By Edward Nawotka

In today’s feature story about Panarea Digital, Emiliano Abramzon laments that publishers aren’t putting enough effort into improving their online marketing skills. “Without effective marketing,” he says, “our products will be out there in the cloud and nobody will know. I would like to see people talking about how to promote, how to learn about our product’s usage, and how we can use digital to learn about the consumer in new ways and give them an even better experience next time.”

Publishers have never exactly been the sharpest salespeople — after all, they left the vast majority of customer interaction up to the retailers. And even when they have they opportunity to interact with readers in real life, such as at book festivals, many fail miserably.

Online, things are different. Publishers have the opportunity to develop direct links to readers. Many maintain Facebook pages for their authors, tweet, and run blogs — of varying quality. The arms-length anonymity that the web affords — after all, you don’t need messy face-to-face contact any more – as well as the fact that nearly everything online is image and text-based, should pay right into publishers strengths.

So, as of January 2012, how would you rate publishers overall online promotion efforts? Let us know what you think below and please leave your thoughts and examples in the comments.