ChaptersIndigo’s Book Community: The First Year
Social networks for booklovers have been in the news lately. The reports seem to suggest Amazon is cornering the market on community sites, but not to be forgotten is Indigo Books’ entry in this space. Indigo’s “Community“, as it is so blandly called, launched last September. I wanted to mark the anniversary by gathering my thoughts on the effort so far.
From an outsider’s perspective it seems like book retailers of all kinds realized — all at once — their existing web platforms were stale. That was 18-24 months ago. Since then we have seen reinvention, reinvestment, and more vigour in web-based book retail from all players.
Amazon, of course, is the juggernaut here. Their strategy seems to extend along two different axis. One, they have been growing their offering. The Amazon mp3 store, Unbox, and the video streaming service are the most audacious examples. But they also did a cute bait and switch with book publishers by enticing content owners to surrender book files to power the search inside feature, then to turn around and use those files to kick start the Kindle program and procure a leg up in the POD sector. At first this expansionist strategy was on the down low but it has received increasing industry attention as Amazon’s moves have become bolder.
None the less, other book retailers simply lack the vision and resources to out-maneuver Bezos on this level. Instead, they have answered by tweaking their websites at the customer interface level. Here, Amazon seems less than innovative. Their strategy seems to be primarily algorithm based. They surface content to the visitor through mechanical means. Net-new content is annexed to a smattering of blogs and podcasts. This works OK but other book retailers’ web efforts really take aim at Amazon’s plodding (I would say boring) customer engagement strategy.
Just this year, Borders broke from Amazon and established its own property. They put content from Borders Media front and centre. They also used Flash technology to approximate the in-store browsing experience with their bookshelf. Their media-rich site is likely the best destination for book readers going right now.
Barnes & Noble’s media programming isn’t as rich as Borders but they are basically riffing on the same strategy.
Even a smaller retailer like McNally Robinson upended their website, choosing to background the ecommerce element and showcase blog content instead.
Which brings me back to Indigo Community. The powers that be at Indigo.ca clearly realized they couldn’t compete with Amazon on new features. They didn’t have the engineering know-how to do so. Like competing with Amazon on discount, adding new features would be a race to the bottom. They also realized they didn’t have deep enough pockets to produce unique rich-media content. The publisher-generated content wouldn’t necessarily improve their search rank, as the web doesn’t reward you for having the same content as other sites. They couldn’t go the way of Borders and B&N.
Instead, they hatched a quasi-blue ocean strategy. Indigo looked at what they had that Amazon didn’t and went from there. Sure they had brick & mortar stores, but their website was already tightly integrated with their instore kiosks. That wasn’t going to help them. But the 5000 or so store employees certainly could.
If they could harness the wisdom of their staff, Indigo could provide that human touch that Amazon’s algorithm couldn’t. I think that insight was brilliant.
Once a customer-facing staff portal was envisioned, it was a short beat to make it a full fledged public community. On that level — as a facebook-for-books — it didn’t strike me as all that brilliant. Goodreads, Shelfari, and LibraryThing already existed. And really, why invent a facebook-for-books when you could just use facebook? But in an Amazon context it worked. Hereunto disenfranchised staff would get an outlet and the whole thing would get bookstrapped.
To be a success Indigo’s booklovers’ community needed to capture the imagination of Indigo/Chapters employees, it needed to have a rich enough feature set (to at least compete with the other book communities), and it needed to be open so that authors and publishers could easily service their content (especially those foreign authors who can’t invest a lot of time in a Canadian site).
A year later, how are they doing?
- The banners on the site declare 160,000 members. How many are active is a good question. Earlier in the summer, the same banners declared 140k members. Taken at their word, the site appears to be growing in the neighbourhood of 200-300 new members a day. That is pretty good. For the past couple months, the Community landing page served as the frontdoor to the main site itself. That, likely, spurred adoption (and awareness) amongst customers. The project has no logo and a rather lame name, making branding otherwise a chore.
- Staff uptake also appears to be positive. There is that rule about the active 5% contributing all the content and it appears to be true here. The site administrators seem on top of things. The staff generated content is fresh.
- The feature set isn’t great but it has improved. I think they built the backend CMS themselves. That in-itself is to be applauded but keeping pace with web development is always tough. It is only going to get tougher as time goes on. I already find the thumbnail-sized images to seem dated. Most importantly they need to stay ontop of ways for memebers to connect with each other. That has been hit and miss until now, but improvements have come and as long as they keep coming, they should be fine.
- The author and artists program is a bit of a mess. Ben Mulroney still has no friends. The site has seen authors sign up but they appear to do so primarily when they are on tour, then they lose interest. To survive (and thrive) Indigo needs to leave the walled-garden behind and allow authors to cross-post from other places.
There is also the everpresent spectre of a backlash. In other online communities you eventually encounter a user uprising (see digg or facebook). How the governing company deals with upset users is always a true test of their mettle. Up until now the indigo book community has been free of PR disasters. It will be interesting to see if Indigo can avoid those minefields while they ratchet things up in preparation for the inevitable surge by Amazon — co-ordinated (or not) amongst their communities.
I am looking forward to year two.
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