Lyle at Crocodile Caucus has two great posts up. (Well, he always has a bunch of great posts up, but these two in particular caught my eye.)
He takes a look at the current state of Shojo Beat and its roster of titles and ponders future directions for the anthology:
“Now, however, I’m wondering which title will get rotated out of the magazine next and how I’ll react. For the moment, it looks likely we’ll see titles rotated in and out of Shojo Beat every three months and a series I’m enjoying will get the boot.”
Suspenseful, no?
Lyle also takes a very constructive look at the possibilities of a social network as a marketing resource:
“Looking at it as a marketing geek, I’m mostly thinking of how one can make the product a social experience, intertwining the product and the bonds of friendship. Considering how manga fandom (which is largely made up of people who buy manga) is so social, that should be easier to accomplish than with other products.”
Lots of interesting thoughts there.
As someone who works in higher education marketing, one of the questions that is currently baffling me (and just about all of my colleagues) is how to effectively harness the power of an on-line social network (blogs, MySpace, what have you) for marketing communication. I don’t know if it’s really possible, as the appeal of the social network is that it’s wide open and driven by users, and that’s often at odds with the messages a college or university wants to send. Imposing those messages on the social network might very likely kill its appeal for users, which would seem to defeat the purpose entirely.
But it will definitely be interesting to see how Tokyopop’s efforts in that area evolve.