Books-A-Million is teaming up with CoverCake, a startup venture focused on title discovery and analytics that can track book trends and overall online interest in titles and publishers across multiple social media platforms. CoverCake will be used by BAM in its internal and external systems to enhance its merchandising and shopping experience.
CoverCake is a Silicon Valley based technology startup focused on book publishing. The company has created a technology platform that can track overall and specific responses to titles and publishers made on multiple social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Goodreads and YouTube. The technology’s algorithms can aggregate vast amounts of data, scan it for relevant comments and posts—positive, negative and neutral—and deliver both an aggregate score of total comments in addition to the level of activities on specific social media sites as well as isolating individual posters and comments on all the social media networks.
Jeff Costello, v-p sales at CoverCake, said, “Books-A-Million’s choice of CoverCake validates the quality of our platform and highlights the importance of social media trending analysis in today’s competitive retail market.”
Costello said that using CoverCake, publishers and marketers can track individual titles and get specific data on how many people are posting about a specific title on Twitter, say, on any other social media site. Users can track the online discussion around genres—biography, fiction, travel, romance and so on—the gender of readers for a specific title or specific publishers and authors. CoverCake scans data and provides numerical assessments as well as color-coded graphs of activity across abroad range of social media channels. Using their account dashboard to navigate the site, users can even retrieve the specific posts, comments and reviews from Amazon and other sites.
While the use of social media to promote and track book popularity has grown exponentially, it is often difficult to get a clear fix on how Twitter, Facebook and the rest directly impact the sale of books. Publishers, marketers and publicists, librarians, agents and certainly authors, are all interested in being able to track and analyze the ever-growing number of book activities and book discussions taking place online. The ability of CoverCake to parse though volumes of data and deliver clear numerical data and graphs may offer some answers to this question going forward.
Cy Fenton, sr. v-p of Information Technology at BAM, said, “Our customers are talking about books on their favorite social media sites all the time and it is important that we listen to them. integrating CoverCake’s social media analytics will greatly enhance our customer’s shopping experience.”
