There have been plenty of literary events on the social web - some good, some not-so-hot. A friend of mine introduced me to the team at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. When I knew that if I was going to work with the publisher that has given us 20 Nobel Prize winners since 1946, I knew I had to pull out ALL the stops. So, I wrote an amazing strategy.In August 2008, FSG author Thomas Friedman released Hot, Flat and Crowded, and it quickly zoomed to the top of most of their business book charts. (It currently holds the top spot in Amazons economics,outdoors/nature and technology categories, and the #6 spot on the NY Times bestseller list.) The Plan: In late August of 2008, I wrote out a quick social web strategy designed to take all of awesome social web collateral built around Friedman's book (his Chapter 18 Project implementation, the FSG site). After looking it over, the FSG team decided that it was clear that one part really jumped out at them: doing a robust implementation on a business-focused social network.The initial goal of the Chapter 18 Project was to solicit thousands of answers to questions that Friedman was asking in order to prepare the final chapter of his book. Previous versions of his books, like The World Is Flat, have been revised two or three times. It's sort of a given that HFC would crowdsourced, to some degree.There were three things that I thought were missing from the either the Chapter 18 implementation or previous literary social network implementations that we could bring to the social web:An social-graph-linked identity standardA rich media component linked to the social graph (e.g. comment on something, share that comment to friends)A clear and quick link to real-word publication (like, at your bookstore, soon)LinkedIn's new application platform delivered all three of these components.The Platform: On October 28, Reid Hoffman and the LinkedIN team launched their applications platform. Rather than allowing a Facebook-like free-for-all, they opted for a blue-chip selection, and drew from best-in-class app providers like Amazon, Box.net, Six Apart and TripIt.The Team: FSG's Jeff Seroy and Christina Harcar were downright critical in ensuring a balance between the needs of Friedman, as an author, the end-users on the social web, and their needs, as a publisher, in ensuring that the implementation was deeply content-rich. MacMillan's tireless Internet Marketing Coordinator, Ryan Chapman diligently prepared brilliant content for the implementation, including sample chapters and killer video footage. Friedman's editor, Paul Elie, provided close oversight and communication to keep everything in line with the editorial vision of the book.The Implementation:We worked closely with LinkedIn's Mario Sundar and Richard Chen to ensure that every piece of the implementation was perfect. In the end, the implementation included (1) the first LinkedIn Q&A that will lead to immediate publication and (2) the first LinkedIn "celebrity" implementaton to leverage multiple applications and rich media.Now that everything is up and running, we expect LinkedIn users to finally get to talk, share and debate with one of their favorite authors, and hopefully see the finest of their arguments make it into the next rev of one of the best business books in years.I'm incredibly thrilled to be of service on such a critical project, and I CAN'T WAIT to read the referral traffic data to learn where the most engaged users are coming from. That's going to be critical information for a publisher like FSG to have, as they expand their marketing onto the social web. One last note: I've got to give a huge thank you to my brother Noah for getting me into Tom's work. My perspective on the world, economics and our environment has been hugely affected by reading The World Is Flat (v 3.0) and Hot, Flat and Crowded.
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