We just sent the book off to the printers, and we couldn’t be more excited. It’s destined to be the year’s #1 best-seller in the crowded history/Twitter/humor category, hands down.

SO, now that the book is done, we bring you:

10 Little-Known But Totally Inspiring True Facts About
Historical Tweets:The Completely Unabridged and Ridiculously Brief History of the World

1. The book has 144 full-color pages.
2. For all you spatial thinkers, it measures 8-1/8 inches wide by 5-1/2 inches tall.
3. The cover art was created by artist Barry Blitt, whose work is often seen on the cover of The New Yorker.
4. The book features 50 of the best tweets from the Historical Tweets site from 2008 to now.
5. The book contains over 8o brand new, never-before-seen tweets.
6. New tweets from the likes of T-Rex, Socrates, Merlin the Magician, The Vikings, Napoleon, and Gorbachev.
7. The book also features all-new types of Twitter-esque humor like conversation stacks, tag clouds, and hate tweets.
8. Besides @historicaltweet, you can follow our whole team on Twitter: authors @alecmcnayr and @abeard, our humor and fact checker @dbrisco, our editor @ryandoh, and our agent @kate_mckean (she’s popular).
9. Of the new tweets in the book, our personal favorites are Agamemnon (Alan) and Isaac Newton (Alec).
10. The book is on sale for pre-order for as low as $9.45 right now.

We hope you’re as excited for the book as we are. As always, thanks for your support.

- Alan & Alec

For those that don’t follow me on Twitter, I turned in the final materials for my Historical Tweets book yesterday, due in bookstores April 27, 2010.  Our editor is already loving it (whew!), and the Random House juggernaut is starting to take over.

I’ll probably write more about this later, but I wanted to share my immediate thoughts as I finished the book, and now consider myself an author.

• It’s anticlimactic. All that work, and a delayed reward.  Book doesn’t come out for over four months.  For the book business, by the way, that is lightning fast.  There’s probably a lesson in delayed gratification there.
• I’m proud of what we did. There was a few weeks when our draft had a lot of flab, but last week we trimmed our Tweets list from about 170 to 130, and the fat was cut away.  The final product, I feel, is very, very funny.
• I’m thankful for a team. Not only for Alan Beard, a funny writing partner, but for the extended team: Darnell Brisco, who did a lot of research and grunt work for us, for our families, and Katie in particular, who allowed “the book” to be an excuse for not cleaning up the house, not having a “real job,” not showering, saying no to social gatherings, and not going to bed until 2AM. And that doesn’t even include the extended-extended team that includes friends and family who have been endlessly supportive through notes, calls, Twitter, and Facebook.
• I’m humbled by the scale. They’re going to do a first run of 100,000 books for the U.S. and Canada alone.  At a retail price of $14, they’re looking to generate $1.4 million off of a little idea I had a year ago.  That’s crazy to me.  Makes me treasure little ideas more.
• I’m ready for more. We’re already talking about the follow-up.

Any questions about the process I should go into?  Leave me questions in the comments, and I’ll answer.

Thanks for your support!

PS — I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you a link to pre-order the book on Amazon.  Here it is.

How to Create Product Demo Videos that Get Social Media Attention: 6 Strategies to Increase Sales
via Marketing Sherpa

“Aaron Miller, President, ProGuitarShop.com, sees online video as the perfect medium for selling the retailer’s boutique electric guitar effects pedals.

In late 2007, ProGuitarShop.com was primarily an eBay retailer struggling to build traffic to their website. Miller’s team created a new strategy that avoided focusing on search engines. Instead, they built traffic through social networks, mostly by video marketing through YouTube.

Two years and more than 550 videos later, the team captures about 45,000 unique video views daily on YouTube and between 15,000 and 20,000 on their website — all from a niche audience. Sales have doubled each year since the effort began.”

Stella Artois Ditches Old-Time Campaigns, Creates Retro “TV” Station
via Fast Company

“How long is it until companies begin sponsoring full-on TV shows of their own and publishing them on the Web? That doesn’t sound too much different from television entertainment in the 1950s and the rise of soap operas. And now, the economics make tremendous sense: Why bother creating TV ads if you can get a few million views with no distribution costs while simultaneously creating and having final cut control over far more ambitious content?”

How long indeed?  It’s happening already.  One by one, brands are realizing the power of creating a constant flow of interesting, inexpensive media — forgoing the overhead-rich worlds of TV and traditional advertising.

The Fast Company asks how long it will be until a brand asks the creators of a show like Gossip Girl to create extended storylines with brands in center stage.  Not too long, I feel. But the question for aspiring and independent creators is — if I don’t work for a network and I don’t make a TV show, what career path can I take to get better cred with brands?

It’s something I’m wrestling with myself.

The answer is that you have to have proof of your work.  And, following the logic trail, you have to have work to get results!

If you’ve followed my career — and I know all six of you reading this have — you’ll see Pepperdine University (recognizable brand), Mann Theatres (regionally known brand), my own project Flipper Nation (350,000 views + awards), deals with ABC (again, a brand), Historical Tweets (4.7 million page views this year), and only now do I have an opportunity to step in front of brands.

The shackles are off.  Make something.  Put it online.  Do it again.  Brands don’t want a one-time hit, they want someone who can deliver results.  So don’t be the one-timer.  Keep working, keep crafting.  Keep getting better.  In time, the results will come.  And so will the brands.

1. How did you come up with this idea? Did it just develop out of your studies in history and interest in social media, or is there more to it?

We came up with the idea after seeing Mad Men characters Twittering in mid-2008. People were signing up as the characters from the AMC show, and the juxtaposition of fake 1960s characters using 21st century technology was interesting. Thinking as a marketer and comedy writer, I called my friend (and former boss) about the idea of Twittering as all the previous U.S. presidents — and having them comment on the then-current presidential election. Luckily for us, that idea sounded like too much work (plus, how many times can Taft be funny?), so we settled on single tweets from lots of historical figures.

2. I started a street-fashion blog a few months ago called Work It, Berk. Although I’m starting to get a bit more traffic, I’m interested in knowing how your site was able to jump to 4.5 million page views in a year. What methods did you use? Word of mouth, other sites, Twitter, Facebook?

We launched the site in October 2008 with 50 tweets in queue, and we probably made 100 more blog posts total during the next 8 months. Around June/July 2009, we were featured on Time.com and CNN.com — and even Ashton Kutcher tweeted about us — and we got 2.5 million page views over a weekend. Crazy.

Honestly, we didn’t do any extensive marketing, nor do we continue to do so. It’s kind of a lesson plan on what not to do. Our Twitter account is not very active. We don’t have a Facebook fan page worth looking at. We don’t really reach out to other bloggers.  As the book looms closer, we’ll probably do more of that; talking to history and education bloggers.

The thing that we do successfully, though, is that we keep the content coming. The sheer amount matters. 10 tweets would never have taken off. We needed a critical mass of at least 100 posts to really get noticed. I don’t know why that’s a rule, but I think it is. Totally unscientific, and with no real numeric basis.  When it comes to online content, it pays to be prolific.

The other positive thing is that we let others participate. From day 1, we put the Photoshop template on the site. The complexity of Photoshop keeps most fans from contributing, but it’s been a nice way to reward our true fans who want to do the extra work.

In the end, however, we just struck gold.  Our idea was right and the timing was right.  I’ve jotted down and created tons of sites in the past few years.  None of them have hit like this.  It was just my time.

And I’m not going to lie; every time I see someone tweet “I’m kicking myself for not thinking of this sooner,” the little malicious boy inside me grins and does a backflip.

3. What did you do before this site?

I’m a self-taught web designer with 10 years experience building web sites, leading marketing strategy. I also have a lot of experience acting and doing improv comedy — which has led me to write a lot of comedy TV scripts. Somehow, all those skills have contributed to this site happening the way it has…. but I never saw it coming.

4. Is this site for mere entertainment or do you do “corporate social media” for your day job?

The site, originally, was for entertainment. But now that we’ve gotten some traction and a book deal, we see it as a way to promote ourselves as creative thinkers and creators — people that can make something memorable and viral out of something as “boring” as history. We’re hoping the site can continue to entertain fans, but also bring corporate marketing clients our way. It’s already working… we’re close to working with a couple of big, international clients to do social media for them.  We’re really excited.

Thanks for your email, Brittany.  Best of luck to you as you push forward (keep pushing, btw… it will come…. you just don’t know what “it” will be).

The simple concept was to capture the twitter messages of historical figures, and in doing so, create a funny and compelling new type of content.

Together with Alan Beard of Wave Strategies, we wanted to combine a hot new technology (Twitter) with the boring old history books to showcase how content can create a new conversation (and hopefully generate some laughs along the way).

The simple concept was to capture the twitter messages of historical figures, and in doing so, create a funny and compelling new type of content.

Together with Alan Beard of Wave Strategies, we wanted to combine a hot new technology (Twitter) with the boring old history books to showcase how content can create a new conversation (and hopefully generate some laughs along the way).

Some messages are benign, some are lame puns, some push the envelope, and some will likely offend. But the goal was to create something of interest out of something common — history and pop culture.

The Early results: in three weeks, after 20 posts, with nothing more than a Twitter account, and submissions to both Digg and StumbleUpon, the site has generated 2400 unique visitors and 12,000 page views. Not bad for little to no marketing work.

As the site grows in interest, we will enact a more active marketing campaign, but, so far, this content experiment has yielded great results.

Do you have “common content?” Every organization has its own, boring content — history, milestones, stories, and more. How can you use this content to your advantage in an engaging way?

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