Connecting Librarian

Day 1 was great, but Day 2 was just as good.

Social media & Library Marketing

The strength of our libraries is our unique brand – which is the specific communities we each serve.  Mass marketing is no longer the key, it is now niche marketing. Even our top Australian TV shows only reach about 5% of the population.

The public visiting public libraries is a choice, not a requirement – really think about what that means.

Marketing is a requirement for libraries, but can be done in new and amazingly engaging ways through Web 2.0.  Examples included a Day in the life of Allen County – Allen County Public Library, Paint the town Read – PLCMC, Love New Jersey Libraries, Storypalooza – Gail Borden Public Library and many more.  We shouldn’t be worried about the sustainability of such programs, after all the technology is changing so fast. We should be more concerned about community needs – use short bursts to get our communities aware of their library.

Create an engagement calendar. Use regular events and holidays to create activities, using free online tools, such as image generators.

8 Steps to Marketing 2.0:

1. Educate – learn about social media
2. Experience – participate and join in the conversation
3. Envision – develop a 2.0 marketing plan
4. Engage – create social celebrations
5. Enable – help your library brand & content travel
6. Expand – play with multimedia
7. Explore – learn as you go & track success
8. Experiment, experiment, experiment

And to top it all off: “The best way to get your customers to market your brand is to allow them to promote (the library) by marketing themselves!”

2.0 Innovations: Passions to Practices

We need to be looking for reasons to change, not excuses for not changing.

Efficiency evolution – improving on what already exists – libraries are good at this. Evolutionary evolution – creating something new and distinctly better. Revolutionary evolution – radically changes business and culture.  Libraries are great at the first and have a long way to go before they are anywhere near implementing the others.

Four elements of innovation: creativity, strategy, implementation and profitability.  Innovation in libraries usually fails at the strategy – lack of buy-in being one of the unbreachable barriers reached there.

Innovative ideas come from focussing on quantity – not quality, collecting everything, getting out of the comfort zone and adding constraints to your thinking.

However, it can be not so much the ideas you need to focus on, but how to move those ideas through the organisation.

• Sell it – tie it to your mission and vision statements
• Create alliances – build relationships that will give you support
• Don’t ask for permission – either ask for forgiveness where the risk is all yours, or ask for support and share the risk
• Sell your vision personally – if you have to produce a report, follow it up personally – you can’t sell a vision on a piece of paper
• Find a champion – if not a supervisor, find a mentor – even if they are outside your line of authority

Implementation requires time, resources and scope. If there is a problem here, you need to revisit the strategy. The profitability comes with how the idea is enacted within your organisation.

Change is about leadership – shouldering it yourself. Change begins with me, leadership is taking the responsibility for moving things forward.

Well that’s it, apart from all the personal little notes I wrote myself about things to chase up for myself or for my library – and there are many of those!   All Helene’s slides are available from Slideshare and I recommend you check them out – they are well worth it.

Wow, how thrilled was I to be offered a place at this Masterclass being held in Melbourne, with Helene Blowers flying in from the US to share her amazing experiences and expertise. Add to that the added bonus of Kathryn Greenhill coming over from Perth to attend as well and it was a perfect way to spend 2 days of library based learning.

So now that the gushing is out of the way, its down to what I got out of it.  And although I am well up to my neck in all this stuff and have been for a few years, I still got plenty of it, with sincere thanks to Helene, Kathryn and the other wonderful participants in this Masterclass (a few of whom I am now in touch with on Facebook and Twitter – hi!)

Exploring the shift

The shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 has been about the shift from Find – seeking information, to Connect – community.

As this connection becomes more widespread and internet access becomes ubiquitous, libraries will no longer be needed for access – what will we be about then?

The first digital divide was about access, the 2nd digital divide is about:

• the ability to do smart searches
• the ability to validate soft information (eg. Wikipedia)
• the ability to find information via hot channels (eg. Digg, Twitter etc)
• the ability to understand the current culture of informal languages (ie. text messaging)
• the ability to get information to travel to you
• the ability to create and re-mix content
• the knowledge that learning is a continual process rather than an achievement

Interestingly I realised that I could not say with total confidence that I could do all these things, but I also know that the vast majority of my professional colleagues definitely couldn’t, so there’s a big challenge for the future.

Helene showed us the Library Meme map: which I will definitely be looking at more closely in the light of our library website redevelopment.

Library 2.0 Meme Map

Patron 2.0 was discussed as enabling our users to contribute content to the library website – a situation that requires radical trust.  We currently allow commenting on our blogs, after approval of course.  Could we relax that further and how else could we and should we be opening our content to our users.  Can we so easily let go of the reins, especially when we are only just now getting the hang of them?

Moving from 1.0 to 2.0

Personal movement is straightforward.  Moving your organisation is more difficult. How do you do it?

1. Learn to listen – show management what people are saying about the library and the technology eg. Google Alerts – find out what the conversation is and respond to it.Pay attention to user generated content and comments.
2. Learn to spy on yourself – get RSS feeds of content you present.
3. Join the conversation – respond to what’s out there.
4. Manage your online reputation – there is a move from organisational to personal brand, with organisations have a personal front. The shift has to be to building the reputation of the individuals, which then reflects on the organisation.
5. Create a home base – a place from which to build your online reputation. A website, blog, Facebook profile, etc. Build it on your own name, engage your passion, start commenting, link & trackback, join other communities, create connections with yourself (between your online presences), continually engage with others. Its not a one off process, so you need to have a strategy.

Does your library’s mission statement translate into the online environment? If not, what has to change?

On a different tangent, I had to agree with Helene that users see the library’s website, not so much as a distinct virtual branch, but as an extension of their local library.  We experience this in our everyday virtual contact with ours users.  Which places an interesting perspective on getting management support for the library website and how to present it to our users, when each of their perspectives can be very different.

And thus ended day one.  For those who are interested in more, Helene has made her presentations available on Slideshare.  In the meantime, I hope to get my notes on Day 2 up soon, so stay tuned.