events and products. Maybe these experiences will help you prepare for a more successful rollout.

Firefox is a popular web browser and users across the globe have been anticipating the release of version 3 of the software. Someone came up with the great idea of feeding & building that passionate community. They set a goal to enter the Guinness Book of World Records for the most downloads in a 24 hour period. They declared June 17th as Download Day. A nice website was built that hosted community forums, featured event promoters who were the most active, collected commitments for downloads from hundreds of thousands of people and featured a world map that showed how many people had committed to the download from each country. People around the world were planning download parties and the Spread Firefox site was the central planning place. This was great work on their part and when midnight came and June 16th slid into June 17th, the Firefox world was full of… really ticked off people. And lots of them.

You see, the globe has time zones and while the Download Day folks did announce the time it would start (10am Pacific Time), they didn’t do it very prominently. Most people just saw the date, June 17th, which was featured and promoted heavily. And June 17th in Tokyo, Japan and June 17th in Mountain View, California, USA are not the same. Potential downloaders stayed up till all hours of the night and early morning waiting for the promised Download Day and then trying to figure out what went wrong when it didn’t materialize. To make matters worse, when 10am Central time came, the Firefox download page changed to “Download Firefox 3 Now” buttons. But when you clicked the button, it took you to a page to download the old version of Firefox 2. In fact, this error wasn’t corrected for at least a couple of hours. Downloaders were mad all over again. At last, the problems were ironed out, download links were corrected and more than 8 million downloads of Firefox took place in that 24 hour period. But how many angry people just decided to download the software another day?

The second rollout was Verizon’s introduction of the new LG Dare. It’s a strong contender against Apple’s iPHone (Verizon’s strongest yet) and Verizon customers were already excited about it, even though Verizon didn’t appear to be and kept it hush-hush. In my opinion, Verizon had already made a mistake by not organizing and feeding the growing community of people looking forward to the phone. Despite LG and Verizon being very mum on the subject, photos and reports on the Dare leaked out and each lead ratcheted up the excitement. Verizon could have done a lot to really build this excitement, but they pretty much ignored it, only releasing (as far as I could find) one vague press release about the phone. In fact, it’s on sale date wasn’t even announced until June 25th, the day before the phone went on sale in Verizon’s online store. It won’t be in physical stores until early July. To complicate things, Verizon didn’t even inform their own staff very well about the phone. The answers customers got on when the phone would be released and the price varied wildly from Verizon employee to Verizon employee.

Figuring the online store would add the phone around 12:01 am on June 26th, hundreds, if not thousands, of Verizon customers stayed up hitting refresh on their computers to make sure they got their order in. I was one of those people. 11:30 - refresh (just in case they were early). 12:00 - refresh. 12:01 - refresh. 12:05 - refresh. 12:10 - Refresh! 12:15 - REFRESH!! 12:30 - Argh! It still wasn’t showing up in my phone upgrade options online. I went to a forum dedicated to the LG Dare and, to my horror, I was a post that said the Dare was available online… and had been for nearly an hour! What?!?! I completely logged otu and then back into the store. There it was. I went to the upgrade page and… no Dare. I attempted to call customer service, but they had closed an hour before the phone went online and wouldn’t open again until 6am. (Note that the website doesn’t tell you what time zone. And they have offices across the US.) I tried the online sales consultant, only to receive a terse stock notice that said the live online sales area had closed for the day and I would need to try back tomorrow. About 1:30 am I finally gave up and resolved to call customer service the next day.

The next morning, too early and grumpy from the lack of sleep, I called customer service only to be told that their system hadn’t updated yet and the phone wasn’t actually for sale yet online (despite my having seen it). They told me I would have to try again later or go to a store. (Huh?! A store? This customer service rep told me the phones woud be in store this same day.) Eureka! I decided to just go to my local Verizon store and buy one. Too bad that info was wrong. Good thing I checked before hopping in the car and wasting my lunch hour chasing down the phone. I called customer service again and was told that they were updating their system now and I should be able to buy the phone soon. This was crazy. I then contacted their online live customer service. They told me that they were having technical problems that were preventing exisitng Verizon customers from buying this phone and they hoped to have them resolved soon. How soon? We don’t know. I was so frustrated. This had now been going on for more than 12 hours. As a last desperate attempt, I connected with the online customer service again and got someone else. I asked if they were having technical difficulty with people upgrading their phone online. (I wasn’t sure I believed the story.) I finally got someone with a brain who said, yes, there was a problem. But if I would call telesales, they would process my upgrade order right away, with full online discounts. Thank goodness. Someone was finally implementing a work around solution! I finally got my phone ordered, but I know from online communities that many others were still stymied throughout the day.

So, what is there to learn?

1. Plan for things to go wrong. They will.
2. Pay attention to the details, like time and date. They matter.
3. Communicate with your audience! A lot of the frustration and anger experienced by Firefox and Verizon customers could have been alleviated by posting simple situational updates and solutions.
4. Make sure a problem-solver is around. Verizon closing customer service an hour before the rollout was a really, REALLY bad idea.
5. Find a solution or workaround for the problem as quickly as possible. Verizon should have had the alternative ordering method going within an hour, if not minutes, of the problem coming up. It was a simple workaround until the problem was resolved. If you have a problem, fix it. If you customer has a problem, fix it FAST!

Here’s some intersting data I found by accident. Last week I was perusing one of Google Labs‘ projects, Google Trends. They compile search data from the last 4 1/2 years and reveal trends based on search terms. For instance, you can see trends for the search term “american history”, which is what I did. And after checking a few search terms, I came to realize that american history is taking a hit in the public consciousness - or at least in their searches. Keep in mind that this is in no way a scientific study and public interest in subjects is cyclical. Interests come and go in cycles. But overall, online interest in US history seems to be slipping away.

As a quick side note, the graphs included in this post are from Google Trends. The top blue line reflect the number of searches for a particular term from the beginning of 2004 until today. (The bottom blue line reflects news items reflecting the search term and aren’t really considered in this post.) The letters you see along the top blue line reflect the interest generated by certain online news stories.

Take for instance the search for american history (chart at beginning of post). As with all searches, you’ll see spikes in searches for this term (especially when some news event occured surrounding the subject, but the overall trend is down.

Likewise, here is a search for “United States history”. The trends is remarkably downward!

So, what if you search for specific places or events? Here’s one for Gettysburg.

And Antietam.

How about the Wright Brothers?

So, is the prognosis for history bleak? Not really. As I’ve said, interest in history is often cyclical and frequently spurred on by notable news, entertainment evens (such as Roots, Gettysburg and Cold Mountain). We’re just three years from the sesquicentennial of the Civil War (two if you start with secession in 1860). Furthermore, travel to historic sites is down due to economic woes, but that will turn around. Good historic site marketers should even be able to take advantage of this downturn and fuel pricing woes to lure in local visitors for “backyard vacations” that could save them travel dollars.

What are you doing to gin up interest in your site? Add a comment or drop us a line and tell us about it.