There’s a great story in the New York Times, The Feminine Mistake - Leslie Bennetts - Mommy Books - New York Times, that has lessons for any company looking to generate sales through buzz in the blogosphere. Upshots:

• Just because people are talking about your product on consumer-generated media (blogs, message boards, comment threads, Amazon reviews, etc.) doesn’t mean that they’re going to buy your product
• Blogging buzz can serve more sophisticated, nuanced public relations goals— generate television appearances, establish yourself as an expert, and so on
• Blogging and other social network platforms have to be considered a core media. Perhaps BookScan should include data on how much ad revenue was generated by advertising sales and other “influence factors” on blog posts and forum entries about particular books.

Snip on the failure of buzz to generate actual book sales:

Recent mommy books that have not lived up to the promise of their publicity include Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children, which sold only 11,000 copies in hardcover and 2,000 in paperback, according to BookScan, despite the book’s appearance on a 60 Minutes, The Oprah Winfrey Show and the covers of Time and New York magazines.

And the alternative goals:

Some authors say that book sales are not the only goal. Ms. Hirshman, who wrote a shortened version of her book for the online site of American Prospect magazine six months before the book’s release, said the book was just a platform for getting her ideas into the ether.

I guess the media world has changed in such a way that a book is just a pretext for television appearances and blogging and writing for The New Republic, Ms. Hirshman said. If the world is divided into people who don’t need my message and women who don’t want to hear it, it’s a miracle I sold any books.