We’ll be discussing metadata and reviews at the November 5th meeting of Bay Area Bloggers Society in Belvedere.
If you don’t quite know what metadata is, this article by Laura Dawson of Bowker, (the guest at Anne Hill’s Google Hangout interview earlier in October), will bring you right up to speed. You might realize, as I did, that metadata is a lot of the stuff we have been using to make our books more discoverable.
That’s what it has always been, only now, with the vast number of points of connection available to describe your products online, metadata is a much bigger animal.
The article: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Metadata”
And it’s more fun. An interesting thought from the article: Metadata is the filter that makes meaning out of the abundance brought forward by the digital universe.
One of the ways your metadata will reach out into the reader’s universe is through the effective use of press releases. Crafting these is yet another big world, which means you will want to use a great press release SEO service to dial in all your verbiage. One effective press release SEO service is Gnosis Media Group.
Amazon’s visibility machine includes those little boxes that say “people who bought this also bought that,” and tags, which function just like keywords, and which can be disputed by the public. You can agree or disagree with existing tags on a book’s Amazon page. You can say “this was helpful” — or not helpful — about any existing review. These activities all produce a form of metadata which is social proof in action.
Now you know a little bit about why we are including reviews in our metadata conversation.
See the video of the Google Hangout with Laura Dawson here on Anne Hill’s YouTube site.
Metadata with Laura Dawson and Bay Area Bloggers Society
I’m currently reading about Maksim Tsvetovat (on Twitter, he’s @maksim2042), O’Reilly author and presenter of the November webcast “3 Reasons Why #Hashtags Matter.”
My (in progress) Author Platform e-course on Twitter for Authors revolves around the use of hashtags. From what I’ve learned listening to Laura Dawson, I’d say hashtags are another piece of the metadata animal. I hope you’ll make the November BABS meeting so I can ask what you think about it.
Suzanna Stinnett
Founder, Bay Area Bloggers Society
Twitter: Brainmaker
First up in the Author Platform E-Courses from Beyond Bestseller: How to Produce a Series for Digital Readers