HarperCollins Canada has an immediate opening for a Digital Marketing Manager. I’ve met Steve Osgoode several times and have admired the Harper Collins’ online program from afar. If you’re in Toronto or want to be, and you have experience in books and online marketing, apply now. Details below.

As Digital Marketing Manager, the successful applicant will be responsible for:

Responsibilities:

– Develop digital marketing plans for select Canadian, US and UK titles
– Manage online advertising campaigns for titles and authors
– Co-ordinate the development and production of new website builds for key brands, authors and series, and market these sites to build traffic and loyalty
– Working with the marketing associates, schedule content and features for harpercollins.ca and other corporate sites
– Supported by the IT department, ensure data and images are provided to online retail partners and other third-party sites
– Develop strategies to further increase traffic to all of HarperCollins Canada’s corporate websites
– Strengthen existing relationships with online reviewers/editors, service providers, and other partners, and actively build new partnerships to open fresh opportunities
– Monitor and analyse all website metrics and provide regular reporting to specific departments as well as the company at large
– Review, evaluate and provide recommendations for online campaign activities and reports to understand successes and develop future plans

Relevant Skills

– At least 3-4 years marketing experience
– Demonstrated acumen in developing online initiatives and websites
– Highly self-motivated, with a strong creative bent, and excellent copywriting skills
– Knowledge of HTML (and/or ability to use a web-editing program) as well as web analytic software
– Confidence and adaptability in using new content management tools and database systems
– Good communications skills, and ability to work well in a collaborative environment
– Must be detail-oriented, well-organized and able to set priorities and meet deadlines under pressure

If you are looking for an exciting and challenging opportunity please email a cover letter and resume to dianne.aquilina at harpercollins dot com.

Please be advised that we can only contact those who are selected for an interview.

Deadline for submissions is January 26, 2007.

Congratulations, here’s an example post.

Here’s unbold.

At 3:15 today, James and I had just returned home. The wind was gushing and the trees were being whipped around. I decided to film the wind because it was so intense, howling and twisting the trees about. Just as I finished the first clip I turned around to film up the street and a huge tree on the corner of First Ave. and Maple came crashing down. I just missed catching it on film. One crack, no other sound, and then it was covering the entire intersection. The tree just missed a car parked behind the stop sign, and just missed a woman who was crossing the intersection.

My guess is the tree is 60-70 ft but I’m never very good at these things. The building is a three-story apartment and the trees are taller than the building.

The wind is still howling.

Here’s 5 photos. I’ll post the video soon.

UPDATE: This story is NowPublic (photos and video).

UPDATE 2: Here’s my YouTube video of the wind storm and tree knocked down in Kitsilano (post-fall).

Catherine Winters, aka Catherine Omega, is Social Signal’s newest hire, with the fancy title of Manager of Virtual Worlds. I lover her avatar. And Alex is looking really hot too. My avatar needs serious fashion advice.

Here’s Kate’s post on the event with photos.

And here’s Social Signal’s announcement of their latest business offering, plus a white paper on why businesses should take Second Life seriously.

I’m off to Second Life.

The Montreal Gazette has a story today: “Books by email – a novel idea: DailyLit.com offers titles in snippets. Site offers hundreds of titles in the public domain – whose copyrights have expired”.

What’s the deal?

DailyLit.com lets you browse by author or title. You can view a detail page of your selection that includes the cover image and opening snippet, and DailyLit tells you how many parts the book is divided into (how many email snippets you’ll receive in order to read the whole book).

Clever idea but there are a couple of drawbacks. The books are anywhere from 17 parts to over 400. That’s a lot of emails. It would take you more than a year to read Middlemarch.

The good thing is that the service is free. The Gazette says, “The free service was launched in September and by word of mouth alone it has raked in 15,000 regular subscribers.” Clearly there’s a demand.

The about section of DailyLit describes the site as follows:
Quote: We created DailyLit because we spent hours each day on email but couldnít find the time to read a book. Now the books come to us by email. Problem solved. We will use this blog to write about new features and (hopefully) receive feedback from readers.

There’s no mention of who the “we” is, however, the Gazette quotes a female literary agent “Danziger” several times. No first name.

One of her points that resonated with me is that book publishers may consider doling out copyrighted titles on a paid subscription. Danzinger is “also pushing to have authors offer email snippets of their books as a marketing tool.” Fantastic idea.

Publishers and authors (not all, but many) will be resistant to the idea of giving away the content for free, but I say fear not. Reading a book over the course of a year can’t be that fun. Depending on your email platform, the messages will likely bounce as spam. But what you could get through (spam filters and people’s attention span), could engage readers, could give them a chance to sample new books, and, done right, could generate word of mouth for books.

Someone–Amazon, Indigo, indie collective, Random House’s booklounge.ca, HarperCollins’ First Look program, any publisher–should create a service that allows people to select the genre of books they’re interested in, and each day? week? month? sends them a little excerpt. The key elements would be 1) a company that wants to build stronger relations with their customer base, 2) a “buy the book” option, either direct online sales or with affiliates, that would complete the selling cycle and allow users to access the detail page info, and, most important, 3) an existing customer base of readers who want to discover new books. Opportunity is knocking.

Or DailyLit.com has plans to open up paid subs with publishers. Why not open up a web interface to the DailyLit database and allow publishers to submit snippets of new works. Everything remains free. New books and old books feed each other. Copyright and serialization are not an issue for the new stuff. Brilliant. Is anyone doing this already?