Wed 18 April 2012 at 9.30 am

Twitter to woo? The benefits of social media

Taking Place: London Book Fair, Earls Court - Wellington Room

Following on from the popularity of last year’s LBF seminar, ‘Tweet smell of success?’, the panel will again address the key questions around the use of social media in publishing. We know that authors and publishers need to have a strong presence through blogs, Twitter and Facebook. What is the marketing strategy behind this engagement and what kind of results can be expected? Come and hear three experts explain the range of benefits from using social media, from building communities to spreading word of mouth about new authors and projects.

This seminar will be chaired by Angus Phillips, Director of the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies at Oxford Brookes University. He is the author of Inside Book Publishing (with Giles Clark), the editor of The Future of the Book in the Digital Age (with Bill Cope), and the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Logos. He is working on a new book for Routledge about the evolution of the book in the light of digital and other developments.

Tom Hall is Digital Editorial Director at Lonely Planet, overseeing the multiple award-winning website of the iconic travel brand. He is responsible for editorial direction of both the site and social media spaces including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google+. He is also a contributor to the Lonely Planet magazine, the writer of the Ask Tom feature in the Guardian and the travel expert on Five Live's Saturday Edition.

Julia Lampam is Associate Director, Corporate Communications for Wiley's EMEA region.  Her responsibilities include chairing the Global Social Media Group which provides best practice guidelines and enables colleagues to share experience as they employ these channels of engagement to promote products and brands.  Previously she managed Wiley's publicity activities, including the UK launches of the For Dummies and Frommer's publishing brands, as well as instigating a proactive PR strategy for academic journals.  While in this role she launched the online newsroom and integrated social media tools into PR campaigns.  In addition, Julia handles Wiley's presence at the London and Frankfurt Book Fairs. 

Joe Pickering is a Publicity Manager for Penguin, working across fiction and non-fiction on the imprints Hamish Hamilton, Viking, Fig Tree and Penguin Ireland. He handles publicity for authors such as Zadie Smith, Joshua Ferris, Nick Hornby, Robert Macfarlane, Mohsin Hamid, Catherine O'Flynn, John Banville, Ross Raisin, Eli Pariser and Michael Wood. He began working part-time for Waterstone's as a student in 2000, first in Brighton, then London, before starting in the publicity department at Simon & Schuster UK in 2005. He moved to Penguin in 2008. In 2010 he won the Publishers Publicity Circle Award for Paperback Original Fiction Campaign for his work on David Vann's Legend of a Suicide, and went on to win the Bookseller Industry Award for Publicity Campaign of the Year.