MacMillan/Farrar, Straus & Giroux

The social concept designs the first social web strategy for new book by Pulitzer-Prize winning NY Times Columnist Thomas L. Friedman and his publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

As a publisher, we’d never done anything on the social web much beyond Facebook accounts and viral video. We like to break new ground and the size, scope and message of Friedman project made it ideal for this purpose. Using best practices, Adam showed us what to look for, sped the business development, managed the assets, and did some impressive trouble-shooting along with way. The author was pleased with how ‘organic’ everything looked and felt, and we’re confident enough with the results of this unique collaboration to pursue more opportunities on the social web. It’s great to work with someone who listens and knows how to make it happen.

–Jeff Seroy, Sr Vice President, Publicity and Marketing at Farrar, Straus & Giroux LLC

The Farrar Straus & Giroux team was looking for an innovative yet laid-back way to get one of their most popular books onto the social web. The author had already planned a crowd-sourced content implementation on his own website, and traffic was moderate. They needed to raise the bar.

The social concept designed an implementation to take Thomas Friedman’s successful Chapter 18 implementation and bring it to a larger audience, and coordinated all assets with the FSG and LinkedIN teams.

The outcomes made this the most successful author implementation on LinkedIn, with 658 responses.

Results

  1. A Huge Traffic Spike The implementation generated a the most significant traffic increase to Tom Friedman’s site since the debut of his 2008 FSG bestseller, “Hot, Flat & Crowded.” The implementation generated 50% as much traffic as the book release itself, and about 3x the "buzz" of a normal day on the Friedman website.
  2. A 4x Social Web Traffic Referral Increase In August/September, 5% of Tom Friedman’s traffic came from the social web. Post-implementation, 22% of Friedman’s traffic is came from the social web. This is 4x increase in how important the social Internet is to Tom's brand.
  3. More “Bounce” To The Book Loss-Of-Traffic The social concept implementation recovered a significant percentage of the post-release dip in traffic to the Friedman site: Aug-Sep (108.9k), (Sep-Oct 77k), Oct-Nov (81.5k).
  4. Incredibly High Return-on-Participation Friedman’s ROP (return-on-participation) was 45% as high as Barack Obama's! Typical consumer ROP numbers are around 200x, so this implementation did about 3x better than we had expected. This is the most successful author implementation on LinkedIn, bar none.