Why I like what this bookstore is doing

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One of the videos in Fully Booked's What's My Story? campaign. I gush about John Williams' Stoner.:)

In the country I live in, there are two major bookstore chains. One has been around for more than 50 years, devotes a large part of its business to selling school and office supplies, and definitely has wider penetration. The other is less than 20 years old, has a more diverse selection of titles, but caters to clientele with larger disposable incomes.

I'd say both do their part in pushing a reading culture in my country. Whereas one has ventured into publishing popular local titles and selling a lot of other titles for cheap, the other provides its customers titles not usually found in the other store and actively engages its reading community.

Now, I'm very big on engaging the reading community. As a reader, I like to watch what companies in the book industry do to engage their readers. As a heavy user of social media, I also like to watch these companies' social media accounts and see whether the "voice" they have and the content they put up are attractive to me and other readers.

Personally, I'd have to give it to Fully Booked for engaging their community. No, not because I'm in the videos posted here, but because they actually used their customers and reading community in their campaign.

A few years ago, I remember some book blogger friends lamenting the fact that bookstores often used celebrities (actors, models, etc.) to promote their wares. Their beef was not that celebrities don't read (though I'm betting only a few of them do), but that book bloggers couldn't really relate to these celebrities. And though I can understand the use of a popular face to sell one's product, I also wished that bookstores saw the growing community of Filipino readers. We got our recommendations from friends, trusted bloggers, and book websites we frequented. We did not get them from celebrities.

The What's your Story? billboard in front of the Fully Booked main branch.
The itty-bitty picture of me, with some of the other readers interviewed.

Here's an experiment: tell me who got you interested in reading. Chances are, very few to nil of you will say, "Oh, I saw holding/reading/talking about a book, and from then on, I fell in love with reading."

(Related thought: You know, though I'm not likely to take a book recommendation from a celebrity, I would definitely take it from a character, e.g. Lisa Simpson, Rory Gilmore, folks at Mad Men, etc.)

Anyway, apparently Fully Booked, in a series of focus group discussions, did ask their customers where they got their recommendations from. And the answer was from other readers. And so, this year, they launched a campaign with a host of regular customers who just talk about their favorite books, favorite characters, their reading journey, etc. And they're inviting other customers to share their favorite books and their own reading stories, too.

Finally, someone who got it.

The campaign is called What's Your Story? I got invited to be one of the customers to share the our reading stories in the videos. I think there are about ten videos so far, which you can check out on Youtube. There are also a few videos of people sharing their bookshelves. And whenever they release one of these videos, they use their Facebook and Twitter accounts to ask their other customers to share their own favorite books, characters, etc. Here are a couple more of the videos where I make the cut.:)




Whoever's in charge of their Facebook and Twitter accounts, by the way, gets a hat tip from me. Quick responses, chipper and friendly tone, and always a response. They ask these interesting questions on Twitter that get a lot of retweets and replies. And I will honestly say that, among all the companies that have something to do with books (i.e., publishers and bookstores), I think they're doing the best job with customer engagement on social media.

Now, I have no idea how successful this campaign is going to be. But for the sheer bravery of deciding to focus on their readers, instead of their merchandise or their company, I'm hoping that Fully Booked does really well with it.

To the Fully Booked Marketing team: thanks so much for including me, for always responding to your customers on Twitter, and, in general, for deciding to ask your readers what they want. In the end, I guess we readers just want the same thing--to be acknowledged and to find others like us.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Great post, Honey. Yes to featuring actual readers instead of celebrities (just because they're popular)! I get the recommendations for ALL the books that I read from friends and trusted book bloggers. I really, really miss Fully Booked. It's such a pain that books are a lot more expensive here in Singapore than in Manila. I always end up buying books whenever I go home, or I grab books from the TBR pile that I left there.
March 23, 2013 at 6:45 PM
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