- BLOG BEAG –

TV presenter Colette Fitzpatrick and author John Boyne today (14 March 2010) launched the Eason Book Club, an interactive online forum for book lovers and book clubs created by Eason, Ireland’s largest book retailer. The Eason Book Club will host discussions and reviews, top tips for setting up book clubs, recommended reads, regular competitions and interactive polls. John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas topped the first Eason Book Club poll of best book club reads of the noughties. The poll revealed the popularity of “cross-over” books – popular with both children and adults – for book clubs.

The Eason Book Club, which is powered by Facebook, has already almost 1,400 registered fans who are availing of book advice from Eason’s team of experts, including suggested reads, information on book events and group discussions on many bookish topics from favourite re-reads to judging books by their covers! There will be a monthly discussion on a selected title which has been kick-started with a lively debate on the poll winner The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. The Eason Book Club will feature regular author participation and this month’s discussion includes an introductory synopsis of the book from the author, John Boyne.

Maria Dickenson, Head of Purchasing at Easons said “Book clubs have become a huge phenomenon in the last 10 years with thousands of book-clubs getting together on a monthly or weekly basis around the country. There is an incredible word of mouth network when it comes to book club books, and titles can have a long shelf life as they are passed from reader to reader over the years. Our online forum is designed to offer support to existing book-clubs and also to allow individuals who are perhaps not in a book-club to take part in discussions in their own time.

It was incredibly interesting to see in the results of our first book-club poll, that “cross-over” children-adult titles are making very popular book club reads with John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas topping the poll. Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog, Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief and Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Bind Up all also feature in the top twenty. Children’s literature has produced some real gems during the noughties and it is great to see that adults are happy to explore the genre.”

The first Eason Book Club poll registered 1700 votes and respondents were asked to choose their top reads of the noughties from a selection of 125 books. The books selected were drawn from national sales data over the last ten years. There was also a strong qualititative element with the Eason team selecting books that they have read and loved in their own book clubs, as well as books that customers have recommended or responded well to. (The full list of the top 50 selected titles can be found below).

The Eason Book Club is also providing a new way for Eason to interact with its customers.  “This online forum is facilitating direct dialogue with our customers which we greatly welcome.  The feedback we receive from our online members can have a direct influence on our in-store promotions, for example, following our first poll of top books of the noughties, we are now running a 3 for 2 offer on the book-club top 50 of the noughties. The Eason Book Club will allow us to actively listen to our customers views which is essentially changing the way we do business”, Maria Dickenson concluded.

Visit the Eason Book Club on http://www.facebook.com/EasonBookClub

EASON BOOK CLUB – Top 50 Books of the Noughties

Unwieldy links spilling over lines, messing up pages, making a nonsense of your tweets? The following table of URL shortening software might help. It’s a summary of what we could find, what they work with and most importantly from our point of view, can you make a custom URL? It’s not definitive (what is these days?). So tell us if we’ve missed something or update us if you’ve found an even better option.

Our preference? BudURL. It was designed from the start to give small businesses and marketers insight into click traffic.

There’s a very interesting piece on the Royal Pingdom (a website monitoring service) blog attempting to shed light on the relative popularities of social networking sites.

Simply put, Royal Pingdom ask, how do you put a number on how engaging a site is?

For the sake of argument, they have used the monthly visits per visitor X page views per visit  i.e.”visitor activity level”

Here’s their result. Stats from Google Adplanner, and the view is worldwide.

A clear leader: Facebook by quite a stretch.

A few observations:

• These numbers might appear a bit unfair to Twitter. Many of its users rely heavily on applications to access the site and don’t necessarily spend much time on the site itself.
• Facebook not only has a huge of users (350 million+) but the site manages to wring out so many page views from each one. This is bound to be extremely good news for Facebook’s income from advertising.

For more observations and a closer look at visitor behaviour on social networking site check out this excellent post here.

END

On Thursday 25 March 2010, people in hundreds of cities around the world, including Dublin will come together offline to rally around the important cause of Education by hosting local events to have fun and create awareness.  Twestival™ (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good.  All of the local events are organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to projects.

The difference between the twestival and a usual “tweet-up” (meet-up) is that this will raise money for charity. The Twestival will provide a chance for “tweeple” to meet “twiends” in person. However “twebies” (twitter newcomers) in particular are advised to follow “twittiquette”.

Twestival was started in London last year by the local twitter community which decided to expand it into a global event for 2009.