Social Networking is not a Marketing Tool?

If you've been keeping up with digital publishing experiments, you may have heard of Rick Moody. Moody writes about music on the Rumpus and has authored a novel, "The Ice Storm" as well as a collection of short stories titled, "Demonology." Late last year his short story, "Some Contemporary Characters," was published via Twitter. Serial tweets appeared every 10 to 20 minutes for about three days. The project was sponsored by literary magazine, Electric Literature.

I heard about the experiment last year, but I was knee-deep in finals and never read it. I still haven't. I'm more interested in an article I read today on Publishing Perspectives.com written by editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, Andy Hunter. Titled, "Lessons from the Rick Moody Experiment," Hunter outlines how they went about pushing Moody's story. Employing 20 co-publishers, from literary magazines to authors and booksellers, Moody's tweets were scheduled and sent through Hootsuite, a professional Twitter client. The tweets were broadcast from each of the 20 co-publishers as original content. This was an important piece of the publishing process as it avoided the issue of retweeting, wherein each retweet would be branded with the original publisher's information. By publishing the content as original from all 20 co-publishers, Electric Literature was able to harness the networks of each for maximum exposure and the story reached over 38,000 people.

As Hunter shares, the experiment was not without problems. People who subscribe to more than one of the 20 co-publishers received multiple tweets and were not shy about reporting issues with delivery. Booksellers with diverse audiences angered their clients by clogging Twitter feeds with unrequested information. Hunter expressed "...regret that less attention was paid to the content of Rick’s story than its mode of delivery—although that may have been inevitable." It is unfortunate that people didn't talk more about Moody's story, but wasn't this as much of a publicity stunt as an experiment? As Hunter reports: "Over the course of those three days, our web traffic spiked 300%, subscriptions jumped 500%, hundreds joined our email list, and we gained 10,000 new followers on Twitter." Even if marketing Electric Literature was not the main idea, the experiment did a great job of extending brand awareness.

What really stands out in this article, and the reason that I've subjected you to this recap is this simple statement towards the end of Hunter's report: "Social networking is not a marketing tool..." I'm sorry, what? I'm not sure I read that correctly. Social networking IS a marketing tool, or I've been living on another planet. I love and appreciate that Hunter believes in literature and art for art's sake, without need for salesmanship or money, but please. Call the Rick Moody short story an experiment in digital publishing, call it a marketing coup, call it social networking. It doesn't matter because when social media marketing is correctly executed, it is all of these things.