If you’re living on Planet Earth and publishing books, you probably have finite amounts of time, energy and money to devote to Help with Social Media

If you’re publishing books here on Planet Earth, you probably don’t have infinite amounts of time for promoting them. How, then, should you respond to the clamor about social networking?

Can you afford time-intensive activities at the likes of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, LibraryThing, and Shelfari? Can you spare the time it takes to create a blog and make it effective? Will the payoffs from these activities be better than the payoffs you’re getting now by spending time in other, older arenas?

Until authoritative answers to such questions are available, it makes sense to think through your options in the light of research and reports to date.

This issue of the Independent adds three articles on social networking to our ongoing coverage. Read on for information about how IBPA members are using blogs, how to begin using Facebook, and how to keep social networks from sucking up too much precious time. And take advantage of the Independent archives at ibpa-online.org for more social-networking advice and more reports from fellow members on what works for them. Just click “Independent Articles” in the navigation bar on the Home page and then use the Search function.

In the archives, see especially:

“New Media: Testing, 1, 2 . . .” by Carol White

“Why and How to Start Blogging Now” by Paul Gillin

“A Sample Blogging Workflow” by Chris Brogan

“Streamlining Your Presence in the Social Web” by Deltina Hay

“Social Networking Sites: Options and Outcomes” by Linda Carlson

“Web 2.0 and Social Media: A Practical Guide to the New, Live Web,” in three parts, by Deltina Hay

—Judith Appelbaum

The Social Networking Merry-Go-Round: A Game Plan

by Steve O’Keefe

You have no doubt heard that your survival as a book publisher depends on whether you get wise to Web 2.0, get hip to social networking, and get up on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You might be asking whether the social-networking frenzy is genuine (as the Web-site-building frenzy was) or overblown (as the e-book frenzy was). The answer is yes.

Social networking is a lot like that merry-go-round you enjoyed as a child: If you don’t want to be a wimp, you have to hop on. But you may want to throw up by the time you’re finished.

The First Circles

The merry-go-round is an apt metaphor for the structure of social networks as well. You’re at the center. Your profile, to be specific: your picture, your resume, your favorites, your links. All your friends are in the ring around you. The next ring has your friends’ friends. Together, you swirl in social-networking nirvana, doing business and playing nice.

When you set up these profiles, the results are delightful. You connect with school chums, colleagues, distant family, old friends. When your friends’ friends start connecting with you, inquiries go up, sales go up, new projects get started. You quickly see the benefits of social networking. And you embrace it and even evangelize it to your co-workers and old-style friends.

It doesn’t take long, however—a few months at most—before you start hearing from the fourth ring on the social-networking merry-go-round. These are the people who might be friends, or might not be. You’re not sure. They contacted you through friends. Maybe they’re friends? But you’ve looked into a few of them, and sometimes they’re pornographers or prostitutes, so you can’t just “friend” them without a little investigation first.

In the fourth circle, the friends requests start pouring in. Although you don’t know who most of these people are, as long as they aren’t porn merchants, you’re friending them. You have a form friend request, a form thanks, a form add, and a form reject. If you can, you delegate the job of responding to friends requests to a staff member. All the time, your friends counts are going up! Your followers counts are going up! Your traffic is going up! This social-networking stuff is really magic!

What’s not going up anymore are your sales. Yes, they rose at first. But now they don’t rise nearly as fast as your friends and followers. Nor do your sales rise as fast as the amount of time and effort you spend processing your social-network requests and maintaining your profiles.

Calling a Halt

Then you enter the fifth ring of social networking. Here there is no doubt: these people are not your friends. Suddenly, thousands of marketers reach through the porous layers of friendship surrounding you, spamming you mercilessly with vile messages and stupid requests. Here’s a little ditty from my Facebook email today: “Amanda is dancing on Striptease Dance Party, March 15, 2009!”

At this point, you might be wondering, Can I just stop maintaining my social networks? Yes, you can. You may jump off the merry-go-round. You will feel dizzy at first. Breathe deep. You have a normal life again. You can social network with your family and friends the old-fashioned way: face to face.

The key to managing social networks is this: It is important to be in them for various reasons, including the fact that large social-networking sites rank high in search engines, but it is not important to maintain them continually.

The social networks will hate me for saying that, but I think for most book publishers and authors, it’s true. Get out there. Set up your profiles. Do it now. Do it right (see “Materials to Prepare in Advance” and the “Social Networking Checklist”).

Ride a network for 90 days. Make connections with your friends and their friends. Then stop responding. Or, if you’d feel guilty about that, turn over all maintenance to a staff member or freelancer or intern or robot. You will get the benefits of visibility without the cost of maintenance, and those who really want to do business with you will find a way to get through.

I went for two blissful years without looking at my MySpace page. That was a mistake. You should update your profiles once a year, or with each new release or batch of releases. At the same time, update your keywords, your tags, your links, your email addresses, and so on.

Any communications channel that allows for genuine dialogue between you and your friends’ friends is subject to becoming clogged with spam. When that happens, either the service has to crack down—which few large social networks have done successfully—or the networkers pull back. Pulling back is a rational strategy despite the propaganda about social networking as a never-ending tool for spurring sales.

Steve O’Keefe teaches Internet public relations at Tulane University and has taught online publicity at Publishing University since 1998. The author of Complete Guide to Internet Publicity (Wiley) and the co-founder of the International Association of Online Communicators (IAOCblog.com), he writes frequently for the Independent and other publishing trade periodicals.

Materials to Prepare in Advance

As you prepare to enter various social networks, have these items ready:

• good photo of yourself in 72 dpi JPEG and 300+ dpi JPEG
• updated resume or CV in Microsoft Word or text
• employment history with names of contacts
• education history with names of schools and professors
• endorsements and contact information for the endorsers
• list of any awards or honors you’ve received
• list of volunteer activities, organizations, and contacts
• list of keywords, keyphrases, keynames, keyplaces

Social Networking Checklist

• profile/account setup
• record user ID, password, email address
• artwork added (logo, too)
• introductory post
• introductory email
• thank-you email
• friends requests processed
• events added
• comments responded to
• spam removed
• links/blogroll added
• links/blogroll updated
• RSS streams connected

Important Social-Networking Sites

ZoomInfo. You’re in this network, whether you like it or not. Worth claiming your profile and beefing it up.

LinkedIn. Mostly for business connections. Worth maintaining. They do a good job of keeping the spam manageable.

Amazon. Often overlooked, your Amazon profile is one of the most important social-networking vehicles to set up properly.

Google. All the big sites want you to add profiles. It’s usually a good idea. Your Google profile will become increasingly important to visibility.

Yahoo! If only so we’ll keep having somewhere to turn besides Google.

MySpace. Originated as a musician/music social network, it remains a great place to push audio tracks, audiobooks, and tour dates.

Facebook. Originally a college network for people whose physical address is always in flux. Still great for reaching young adults and teens.

Twitter. A tweet is the ultimate news release. If this is not the most hated social network in six months, I’ll eat this article.

Wikipedia. All authors should be in here and should care about what their profiles say and work to correct and enhance them. Always a top-10 search engine result.

Flickr. This photo-sharing service is an important visual social network. Anyone using photos in cookbooks, coffee-table books, or other books should have a strong profile here, and “eblads” or slideshow samplers from books.

YouTube. Also an important social network, this video-sharing service does a terrible job of cleaning spam, profanity, and copyright violations off the site. Keep your eyes out for niche video portals that are better groomed.

Book-Oriented Networks

Many networks for sectors of the book industry do an excellent job of grooming content and building community the way large networks cannot.

You should visit, set up profiles where that’s an option, and take advantage of every free service. In many cases, that will be enough. Some of you will find these networks a joy and a source of indispensable support. They include BookCrossing, LibraryThing, FiledByAuthor (a new entry in a crowded field, which I’ve worked with and which, like ZoomInfo, includes all authors whether they like it or not), GoodReads, Shelfari, AuthorsDen, and Suite101.

Getting Started with Facebook

by Stephanie Chandler

“Are you on Facebook?” That’s a question you’ve probably heard more than once lately. Launched as a way for founder Mark Zuckerberg to connect with friends at Harvard, Facebook now has nearly 200 million users and a million new members joining each week in the U.S. alone.

Benefits that social-networking platforms like Facebook provide for the business community include the ability to get repeat exposure with customers, peers, and prospects, who can make up your network, and the ability to promote events, sales, special offers, and more through your Facebook profile.

Of course, Facebook is not just a tool for your business; it can also let you have fun connecting with old friends, family, and co-workers. There is something about sharing a grade-school photo that creates an instant bond with those from your past. And personal connections have the potential to become new business opportunities.

If you haven’t joined Facebook yet but you’re ready to do that now, here’s how to get started:

Create a powerful profile. There is no cost to create a profile on Facebook. Site policies require that it be tied to a human name, not a business name, so use the About Me section to describe your business and what you do. In the Information box on your main profile page, you can feature links to your Web site, blog, and other business resources. Be sure to include your photo so that others can recognize you online.

Build your contact list. Facebook is designed to foster connecting with “friends.” You can send and receive friend requests, and once you accept someone as a friend, that friend can view your profile and you can view theirs. To begin connecting with people you know, you can either import your contact database or search Facebook for individual people.

You can also view the friends list for each person you are connected to. And if it turns out that you know any of a friend’s friends (or you would like to know them), you can send connection requests.

Communicate via wall posts. Each Facebook member has a “wall” where friends can post messages. Your friends’ walls are great places to post quick notes. For example, if you have “friended” a CEO you saw at a recent event, you could post a note on her wall that says, “Loved your presentation at the XYZ event—thanks for the great ideas!” In the business networking world, this is the online equivalent of picking up the phone to say hello.

Update your status. At the top of your Facebook home page, you’ll see a status box. When you post a status update, everyone in your friends list can see it on their home pages. For business purposes, this is a place to share tips and promote events with a view toward boosting sales.

Effective business updates could include: “Jenny found a great article on social networking: www. . . . ” or “Joe at The Book Nook is hosting a special event! Check out www. . . . ”

Participate in groups. Online groups allow you to network virtually with potential buyers, customers, and peers. To access groups, start from your Facebook home page; view the list of applications and click on Groups. You can browse through thousands of themed groups.

You can also search groups to find topics related to your industry. For example, if you publish children’s books in northern California, you might search for parents’ and teachers’ groups based there. If you publish travel books for hikers, you might join the Appalachian Trail Users group along with other relevant groups.

To maximize the potential with groups, consider starting one of your own. Once again, there is no cost to do this, and the visibility can be great. For example, a business-book publisher in Dallas could start a group for Dallas business owners.

You do not need to promote your business at every turn. Instead, make it known that you offer helpful books, and provide value for members of your group by sharing interesting tips and engaging with them in the online forum.

Build your friends list. For business purposes, the one with the most friends on Facebook wins. Okay, not exactly, but the point is to connect with as many potential customers as possible. One way to do this is to join a group and send connection requests to fellow members with a note saying something like: “Hey, we’re both members of XYZ group. Let’s connect here on FB!”

Just as you would with an in-person business introduction, take a moment to learn about new people you meet on Facebook. Networking always works best when there is a two-way exchange. If you can help a new Facebook friend, the friend will likely want to return the favor.

Create fan pages. Although Facebook requires that a profile be designated in terms of a human, not a business, it provides the ability to create fan pages for a business, a product, an author, a speaker, or just about anything else you want.

To create a fan page, scroll all the way down to the bottom of the Facebook Home page and click on Advertising (don’t worry, it doesn’t cost anything to set up). Next, click on Pages at the top of the advertising screen. You will find helpful explanations about how pages work, along with a link that will allow you to create a fan page.

Fan pages function a lot like profiles, which means you can add links, events, discussion boards, and other features that make them interactive.

Also, Facebook will post updates from your fan pages back to your profile so others will know about them. And instead of sending friend requests out, you can invite others to become a “fan” of your fan page.

You will also have the ability to send messages to all your fans, allowing you to cultivate a community online.

Manage your time. The biggest complaint most people have about social networking is that managing it takes a lot of time. I recommend designating a time each day for Facebook activities. You can log in once or twice a day to view messages and manage your connections. Just be careful not to let time run away with you (it’s easy for that to happen!).

The more time you spend on Facebook, the more ways you may find to use it to your advantage. Be creative, show your personality, and have some fun. All that will be reflected in your success.

Stephanie Chandler is founder and CEO of AuthorityPublishing.com, which provides custom book-publishing and author-marketing services for business, self-help, and other nonfiction books, and of BusinessInfoGuide.com, a directory of resources for entrepreneurs. Her business and marketing books include The Author’s Guide to Building an Online Platform and From Entrepreneur to Infopreneur.

Blogs and Blog Tours

by Linda Carlson

If you’d like to know more about what blogs and blog tours offer, you can learn from several IBPA members with experiences to share. Some are promoting via the blogosphere because they believe that’s the best way to reach technically savvy customers, and others are using this channel because online publicity can be more economical than bookstore appearances and traditional advertising.

Online promotion also gives you and your authors the chance to be interactive and dynamic, especially with the online chat of blog tour Q&A.

This is vital if you’re targeting a younger market. In March 2008, as young people’s interest in the presidential campaign became evident, The New York Times pointed out how kids and young adults are using the Internet as a technological version of word of mouth. Talking about the campaign, reporter Brian Stelter wrote, “Younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well—sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter with a social one.”

Stelter quoted a 25-year-old who said that when she reads an interesting story online, she’ll often send the URL to 10 friends. “I’d rather read an e-mail from a friend with an attached story than search through a newspaper to find the story,” she explained.

Regardless of the age of your market, cyber-marketing efforts may help you reach your goals. Here’s what IBPA members report:

Aims and Achievements

“In November 2008, Masteryear converted one book’s Web site to a blog, with the goal of positioning author Michael Pollack as an authority on musical improvisation and sketch comedy. The blog is more articles-based than others in the industry, resulting in significant referral links,” explains Christopher Colley, who runs the company.

“Our goal for sales increases for all these titles has not been met, but we’re on our way,” he adds, citing results from backlist. One title published in 2003 sold more in the first three weeks of 2009 than in all of 2007, and as many copies as it had in half of 2008. A second book, a 2004 title, sold more copies in the first two weeks of 2009 than it had in either 2007 or 2008.

Like Los Angeles–based Masteryear, C&T Publishing in Concord, CA, made the Internet and social media a priority in 2008, launching ctpubblog.com in October to promote its quilting and crafting titles.

“Our mission statement for the blog describes it as ‘where we break away from book schedules and marketing campaigns to focus on what drives us to be creative,’” reports Megan Wisniewski, media relations coordinator, who considers the blog an extremely successful communications device. “Our authors take part as guest bloggers, and each staff member has made a contribution. We see the number of visitors rise every week. In addition, our blog is listed on dozens of other crafters’ blog rolls.”

Being listed on blog rolls significantly increases readership of your blog, says Wisniewski, who reports that C&T blog visitors reached 11,000 per month by March 31 and that traffic has increased by at least 2,000 each month. Blog badges, which are craft-related images that bloggers can add to their sites, link directly to C&T’s blog and also prompt visits. For examples, see ctpub.com/client/client_pages/blog_badges.cfm.

This blog was conceived as a newsletter, a place to make information about projects, contests, and industry buzz more accessible than it was on the publisher’s Web site, but it has evolved into more of a community with lots of interaction, Wisniewski explains. Some posts attract as many as 200 comments (and others as few as five).

C&T has also recognized the need for such “blog candy” as giveaways. One recent example: “We are celebrating the arrival of spring and all of its grand occasions by giving away a copy of Card Art by our author Susan S. Terry. All you have to do to enter the drawing is post a comment here telling us who you want to make a card for and why.”

Another publisher of handcrafts with a blog is Nomad Press in Fort Collins, CO, where Deborah Robson says, “One of the purposes of my blog is to communicate that this is a small, thoughtful, careful operation.”

Robson recommends Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook (see rebeccablood.net/handbook). Because it’s a 2002 publication, the technical information is dated, but Robson found Blood’s philosophy helpful. “Her tips for getting into blogging and finding a way of doing it that’s personally satisfying and sustainable have served me extremely well.”

Publicist Kate Bandos doesn’t blog, but she is developing a list of blogs, Web sites, and e-zines that cover the same topics as clients of KSB Promotions in Ada, MI: parenting, children, food, health, and travel. E-blasting to these online media with Constant Contact (constantcontact.com) “is helping increase the Web coverage of our books and authors,” she reports.

Elaine Williams, author of A Journey Well Taken: Life After Loss and publisher at OnWings Press in East Jewett, NY, also cites the publicity value of blogging. It “has brought me to the attention of buyers and others in the grief and bereavement field,” she reports. “My blog posts are usually listed on Google.com within six hours of posting.”

Even more enthusiastic about blogs as communication devices, Stacey Kannenberg of Cedar Valley Publishing, Fredonia, WI, says: “I believe in the power of blogs! I am proud that my books have been featured on over 700 mom blogs! Those blogs have contributed to my high position on search engines, and these blog posts will live forever online.”

The Pluses of Prizes

One way Kannenberg encourages blog publicity is by offering her books as contest prizes.

“So that mom bloggers can make their readers eligible to win copies of Let’s Get Ready For Kindergarten! and Let’s Get Ready For First Grade!, they ask questions on their blogs about my books,” she explains. “Answering the questions requires some research on my Web site.”

Reporting on a contest held the day Kannenberg emailed me to share her experiences, she noted that she got comments from 150 readers of one mom’s blog. Half the people who responded said they used Kanneberg’s books or knew that the books were available in their children’s schools.

The contests provide “free and priceless market research for me,” Kannenberg says. “Now I know that on that mom blog I had a 50 percent name recognition.”

Jasmine-Jade Enterprises and its authors also run contests to drive fans to their Web sites. Prizes range from free digital books to mini-laptops and e-readers, says Susan Edwards, vice president of media and legal relations for the Orlando, FL, publisher. “Our authors are especially good at working together to create scavenger hunts and other contests,” she notes.

Some bloggers use contest prizes and other giveaways provided by publishers (large as well as small) to solicit comments and get people to register on their blogs and/or to access their Twitter and Facebook pages (all of which document the readership of the blog).

For example, at cafeofdreams.blogspot.com, readers can enter a drawing for a free book in one of several ways:

• leave a comment on the book being reviewed
• sign up for the cafeofdreams newsletter
• follow the blogger on Twitter
• Twitter or blog about the giveaway

Touting Virtual Tours

IBPA members with active blogs seem to be increasingly enthusiastic about blog tours. The setup is simple: By prearrangement with a blog owner, a publisher can have its authors post informative material or answer questions that the blog’s readers have posted in advance. In some cases, authors respond to posts on the blog almost immediately, creating an Internet chat. Besides Elaine Williams, those using tours include Nomad Press and Pamela Samuels Young.

At Nomad, Robson reports, “we did our first blog tour in 2005, and we’ve done one for every title since. Because our books cover craft, history, culture, and ecology, we can connect with a variety of blogs. Generally a tour is three weeks, with daily visits. In each case, the author and I work with each other to create the posts. We both always feel that we’ve done a lot, but that the effort was extremely worthwhile.”

For an example, see the tour Robson has archived at

independentstitch.typepad.com/the_independent_stitch/blog-tour-ethnic-knitting.html.

Pamela Samuels Young, the Artesia, CA, author/publisher of Murder on the Down Low, explains some blog-tour logistics: “In December 2008, I did a month-long virtual book tour arranged through Pump Up Your Books, an online promotion agency. In advance, copies of the book were sent to blogger-reviewers, who posted their reviews to coincide with my tour. Every week, the virtual tour took me to several blog sites where I blogged, posted interview questions, and offered writing advice.”

“It was great for generating buzz,” Young believes, since she saw an immediate bump in sales on Amazon.com.

Besides generating sales, reasons to consider blog tours include boosting Web-site traffic and getting links.

Elaine Williams notes: “My first blog tour was intended to bring traffic to my site. What was important to me was to have people post my blog comments on their sites so that what I said showed up in multiple places, and so that a lot of links were created.”

With her second tour, Williams’s objective was to create awareness of the list of grief-and-loss Web sites that she’d developed. Few of the sites mentioned in her tour reciprocated with links or posts, however, reducing the tour’s impact.

Unlike a real book tour, a completed blog tour can be used in continuing promotion, as Alyson Stanfield demonstrates. This Golden, CO, coach, the author of I’d Rather Be in the Studio! The Artist’s No-Excuse Guide to Self-Promotion, had responses from an 18-stop 2008 tour compiled and posted at idratherbeinthestudio.com/blogtour.html.

A couple of excerpts show how she structured the compilation:

Susie Monday’s El Cielo Art Studio Journal Blog:

Susie asks: As an artist who teaches (both in other places and regularly in my own studio with retreat formats) I wonder if I should have a separate blog, website and newsletter for the teaching/coaching side of my business, or do I keep it all together. Which is less confusing? Read Susie’s interview with me.

Anne Randolph’s Soup Kitchen Writing Blog:

Anne asked me how much time I spend on the blog and my marketing. She also asked what my marketing schedule looks like. It’s a cool question and you just might be interested. Visit the Soup Kitchen Writing blog to see what I had to say.

What other conclusions do IBPA members have to share?

“The key to success in online marketing is the quality content: articles, excerpts, videos and audio,” says Margo Baldwin, president of Chelsea Green Publishing in White River Junction, VT. “Content is king.”

Thom Schumacher, marketing director at Summit University Publishing in Gardiner, MT, agrees. “You must continue to provide fresh content on a regular basis. The shelf life of digital content is very short. Our goal is to have something new uploaded at least once a week.”

Although Schumacher says Summit has plenty of material to use in electronic marketing, he also notes a need to have at least one of its 14 staff members work full-time on viral marketing. Today that’s not an option, although Summit is devoting as much staff time to the effort as possible, in part because it is soliciting reviews and buzz for its first fiction title, which will officially launch in September .

Is It Worth the Effort?

Several publishers question whether their viral marketing results justify the resources they devote to them.

Gretchen Goldsmith at Torrance, CA’s Rose Publishing warns, “Before getting caught up in fad marketing, it’s important to be ruthlessly fixed on objective results. A company must put tracking in place so it knows how much is being purchased on the Web site and where the buyers are coming from.”

Her tracking for a recent 30-day period shows that Web traffic (not sales) was driven by (in descending order): GoogleAdWords, Google “organic” (unpaid) search, the company’s own catalog, and e-blasts. Much less effective were Yahoo! search, a banner ad, and the “Forward to a friend” button on e-blasts and Web-site pages.

For tracking, Goldsmith recommends the free Google Analytics, but Christopher Colley at Masteryear points out that Analytics works only when Java is enabled, and he estimates that as many as 40 percent of computer users disable the Java script in their browsers. “So this tool does not represent all your traffic,” he cautions.

Steve Mettee at Quill Driver Books in Sanger, CA, echoes others’ concerns about time commitment and monitoring. “Much of this needs to be done by the author. Publishers of multiple titles seldom have the time and the contacts to do it,” he points out. “Of course, we can help our authors by recommending resources so they can learn how to create online events.” Monitoring is one way publishers can help their authors, Mettee suggests, although many of us may not have the time for the extensive monitoring that Masteryear does.

Besides using Google Analytics, Colley has redesigned some Web sites to provide more tracking information. “We know which online presence (for example, Facebook, Flickr, or the author’s personal Web site) drives traffic to which of our Web sites,” he reports, adding: “In addition to server logs, I receive about 15 daily emails that summarize every new search hit, blog entry, etc., for our keywords. I know when new online resellers have added us to their databases. And we maintain a database of every site that links to our sites and try to follow those traffic patterns from site to site.”

The bottom line when it comes to the effects of blogging on sales? Few publishers attribute sales to blog posts. When you review what they say about blogging, you’ll see that it’s being used as yet another publicity tool, an inexpensive (but sometimes time-consuming) way to develop awareness of authors and books. Especially if your market is young, or you’re targeting enthusiastic hobbyists, it’s a tool you’ll want to consider.

Linda Carlson (lindacarlson.com) writes from Seattle, where she is learning to blog and Twitter.

More Tools for Electronic Marketing

Each article in our ongoing series about electronic marketing identifies resources for improving your media and customer relations and increasing the visibility of your books and authors.

Every tool covered in this series is readily available, and many require only your time.

So far, the series includes:

“AdWords and Other Marketing Opportunities That Search Engines Offer” (October 2008)

“Show Up on Major Sites” (January)

“Tools for Reaching Media, Booksellers, and More” (February)

“Social Networking Sites: Options and Outcomes” (March)

All these articles are available via ibpa-online.org.

If you have relevant anecdotes to share for upcoming pieces on Twitter, trailers, Flickr, pings, loops, Webinars, podcasts, and e-book clubs, or if you have other Web 2.0 applications to suggest, please e-mail me at linda@ibpa-online.org.