Last week I moderated a session at the Association of Educational Publishers Summit “Publishing in the World of Free.” The panelists were Andrew Pass of Pass-Ed a developer of curriculum materials employing web 2.0 technologies, and Lisa Schmucki of EdWeb.net a social networking site for educators. The title of the session was “75 Ways to Use Social Networking in Educational Publishing” don’t worry the panelists did not try to fit all 75 into the session—the full list was handed out at the end. If you missed the handout, download it here.
My purpose was just to set the stage for the discussion and to provide input from the publisher’s perspective. Here’s my introduction:
Good Afternoon:
Thank you for joining us for 75 Ways to Use Social Networking in Educational Publishing. Our panelists today are Andrew Pass of Pass-Ed and Lisa Schmucki of EdWeb.net
Over the past couple of years the world has seen a virtual “big bang” in Social Networking, that has spawned, among other things, a “blogosphere,” a “twitterverse,” and a friendly but strange world called Facebook, in which one is constantly offered drinks yet remains thirsty!
Even for those publishers who have yet to “Digg,” “Tweet,” or “blog,” the concepts of social networking are not completely new. Many of the old school have used tools such as listservs and online discussion groups to share expertise, promote products, and to monitor the reputations of their authors and brands.
However, the latest proliferation of social networking tools and sites, and their embrace by the public is unprecedented—earlier this year Facebook crossed the 200 million user mark, making it the 4th most trafficked site on the Internet (new numbers in last week suggest it may now be #3), and Twitter was the cover story in last week’s Time Magazine. For businesses and organizations, the opportunities and challenges this new environment presents can seem daunting. For publishers, the silver lining is that this new environment doesn’t favor those with large marketing budgets so much as those with compelling content. In the panel today we will help you make sense of some of the tools available and their uses in both product development and marketing contexts. The panelists will touch on a number of examples of how to use social networking, however the “75 ways” referred to in the program title are all listed in your handout…
I hope it was a valuable session for everyone. The room was packed so there are a lot of publishers trying to figure out the social networking thing. As might be gleaned from the title of the summit, there was a lot of discussion about the “problem” of free content, but one thing we hoped to point out was the other side of the coin—how many free resources and tools are available that make the barriers to getting into social media very low.
