"Digi-novelist" Anthony Zuiker erects "cyber-bridge” to mesh story across publishing, film and social networking.

What is a digi-novel? Digi-novelist Anthony Zuiker, who is also the creator of the hit TV show “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” described it to J.D. Biersdorfer, tech reporter at The New York Times, as “the best of publishing, motion picture and social communities all kind of meshed into one experience.”

Zuiker just published, “Dark Prophecy,” the second in his "Level 26″ crime thriller series, that is being marketed both as a printed novel and an e-book for iPad with Web links to a 52 minute-long film edited into 11 segments. There is free content on Level 26’s YouTube channel as well.

To promote “‘Dark Prophecy” Zuiker wrote a serial killer from the book into his Oct. 14 episode of CSI – the book’s release date. That’s a hefty publicity score considering CSI reaches nearly 15 million TV viewers each week.

Zuiker told Bloomberg’s Ronald Glover that disappointing sales of his first crime novel, “Level 26: Dark Origins,”  prompted his to engage “CSI” fans by creating a cyber-bridge” to link the story across publishing, film and social networking.  He said, “If I can just get 1 percent of the 15 million people who watch ‘CSI’ to buy this book I’ll have a bestseller on my hands.”  

U.S. Department of Education Awards HITN $30 Million for Ready to Learn Initiative using Transmedia Storytelling

The U.S. Department of Education (USDE) has announced that the Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network, Inc. (HITN), in partnership with Callaway Digital Arts and the Michael Cohen Group LLC (MCG), was awarded a $30 million Ready to Learn grant for Project LAMP (Learning Apps Media Partnership). The project is an early childhood media-based education initiative targeting next-generation learners including children from low-income groups.

The content will be largely available as an open educational resource and use a transmedia storytelling approach through books, iPAD/Touch Screen applications, mobile device and phone applications, console and hand held gaming applications, sing along DVDs and CDs, an interactive Website, and television. The USDE, in 2010, expanded the Ready to Learn grant program to include transmedia storytelling.

Hearst Digital debuts awesome ESQUIRE magazine for iPad!

Until now digital adaptations by popular magazines haven’t been all that exciting.  This month’s debut of ESQUIRE for iPad is truly an awesome editorial and technological achievement, however, and it offers a thrilling glimpse at where magazine publishing is headed. 

Developed by Hearst Digital and ScrollMotion, Esquire's iPad app makes each page a rich and dynamic experience. Take the October cover featuring actor Javier Bardem. He strolls right up to your screen and personally welcomes you to the issue as Esquire's masthead and interactive story call-outs fuse into rightful position. 

This video demo shows how the magazine goes very digital while still retaining its hallmark editorial design and quality. For example, photography in the fall style section can be rotated 360 degrees and viewed from various angles. The automotive review opens with a stunning still shot of an Audi roadster that turns cinematic when the driver revs up, roars away and then screeches back to give us a frontal view. Cool!  An article about the World Trade Center’s reconstruction is presented in layers of interactive text, high-resolution images and animation.

Josh Koppel, one of the co-founders of ScrollMotion, whose clients include Hearst, Random House, Houghton Mifflin, Simon and Schuster, and The Jim Henson Company, believes digital publishing should not be about putting a PDF version on an iPad; rather, he says digitization should be an additive process that makes each page a powerful multimedia platform.

No doubt magazines have much to gain by publishing digital editions. Consider that Esquire’s iPad app is sold at full price ($4.99) on a per-issue basis - no discounted subscriptions. (The iPhone edition costs $2.99 per issue.) As long as audiences keep coming back (how could they not given fantastic content?) it makes sense advertisers will be lining up, too. 

New Skype features on Facebook give brand advocates greater voice

Skype's release of Skype 5.0 for Windows includes a new Facebook tab that allows users to SMS or call their Facebook friends (even do a 10-caller video group call) right from their Facebook News Feed. This feature could have interesting applications for brand marketers with active Facebook fan communities. 

For example, we might see Facebook friends rallying around one-day deals promoted editorially by Groupon, which offers super-low prices by facilitating group buying online. Since deals are only activated once a minimum quota of buyers has been met, many Groupon users get their friends on board through social networking. Especially hot deals could warrant the extra nudge of a Skype call or SMS. 

Most of Groupon's daily deals are for local restaurants, events, services and retailers, but there's potential for national brands and chains, too. Case in point, GAP recently ran a national one-day Groupon deal that sold nearly half a million "Groupons" valued at more than $11 million.  GAP's Facebook fan page had a role in this success, no doubt, and now with Skype fan endorsements can be even more dynamic. 

For consumer marketers, dovetailing Facebook (for reach), Skype (for advocacy), and Groupon (for high-value, time-sensitive promotion), may be a winning way to leverage fan communities for brand-building, publicizing new products, encouraging trial, or getting momentum behind sales events. 

Leggo my logo! GAP's flap proves logos are social

Brief makeover, now over. 

GAP’s brief  fling with a new logo is over and everyone (except the design firm, no doubt) is happy again.

So what did we learn?  For one, who knew GAP's fans cared so much?  This became abundantly clear as fans flocked to social media to voice disfavor with the company's new logo design.  What happened with GAP reveals plenty about brands and the new rules of fan engagement!

GAP's decision to nix its new logo raises an interesting question about brand identity: Should customers have any say in something as major as a corporate mark? I believe they do. Logos are social, after all.

Before Twitter and Facebook GAP would  have gone ahead with the logo change, disenfranchising some of its best customers in the process. Thanks to social media the company averted what could have been a costly mistake. GAP listened and truly engaged its customers in the logo issue, and for doing that the brand (and fan base) is all the stronger.

Disney and Propaganda Games tightly aligned on new 'TRON' film/game releases

Continuing my recent post about transmedia projects and the importance of creative alignment, at last week’s New York Comic Com the panel discussing Disney's upcoming release of the video game TRON: Evolution talked about the extraordinarily close integration among the game’s developers at Propaganda Games and filmmakers at Disney. This featurette provides an inside look at their creative collaboration and here is a post on sticthkingdom.com that gives a concise overview of the TRON franchise. 

Disney will release the TRON: Evolution game on December 7, 2010, and on December 17, it will release the 3-D film TRON: Legacy, the first sequel since TRON's film debut in 1982. 

Comic book king STAN LEE sees gold in digital/cross-media narratives

When the first comic book was published in 1934 as a compilation of newspaper comic strips, who could have imagined how white-hot comic book properties would become?   

Stan Lee, the legendary comic book writer and former president and chairman of Marvel Comics, says the digital age is great for the comic book industry. In a recent interview with The Street TV, he said digital devices like iPads provide great platforms that bring static comic book stories to life. Lee added that the spate of superhero-inspired blockbusters coupled with the allure of lucrative multimedia story deals, has made some screenwriters and novelists eager to write comic books. 

So good are the prospects for comic book gold, in fact, that last year Lee, with award-winning producer Gill Champion and intellectual property attorney Arthur Lieberman, Esq., founded POW! Entertainment (Pink Sheets: POWN), an advanced media and entertainment company for creating, producing and licensing original intellectual properties for the global market.  Disney, which last year acquired Marvel Entertainment, Inc., has a ‘first look’ deal with POW! and also holds a 10% stake in the company.

Lee explained his bullishness for comic books in a televised interview on CNBC's Squawk on the Street. He said, “The need for stories is a human need and whether they're comic books or they're on the internet or on the screen, everybody wants to be entertained.” Lee maintains that a quality story - one that's full of action, surprise and suspense - is still paramount. 

During last week's New York Comic Con, Pow! announced several new projects, including: 

“The Seekers” - a digital comic series in development with MTV for its new MTV Geek website that offers comics, horror, sci-fi and gaming news, as well as coverage of comic-book conventions and previews of new comic books, games and movies.

A three-book development deal with the start up comic book and graphic novel company, 1821 Comics.  The first book is said to be a futuristic retelling of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, titled Romeo and Juliet: The War.

Collaboration with Yoshiki , Asia's most influential music artist and founder and drummer of the band X JAPAN, on a music superhero comic book and motion comic series.