Green Apple Books: a video about videos about books

In the current online marketing landscape, how can small businesses keep up with big brand online marketing when their internet promotion needs to get customers in the door of their brick-and-mortar location?

French Press Films releases a video today featuring the successes of Green Apple Books, a prominent San Francisco bookstore. Co-owner Pete Mulvihill talks about how their homegrown marketing turned into a successful viral video series, culminating in a BoingBoing-featured video campaign called "Book Vs. Kindle."

With over 40,000 views, that series is merely a part of Green Apple Books' irreverent video campaigns, including a "Book of the Month" series that attracted the attention of the American Booksellers Association. Featuring work by bookstore employees, and later French Press Films, the shorts attracted online attention that placed Green Apple as a home-grown leader in organic marketing and advertising online.

The video shows the attitudes and practices that made Green Apple's small business marketing efforts a success, including clips from their "Book of the Month" series and a guest appearance in the "Kindle" series by Daniel Handler, the author of the Lemony Snicket series.

Mulvihill, in the video, outlines three key parts of Green Apple's success that are applicable to any small business' online marketing efforts:

- Show The Character of Your Store: Green Apple chose the "Book of the Month" videos to kick off their online video campaigns because it was unique to the store, and displayed the character of the store and its employees. Even the best "viral" campaigns won't do much for a store or brand if it's not true to the character and values of the company behind it.

- Make The Campaign Repeatable, But Not Repetitive: Perhaps the best summary of a good online video campaign, Mulvihill describes the "Book of the Month" videos as "repeatable but not repetitive." At an ad agency, they'd say these campaigns have "legs," but in any words, it means make a viral video campaign that's consistent and episodic, but never, ever, ever boring.

- Make It Short, Sharable and Fun: Mulvihill makes a great point in the middle of the video, that if you want to put something up online, make sure it's worth watching, and to the point. He mentions other bookstores webcasting author readings, and that even he, as a bookseller, can't sit through it. If your audience doesn't want to watch to the end, and send that link off to their friends — you're plain doing it wrong.

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Tags:

• bay area
• san francisco
• oakland
• viral
• video
• marketing
• small business
• SEO
• online
• b2c
• b2b
• corporate
• green apple books
• book of the month
• book vs kindle
• amazon kindle
• bookstores
• independent
• indie
• indiebound
• shelf awareness
• little bee
• chris cleave
• daniel handler