Trove – free online search tool that brings together bibliographic records from libraries and archives. Best known for OCR, human corrected digitised newspapers.

Trove already has an interactive base – including lists, tagging, comments and more. Social media channel attached to it 18 months ago.

NLA has a Facebook page, Twitter channel and YouTube channel. NLA posts all of the content – using the corporate brand as the online identity. Use your brand to attract attention and followers – fits with a business model.

Difficulty in serving all our users in any depth, due to their diversity. Its both good and interesting, but can make it difficult for us to deliver content online which is appropriate for a large proportion of our users.

Social media is a free puppy – there is a cost – in generating content, monitoring and responding to users, archiving content, exploring new tools. NLA is investigating tools such as HootSuite to monitor their online social engagement.

More specialist channels, like British Library’s Magnificent Maps blog, Reel Culture, Dinosaur Tracking, From the Catbird Seat, Children’s Literature @ NYPL. Advantage of these is that you can focus in and users are more likely to tune in and engage with their content.

Unfortunately, we are not able to engage with all of our users, regardless of what we do. Our users and their interests are just too varied.

Results of their 12 month trial with social media. Had no resources to invest in social media, so there was no publicity or marketing of these presences. The first thing they did right was setting their aims for Trove’s social media:

To increase use of Trove

To increase the visiblility of Trove

To provide customer service to Trove

To solicit feedback about Trove, in order to improve the service

Getting it wrong was not thinking about which social media channels they should use. They thought they could re-purpose the content for use across different channels. They couldn’t do it easily.

Facebook didn’t work for them – there were some technical issues, but they weren’t able to resources many different feeds. Need to acknowledge that it is a far more interactive presence and requires more work than a broadcast medium like Twitter. So they moved away from Facebook quite quickly.

Twitter worked perfectly for them. Their aim of constantly exposing their content. Were able to use quirky humour. Thought it would be used differently than it was. Rather than linking to blog posts which contained multiple Trove links, they instead linked directly to digitised snippets. Side benefit was a huge growth in media interest in the content shared and in Trove itself.

Under-estimated how quickly and easy it was to communicate to and with their user base. When you treat your user with that sort of respect, you get a return of good will.

When you user has a win using your service, you are more likely to receive a complimentary tweet, than you are to get an email etc.

Twitter presence is not just about getting Twitter followers, but to get people to come into Trove itself.

There is a cost to not operating in this space. If we are not there, we are missing what people are saying about us and missing a chance to get your message out.

Tim Sherratt – Mining the treasures of Trove: new tools and technologies

1913 – the year that Canberra was officially founded. It was also the year before World War 1 began. Showed a word cloud based on articles from Trove which included the phrase “the future”. It included 11,000 articles. To make this job easy, Tim created a Python script which harvests the data in a form which you specify. Instead of 35,000 clicks, it was a handful.

Once the text files were returned, they were cleaned up. He was able to identify consistent OCR errors and bulk correct them. Once done, we combined them into one file and then put the file into Voyant (a text exploration tool). More refining to remove stop words, so that the more significant terms could come to the fore.

There are a number of tools besides Voyant, that enable you to explore text in interesting ways. Mallet will look at large amounts of text and identify themes (clusters). You have to do some work and decide what the clusters relate to. Natural Language Processing Toolkit (python resource) – enabled him to extract the next six words after a given phrase.

None of these are analyses on their own, they are starting points for future research. They are ways of peeking inside the dataset and helping to decide what approach to use. However, it can be rather slow.

How to speed up the process?

Used QueryHarvester which examined how many articles mentioned your search terms, as compared to the total articles for a year. He then used QueryPic to graph and create a html page which you can then add text to. It encourages exploration in a way that the Harvester alone does not. If you then click on the point on the graph, it then retrieves the first twenty articles from Trove. It gives another interface into the depths of Trove.

This channel is starting to be used by other people, including the Airminded blog. You can too – they are all available and free from Wraggelabs Emporium. Check his blog for more on what he is doing and how.

Why is he doing this? The nature of historical research is changing. In the past, we had scarce resources, but with digitisation, our trickle is becoming more like a flood. “nearly every day we are confronted with a new digital historical resources of almost unimaginable size” Dan Cohen (2008). Its even more true now.

Other tools are out there: Mapping Texts.

Researchers need “a methodology for the infinite archive” Bill Turkel (2006). Now that the historical resources are growing, we will be able to do so much more with the data we can harvest. We can start exploring in ways like never before.

Interfaces are just points of contact between us and the data. Interface development will happen everywhere and they will continue to be developed and alternatives created.

Check out the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities.

There are challenges around this material. One is the de-humanisation of data – the danger that we might forget what its about. We need to keep perspective, understand the human story behind the data.

Phillip Minchin – Stacks of fun: games, community, libraries, technology

Asked questions and used A4 coloured paper to get audience feedback. Consensus was that although most didn’t play games a lot, most considered them very important.

Books are very important and have a place in our lives, but are no longer enough.

Collections: lending is suitable for RPG book and for ones that don’t require registration. Also online subscription games. In-house is suitable for board and card games – is changing with advent of 3D printing and generic self-printing game pieces. Curation is suitable for rules-only games, free electronic games and PDF rule-sets. Subscription suitable (but not available) for: some online games, some ebook-based games. Unsuited to libraries, except as a venue: Collectable Card Games.

Gaming is much more common than most people realise. Part of the appeal of gambling is the gaming. There are a surprising number of games clubs around and they get big numbers. Conventions are big and friendly. Melbourne has a club called Cafe Games – something that libraries could be tapping into.

Gaming is a great way to build community. His library is looking at using games to connect two disparate local communities – older affluent and poorer migrants. Games are a good way because they are non-threatening and fun.

Games in the library: for managing teens/rowdies, chess/scrabble clubs, informal/self-organised play, games club (like book clubs), gamers are our people – geeks and libraries are a natural fit – most are heavy library users already, games and community also a natural fit – Herodotus story – read it in full paper.

Benefits – welcoming space, increased inter-patron interaction, more visitors and longer stays.

Drawbacks – increased potential for patron disputes, more stuff to keep track of, noise level management.

Shared spaces – noise has to be OK and games have to be amenable to audiences or new participants. Dedicated spaces – soundproofed, but preferably visible, but need to manage curiousity.

Games days – for specific well-known games, trying new games, BYO games, open games. Tournaments – if the game is sold commercially, the makers may well support you. Self-organising events – BYO games or open gaming events might well spawn these.

 International Gaming Day @ Your Library – First Saturday of November – 3^rd. http://ngd.ala.org/

Part of my birthday being a good day was as a result of all the birthday greetings I got, both through Twitter and Facebook. Now Facebook is easier, because it has the birthday calendar, but on Twitter you have to know its the persons birthday.  Well once the news got out, I got multiple greetings from both sources and yes it did make me feel good.

But initially, I got online early and there was nothing waiting for me. No Facebook greetings etc. And that’s what got me thinking about social esteem and social networking. How would I feel if I went through the day and got no greetings from any of my friends on either Facebook or Twitter? What about if I only got them on one and not the other?  What if it was on Twitter, but not on Facebook – where there is the birthday calendar? What would that do to my confidence?

It wouldn’t be the end of the world if it did happen to me, as I have a pretty healthy self-esteem, but having said that, receiving those greetings did help boost my day that little bit extra, so I could imagine that not getting them would put a dint in the confidence.

Taking that a step further, its not just about birthday greetings. You like to know and be acknowledged, by a like or a comment, even in the everyday things you put up on social networking sites. It just lets you know that what you have said has been taken in and caused a response in another person. I guess doing so is kind of like reaching out and touching someone in the physical world.

It makes it easier to understand then, how awful it can be for people, when they are attacked through these sites, or ignored, or bullied, or any other number of depressing things that humans are capable of, even online. I have friends who have given up on Facebook for just that reason. As we all know, people can be terrible, even online and even if they’re not anonymous.

The good news is that those situations are uncommon.

I can’t necessarily stop those awful things from happening, but I can at least imagine how the person at the other end of the internet connection will feel and try to acknowledge and respond, to let them know that someone hears and someone cares enough to take that moment to do something, even if it just to like.

Blog Workshop – Chris Garrett
Handed out a mind map to give some tips on how your blog could be improved. He then offered to critique some of the attendees blogs. The following is the feedback he gave.

goodlife zen.com – good start having a dot.com address. Fresh look, nice clean layout. Eyes are drawn to the photo – personalises it and connects with people. Layout is good to the content – content must be first. Subscribe options should be at the top and be as simple as possible – top right is usually best – above the fold. Make it work at 800 by 600 but make it look good at 1024 and above.
Subscribe could conjure payment ideals – try to work free/join into it. Tell them how and why to subscribe to your blog at the end of EVERY SINGLE POST. Chris added his email signup up box into his theme, so it appears automatically at the bottom of each post. Add related posts links to get people interested in more content.  RSS footer – type plugins available for Word Press (and others?), usually used for copyright but can put your email form in. Good also to put into the content, but gets tired if you do it all the time. Do it before the comments – regular readers will just scroll past it.

Have a call to action for your comments – edit your theme so it says, leave a comment now, no. of comments – add yours now. DISQUS – helps to organise comments into threads, can help make your comments viral – they then can be posted to social networking sites. Reply to  comments – not just the key ones – its a relationship builder. Have a public comment policy – gives you basis on which to edit or delete comments – my house, my rules.

blog.iqmatrix.com – having a blog separate to your main domain could be good if you are security conscious, but if you link to the main site, then www.domain.com/blog would be better as this is where both search engines and users would expect it to be. Need to be aware of floating footers – may link to ads or original coder – be wary. Floating bubbles can be annoying – but will work better if you use a short delay before it comes up. Can get popups when you scroll over heading, such as comments. Image was great but needed some context – never overestimate the intelligence of your readers. Be careful of how you use the term blog – Latest Blog Articles may be better as Latest Articles.

Open Panel with Darren, Chris, Yaro, Collis and Pip.
Darren has a subscribe page – RSS, email to RSS and newsletter(s) with a short explanation of each.

Introduced a forum when they had 1000 daily visitors. (Darren)
There are personality based niche blogs and then niche information blogs. (Yaro)

Multiple blogs – have an editor for each one – they keep track of direction and management etc, under broader guidelines. (Collis)

Personality, authenticity, sincerity can drive a non-profit blog – you can’t buy that. (Pip)

Persuasive selling techniques not incorporated deliberately into sales pages – more passive than subjective, more natural as it comes from him personally as he learns from other examples. You can utilise both, as long as you are not compromising your personal standards and still meets the demands of your brand. (Yaro)

So that’s the day’s labours but not the day’s results. I will be looking at incorporating many of the things I learnt here in any or all the blogs I am involved in, including this one, so stay tuned!

Building Community on your blog – Darren Rowse

Building community is about good relationships, using skills which can be transferred from the real world.

Why build community on your blog? Blogs can be about providing information, but they can take on a life of their own and communities do form.  Community makes your site:

• more useful (comments add to the content and these can be used create their own content based on this, but located elsewhere);
• social proof makes it easier to promote your blog (comments, members, subscribers etc);
• increased page views (in community areas rather than blog areas); makes it more valuable to sell;
• more attractive to advertisers;
• your community becomes an advocate (for you);
• user generated content.

How to build community:

• be the community you want to have – readers will take your lead;
• invite interaction – they respond to invitations and questions – run polls, surveys etc – if no comments, answer yourself or get someone you know to answer;
• start with your comments section, build an off-blog community elsewhere (eg. Flickr, Facebook etc);
• add a community area (forum);
• use social media to reinforce and build community, write in a personal and engaging tone;
• use personal mediums (photos/video), use ‘you’ and we – write to people – direct language – we = our site;
• reader centred posts – start with the reader;
• offer additional ways to join or become a member;
• social proof – highlight interaction/community/numbers to your community;
• identify natural leaders – give jobs, train them, pay them;
• give people space to play (off topic interactions);
• teach the wisdom of the crowd to your community;
• invite reader generated content;
• set homework/projects – send them away to do something on their own and then report back;
• give readers a chance to show off;
• involve readers in decisions and change – can work for you or against you (survey, features they want etc);
• be accessible.

Dealing with trolls: think about policies and standards before you need them; model good community; reward good behaviour; outline roles of moderators carefully and talk about policies, values and procedures; marginalise trolls; allow community to help you police; be firm, polite and calm with trouble makers.

How to get more comments: use your own comments section, followup commenters, ask questions, be open ended, invite questions, discussion posts, controversy/debate, highlight hot conversations make space for self promotion, ask for advice/opinions/examples/stories. (use a more button to take them to full post and comments, rather than hoping they will go to comments)

Interview with Pip from Meet me at Mike’s (craft/lifestyle blog)

Blogs are a healthy tool to help you document your interests or just your life. It’s OK to write about the human aspect, your good stuff as well as when you muck it up. Run projects through the blog, which are to benefit your community or the wider community. Retain your core values throughout. Interact on lots of different platforms – so that you can reach people and make it easier for people to reach you – don’t talk about just your own stuff, also talk about what they are interested in. Its about them as well as about you.

What she would have done differently? Label your posts properly, categorise them clearly so they readers can find them; use comment moderation or comments systems like DISQUS to protect yourself from nasty comments.

Blog monetization – Yaro Starak
It is not just about making money directly from your blog, but also because of it. 20% effort can achieve 80% results.  Yaro told us how he turned his blog  – Entrepreneurs Journey, into bucks.

Aim to get a lot of results from the least effort – 80/20 rule in general, but to begin with, blogs take a lot of effort to establish.

Ways to make money directly from blogs: advertising income, affiliate income and selling products.

Yaro sold his own advertising, as AdSense didn’t work for him. He charged a monthly rate, used a Paypal account and had different options for advertising. Uses OpenX to manage his banners and they are rotated through. Its all automated.

Affiliate income – wrote a review on a book about Google AdWords. Didn’t work initially, but then managed a sale and now earns a large part of his income through reviews. His most important move was to add an email newsletter to his blog – this made the biggest difference to his income stream. Combine email with blog posts to make the most money.

Blog Mastermind – his first online course product.  Wrote a paper on the topic, which he gave away as a free sample as a lead in to the product and has increased his readership dramatically.

All this helps you to create solid, multiple income streams and establishes you as an authority in blogging and money making. Get a product out as soon as you can.

Did some private coaching recently, only because it gave him an opportunity to investigate his market and to get some case studies. It breaks his 80/20 rule, but it gave him insight he couldn’t otherwise get. He enjoys it, but it is not the best way to leverage his time.

Panel: Yaro, Darren and Chris (Chrisg.com)
Yaro gave a rough estimate of $1 income per unique individual page view per day. Can also vary your prices according to demand. Darren said that he has negotiated with advertisers, based on what they were wanting to spend. Can also be involved in a banner networks and start with getting what the market will pay, then when you have proven performance, you can negotiate a higher price.

90% of geeks will use AdBlock, but they aren’t a big issue outside the geeks.

Email subscriptions going down? Need to have your subscribers waiting in anticipation of what’s in the email, so that they will be waiting for it. Use a commercial product for newsletter creation and subscription means. Options are AWeber, Mail Chimp, Constant Contact and others. Can get content from RSS feed or encode the content yourself.

Affiliate products – different for every industry. Yaro focuses on the ones he needs to use in this day and time.  He uses it and then does his review and recommendations – need to have some negatives otherwise people don’t quite believe it.  Use Clip Bank to get help on finding programs.  If there is not an affiliate program, you can approach the producers to establish one or something similar. Amazon runs an affiliate program and there are many more out there. Do a search on cost per action or lead generation. Be honest about making money – people will appreciate that. Legally required in US, but not in Oz yet – should disclose, because you want to honour the trust that has been place in you by your readers. Reciprocity works here too.

AIDA – attraction, interest, desire, action. Provide proof, answer objections. Think about where your traffic is coming from and then target an offer towards them (specificity). Not just about conversion rates, you need to see the action all the way through. What is the refund rate etc.

Collis Ta-eed – Case Study

Blogging industry been around 6 or 7 years, but there are still a lot of opportunities. How do you identify them? Wrote a post about freelancing, which gave him more hits than the rest of his blog posts combined. Started http://freelanceswitch.com/ – within 2 weeks he had 3000 readers – 10 times what he had on his previous blog. Had written a series of tutorials on PhotoShop which he published on a blog, which also took off and has now spun off into a new series of blogs which also provide tutorials on different topics. Another blog came out of a post which ended up on top of the Google search results for Mac Apps.

Not all opportunities are the same. Not everything they did worked. Freelance Switch worked but Work which aimed at office workers is just trudging alone. PSD/Net great success but Audio has been growing Ok and not the runaway success that its inspiration was. Mac Apps spawned Web Apps which hasn’t really moved, iyet Phone Apps which came later has worked much better in a shorter time.

Some blogs rush straight off the ground. Others are a hard slog, traffic, revenue, audience etc. No difference in the inputs, so need to figure out how to get it right.

Techniques to get it right:

• Variations on popular – imitate but with a twist, can be successful if you get in early-ish, are good and have a sufficiently different angle;
• Using empirical results – search rankings, popularity of posts (not just on your own blog), Adsense testing, any method where you gauge the popularity of a niche in an analytical way;
• problems & passion – doing what you love Or solving your own problem, assumes that there are others out there like you (and there probably are);
• using trends – pick where the market is going and bet on it, great example – Twitip! Great for technology but applicable for other areas too.

Is it really an opportunity? Not always. To find out, try some competitive analysis, empirical analysis, test the waters.

Capitalising on opportunities: Move quickly – web moves first and it takes time to gain momentum so you need to start sooner rather than later. Don’t be afraid to change – you have to give something a good solid go and back yourself but if its  not working then sometimes you have to pull the plug and concentrate on a different opportunity.

Opportunity is only the beginning: you still need to execute well, you need to create good content, you need to be consistent, you have to be better than your competitors.

So that’s it until about mid afternoon on Monday. I will post the last of my notes in a third blog post tomorrow.

Although parts of the day were focused on the money making side of blogging and I was surrounded by business focused bloggers, I still got a lot out of it, even from those monetizing sections. I ended up taking 7 pages of notes, so instead of inflicting them all on you in one go, I will break them up into parts.

Creating Killer Content – Chris Garrett

Worked on Problogger book with Darren Rowse. In from UK. What brings them together is content.

Its one of the pillars of blogging, but it is also the key pillar. If you don’t have content, you don’t have anything to blog with.

It’s not about making cash, it’s about long term value – to have this you have to have killer content.

First: common sense is seldom, common practice. Are you doing this? Are your peers? Could you do better at this? Keep your edge or catch up by doing this.

What is killer content?  Leads to attraction, retention, conversion and referral. Many stop at the attention grabbing. Attention is only the first step and its a cycle. Blog can plateau. Need to keep existing people happy, whilst also getting new people in.

You are only as good as your last article. Even if you have consistently done great content. If you have killer content it becomes viral. Word of mouth is the best advertisement you can get.

Why create it? It puts your blog on the map – a must-have resource. Must be something that they subscribe to. You establish yourself as the go to person in your niche.

Do you know your prospect? Do you know your niche? Do you know your positioning?  Have to stand out and for a good reason. What are you giving to people that nobody else does. You have to be different, but with value.

Success factors: be remarkable (people talk about it), more useful, in more depth, better researched, attractively presented, magnetic headlines, easy to grasp, friendly URL, WIIFM (whats in it for me – for your reader), minimum hype, prominent placement – being where people are going to be and no barriers – don’t make them jump through hoops, just give them the content and explain how they can share it (ie. Creative Commons badges etc). Never say you’re an expert, let others say that for you – if you say it, all the barriers go up.

Compelling content types: your biggest tips, big vision, guides/how to/tutorials, FAQs, Story with a message, research and results, jargon buster, product database, case studies, resource round-up.

Generating Ideas: Yahoo Answers etc – find out what questions people are asking and answer them. Once you get some followers, people will ask questions. Get their permission to answer the question on your blog.

Blog this! Write about what you know or your journey about learning what you want to know. But it also has to intersect with what people want to know (rather than what they need). If it doesn’t, you won’t find an audience. Add proof that you know people want to know it. Back up that you know what you are talking about with your proof – statistics and social verification.

Emotional motivators – towards or away from people – towards is goal oriented, away is worry etc – need to know your audience and blog accordingly. Past, present, future; they live on these clocks – understand where they are coming from.  What if, how to…..; information…. action – people need results from your information.

Headlines – need to get people to read your information. Need to look at the reason they are looking – risk or reward. Need to have keywords that people are seeking.
10 proven formulas for blog posts:

• DO you make these mistakes?
• The secrets of ………..?
• What …….. can teach us about ……….?
• Everything you know about is ………. wrong.
• How ………… made ……….. and you can too.
• If you …………. you can …………..
• Finally, no more ………….
• At last! …………….
• Learn how millions of…..
• How to get more/better/cheaper………….

Borrow Authority – if you don’t know the information yourself, ask an authority and get permission to re-use the content. It gives you more authority because you know people who are recognised authorities.

Jedi Mind tricks (marketing) – audience, relationships, authority, proof, story, conversation, reciprocity, polarity, commitment, consistency.

Multimedia is very persuasive and easy to get out – can make it easy to go viral. It makes you stand out (most bloggers go with text) and is easy to share.

Re-purpose your content – bundle it into a container, make videos around it, take the audio and make it into a podcast, create an e-book from the multimedia you create. Leverage it to get more traction from it. You can even outsource the re-purposing.

Case Study – Chrisg.com – 41 blog success tips —– includes benefit and proof. Has an image that catches the eye. Problogger – becoming a problogger – rags to riches story – underlying message is that you can too.  Copyblogger – on dying, mothers and fighting for your ideas – story with a message.

Mistakes in creating content: – writing purely for search – filler content (just to fill a space) – recycling ideas (update, not copy and paste or link) – Echo chamber (we all agree) – Poking the Hornets nest.

Finding Readers – Darren Rowse
What was your biggest day of traffic and how did it happen? (go and check it out for your blog – can learn so much from this alone)

Which Readers? What type of people do you want to read your blog? Knowing who, informs your content strategy, your promotional strategy, community strategy and monetisation strategy.

Develop reader profiles: create a typical scenario of who would read your site – demographics, dreams, why they would read your blog, needs, challenges, how they use the web, financial situation – all completely made up – but it gives you a starting point. Profiles will evolve and need to be updated. They inform your content and how you promote your site. If you don’t know who reads your blog then how can you find them? If you have a profile in mind, it helps you to personalise the content to that particular profile.

Principles of finding readers:

• choose popular topics for your blog and posts (google trends, market samurai);
• build something worth being found;
• get off your blog – build a home base – then interact on outposts on the web – outposts depend on who your readers are – eg Twitter, Flickr
• build anticipation – give readers a reason to subscribe – a reason to stick around;
• start with the readers you have – you can potentially reach more through the ones you have;
• build a sticky blog – engross them so much that they don’t want to leave (sneeze pages – gets people deeper into your blog, into the things that interest them);
• content event (results of surveys or polls and more, seasonal stuff etc) – look at what your peers are doing, social bookmarking and networking are talking about in your niche and make the most of it;
• use familiar technologies for subscribing – email;
• persist – momentum does grow and it does get easier;
• promote…… but not too much. Survey your readers – find out what they want to know about and what other sites they use.

Lifehacker – suggest a link/topic. Get them to write about something you think their readers should know about.

Blog posts on themes or greatest hits……

Techniques for finding readers:

• guest posting, social media sites, you tube, seo, forums,
• pitch other bloggers,
• leverage other online and offline presences
• participate in other memes and projects of others,
• blogging/web communities, competitions and awards,
• speaking at events and workshops online/offline.
• Blogging alliances,
• present workshops,
• develop reports/whitepapers,
• incentivise subscriptions,
• interview someone/be interviewed,
• comment on others blogs (make an impression),
• comment on readers blogs,
• promote posts or landing pages – not just your blog,
• advertise,
• submit stories to media/press releases,
• anticipate big events,
• press releases.

Forums still have value, particularly in finding readers – you can help those there with your expertise, build your reputation and gain exposure for your blog.

Find a community that helps you to promote and improve your own blog.

Check your public library for training opportunities on things like public speaking, choosing cameras etc.

Getting readers to subscribers – depends on your readers – add a subscribe link to end of each post and if not used too much, in content links.  Sidebar links don’t work that well.

That took us to morning tea – will post the next stage in Part Two – coming soon!

Kathryn has covered the days with our tweets, through a Cover It Live session at Librarians Matter. It is well worth checking out. So instead, I will go over what we covered in the two day workshop and outline what I got out of it, as a presenter and on the side participant.

Day 1 was Kathryn doing all the hard work. We began with a few introductions and then some get to know you exercises, which gave us and all participants information on their sector, their library size and the openness of their IT systems. It was useful information for us, but also for attendees as straight away they knew they were learning alongside people who came from pretty much the same sort of environment they were working in.

Here’s the fast forward bit. Kathryn did presentations on Web 2.0, Shift in power and Library 2.0 and after morning tea I presented on Web 2.0 tools. Which means to say we had a list of 36 types of tools which we had participants research and present back to the group. They had to explain what it was and why libraries should care, with me filling in the gaps.

Most of the way through lunch, I did a quick Twitter clinic, showing how to sigh up etc.

After lunch it was Kathryn again with eBooks, the library in the cloud and opening up the library. We finished with some futures dreaming exercises. Kathryn and I finished our day with a lovely relaxing dinner at Lygon Street.

Day 2 was me carrying most of the load, although I’m still convinced I had an easier time of it than Kathryn. We began with a recap and an indication of things that attendees would like covered (which I think we did).  We then gave them some time to think about three projects they would like to undertake when they got back to work.

I then presented on Library 2.0 and users and Learning 2.0 before Kathryn took us on a fun journey on Creating media. The end of lunch was filled with an informal Sharepoint sharing session for quite a few attendees and Kathryn and I did quick demos of both Word Press and Drupal as content management systems.

After lunch, I did overviews on Creating Social media policies and let them explore some online, then on Marketing and Library 2.0, Creating an online community of practice and by the time I got to Building a strong foundation, was pretty much exhausted.

Fortunately, after afternoon tea, we got participants to plan out an action plan for one project they were going to undertake once they got back to work (chosen from the three they had written down earlier), using the worksheet provided. They then had to practice an elevator pitch with the attendees at their table, giving them immediate practice at explaining their plans.

It was an exhausting, but ultimately very satisfying two days, mainly because:

• I worked with Kathryn to create and run this program. If you have to do something like this with anyone, Kathryn is your person.
• Passion takes you a long way. I was getting very tired by the 2nd half of the second day and had a sore throat as well, but my passion for the topic and helping others to see the value in these tools, carried me through and them along with me.
• Our attendees were a great group of people who were passionate in their own way. Passionate about their libraries and enthusiastic about the possibilities that could be opened up to them through using these tools. I really loved seeing them think of ways to get around restrictions imposed on them by their workplaces.
• The collaboration that happened between the attendees with similar interests or situations. Whenever we weren’t presenting to them or they were using their workbooks, they were sharing ideas, possibilities and more about their work environments. I think it was very encouraging for them to be able to spend that time with colleagues in similar circumstances and it was wonderful for us to see that collaboration happen.

As for what I got out of it:

• Felt lucky that I work with a fairly open IT environment, especially compared to pretty much all of our attendees
• Encouraged to create more media, particularly since discovering how easy it is to do so using Windows Movie Maker  (which I must get started on and soon – thanks Kathryn)
• A desire to find some more opportunities to collaborate with Kathryn and to investigate more options for professional development presentation content – either presenting or printed, with other colleagues – online or in my workplace (offers gratefully considered, lol)
• Inspiration to think outside of the box, which came as a result of our futures dreaming session and from hearing of our enthusiastic attendees plans for projects in their workplace.
• A need for rest. Fortunately, Easter started a day later.

I’m back at work this week and this whole event already seems like a long time ago.  But it has helped to fire me up further with possibilities and plans of my own, which makes me even happier to know that it was more of a two way process than I realised.

Check out more photos at Flickr.

LibMark, which is the marketing subcommittee of the Public Libraries Victoria Network, ran a full day seminar on Digital Marketing and Libraries on Friday 23rd October.  From here on in are my notes from the day, which was great – I came away with a lot of ideas and new perspectives.  Hopefully these notes can give you some too.

The keynote speaker was Darren Sharpe -  Senior Consultant at collabforge, who spoke on “Social Media, Marketing and Public Libraries”.  (His presentation is available at http://www.slideshare.net/dasharp/social-media-marketing-public-libraries)

Australians are generally early adopters of technology.  We have one of the highest rates of mobile phone ownership in the world. 3/4s of Australian online adults use soical media and 1/4 have created their own content (Forrester Research).  Our largest online demographic is the 35-44 year olds (Gen X), followed by the 25-34, then the 45-54 and then the 18-24s.

Marketing has changed, it is now pull not push, many to many not only one to many, its about conversation now not just a message, its peer to peer not organisation controlled and its generative not static. Marketing is no longer fully in our hands to control and we need to be aware of this and to learn how to make the most of it.

Social media comprises:

• connection – which enables people, data, events and issues to meet u

• community – there is a lot of power in self-organising groups, which have represent an identity, have common purpose, trust and representation (See Seth Godin’s book Tribes)

• context – where you can interpret, find, personalise and complement content that you find -

• co-creation – take existing content, change it, add to it and more, then share it again

When talking about new forms of value, He gave us a quote from jeff Jarvis (2005) in “Who wants to own content”, which in its purest form says “The value is in relationships. The value is in trust.”

The new values in today’s social media are sharing, reputation, collaboration, attention, transparency, trust, authenticity and openness.

So what is the challenge for public libraries?

1. Connect your with your community via Social Media (highlighted Boroondara’s blogs)
2. Provide access to open data, tools and APIs (he gave examples from the Gov 2.0 Workforce)
3. Build engaging user communities – our own tribes around a common purpose (WePlan Alpine and Open Austin)
4. Enable crowdsourcing – so our users can feel involved (NLA Digitisation – OCR checking)
5. Facilitate the acquisition of new literacies – help our users to learn and interact with today’s online environment

Libraries are rich with social objects – books for one, other items, that people can gather around, around which tribes can be built. We can provide the right conditions for tribes to flourish.

Libraries are only going to become more important as our communities look to use for our informational leadership.

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Matthew Hunter from Thorpe-Bowker then gave a demonstration of Library Thing for Libraries and Aqua Browser, which I had seen before.  What was news was that there is a new interface for Global Books in Print (I think this is it) on its way – something to look forward to.

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Matthew Van Hasselt from the State Library of Victoria (SLV) gave an excellent presentation on email newsletters and why they still have a place in our emarketing strategies.

SLV’s communications needs is to communicate broadly their range of offerings to geodemographically diverse audiences. They do this through traditional paid media advertising, in-house promotional materials, signage, website, editorials in media, social media and through their email newsletter. They use multiple solutions so that the message is communicated as widely as possible and so that they can ensure it is received by as many people as possible.

Email is considered by many to be old hat, a thing of the past, so why use it for marketing?  Email has many things in its favour, including: its a long standing communication tool – accepted and stable, its cheap and fast, measurable, understood, more formal than social media and more widely available – its not blocked by filters and more people have email addresses than social networking accounts.

One of the problems with social media is knowing which of the many tools out there to invest your resources in.  There is also the question of longevity, not only in the tools themselves, but in people’s dedication to them.  Whereas email has proven staying power and high use.

So how do you market via email?

• Always ask permission – NEVER spam
• Understand what your users want
• Decide how you will give them what they want
• Keep it simple, clear and to the point
• Be responsive

What to consider in design? Matthew gave us some information from Nielson’s “Surviving inbox congestion”, including:

• Average time given to an email newsletter after opening is 51 seconds
• Only 19% of content is fully read
• Content is mostly scanned
• 35% of users only skim a small part of the content

Important stuff we need to be aware of before immersing ourselves:

• Have a straightforward subscribing and unsubscribing process
• Have an easy to read privacy policy
• Offer both text and html options – for equality of access
• Strip formatting from the text option – it can much it up otherwise – use Notepad to do this
• Make sure all images have tags – for accessability
• Check all links twice, more if you can
• Have someone else proof read your work
• Use a clear sender address ie. the name of your organisation
• Create brief and relevant subject lines that will engage your reader

He recommend the Inverted pyramid of writing, where the information the reader must have for the communication to be successful is first, then the helpful but not crucial information, then lastly the bonus but not necessary content.  You want to be sure they get the important stuff if they only read for a short time.

Always give your users the option to view the enewsletter in a browser and include all the important links at the bottom of the newsletter.

For more examples, check out the Australian Writers’ Guild (awg.com), Empire Online (empireonline.co.uk), BabyCentre.com and DailyOm.com.

Software services that offer email newsletters include MailChimp, iContact, Vertical Response and Mail Out.

Last notes:

• Subscribe to your newsletter and test the experience
• Don’t build your newsletter in email software
• Get advice from someone already doing it
• Learn some basic HTML for tweaking if needed
• Keep it simple from the start
• Be happy with the limitations of the medium

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Leith Baggs stepped in on the day to replace a last minute cancellation and did a great presentation on viral marketing.   (her presentation is available on the LibMark blog at http://libmarketing.blogspot.com/)

Viral marketing is a broader form of word of mouth – as new internet tools give us a way to spread the marketing message indirectly as well as directly through our users.  Each person online has on average a network of 8-12 people in their close network – people who they would pass important messages onto.

Using such networks, a message’s exposure could grow exponentially, whilst being sustainable as well as cheap to distribute once the product has been created – after all its your users doing all the work of spreading the message!

Tips for great viral marketing:

• Stand out from the crowd
• Make it emotionally charged enough that people will send it on
• Include something unexpected, weird or naughty to gain attention
• Tell a story that people will want to share

YouTube is a great place to load your viral marketing product.

• Creating a video is easy and YouTube is free for posting.
• Homemade videos are fine and should be no longer than 3 minutes (shorter is better)
• Descriptions should be clear and specific (shouldn’t be hard for librarians )
• Don’t use fake customer insertions – product placement is OK though
• Invite your communities to submit videos
• Tell everyone about it
• Make sure bloggers know about it
• But most of all, have fun and experiment.

Viral marketing can also be about a simple email that meets the tips above. Make sure you personalise it so that it comes from a familiar source (ie. your library name).  However, beware of being a spammer and respect the privacy of your users – you must get their contact details from them directly.

Some great examples of viral marketing:

• Dove Evolution – http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com.au/dove-self-esteem-fund/default.asp
• Hotmail (link at the bottom of each email inviting you to get your own account)
• Burger King Subservient Chicken - http://www.bk.com/en/us/campaigns/subservient-chicken.html
• Fruit Burst – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZlhHsMXl6Y

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The next session was Katie Dawson on Accessible Online Places for your Events.  Unfortunately I lost my notes on this session, but I can advise you to check EventBrite as a potential event booking tool for your library.  I know I will be.

I will post the rest of my notes from the afternoon in Part 2, coming soon.

We need to tell good stories – tell each other about the good things that happen, not the bad, which is what we usually do.

Stephen said that our stuff is awesome, we are in good standing amongst the libraries of the world. We need to let go of the nostalgia. Change has been really slow relatively speaking, especially compared to the baby busters. Big changes coming, which will be fun if you like riding a roller coaster.

What are we going to do to get good results for our users – how can we negate the skewed results of search engine optimisation – where anyone can make sure their content, true or not, lists high in results.

Some people have 40 year careers. Ensure it is 40 years of incrementally better years, not just the same thing year after year. Choose to make the difference. You need to put your meat in the game = professionals commit.

Libraries matter – the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grants is just one example. Stephen gave a long list of examples where librarians are making a real difference, doing things that get people connected to the net and to the information they need, saving money, saving lives, saving our culture and our history and so much more. We need to tell our government about the competitive edge that libraries give Australia. Who do you think built Yahoo – librarians were pulled in to make it work.

What is the competitive advantage we have in our environment? The difference between us the internet is us – sensitive, intelligent, helpful – we are not a list. Put ourselves out there, with photo and social networking profile. Show who we are as well as what we can do.

DREAM BIG – start small, but dream big.

We dont know every little moment of truth that happens in the library. We can be the human touch for people. We may never know the difference we make to each individual.

Democracies persist because of libraries. Its not coincidence that libraries are often the first casualty of war. Librarians protect freedom of information, giving access to all, regardless of what our opinion of it is – we are truly bipartisan.

We have to learn the things that are making a difference, improving service to our users. If you dont want to learn, then get out of the profession.

We are a global profession, a bottomless network. Every librarian has hundreds of moments of truth, where we fight for our freedom, save lives, cure disease, challenge poverty and ignorance. Not dreaming 08, but dreaming big. Say yes every chance you get, encourage others and dont get discouraged. Those who say it cant be done, get out of the way of those who are already doing the impossible.

We are about books, we dont have to advertise that, what we do need to advertise is that we have people who can help you with just about anything. Show who we are and what we can do.

Web 2.0 is about things you can do and people you know. When you go online do you see people you know. You need to be where your users are, otherwise you are on a march to irrelevance.

Stuff will change faster now – by 2020, all content ever created will fit on an iPod. Video games outsell most content combined, ringtones are huge! Pocket size devices will dominate, the devices coming out are about having ubiquitous access on your person.

New? Semantic web, the cloud, no choice search engines, GIS oriented search, virtually unlimited fulltext books, streaming media and spoken word search, personalisation 3.0, microblogging, registries and so much more.

Normal now is RSS, blogs, YouTube, social networks tagging, wikis, SEO and GIS. If libraries arent involved in that, then they are behind. Resist the library culture of poverty, victimisation, risk aversion and passive resistance. We have to pass the chasm of early adopters and into the space of early majority. We have a technology lifecycle, we have to get on the curve early and stay there.

If we dont get into social networking, then we are going to miss it when they progress to the next stage – this is just the tip of the iceberg.

So what should libraries be paying attention to? The user-centred universe, be more open to users paths. A few things to do right away – the time is now! Need to play, pilot, trial, experiment. Mobile is important, confirm your presence, be where your users are, how your presence appear – personal,, professional; get good at the cloud (where users are going), play at e-books, get serious at literacy (dont use that term for users) and check out XML, get serious about e-learning, care about our cultures, just expand, know that most physical objects are dead, get real about influence, the next generation content.

Humans are our competitive edge. Be open to lifelong learning, our careers have seasons, need to have reciprocal mentoring – peers, be important, we can invent the future and make a difference. Just have some fun! Dream big!

I have been exploring lots of social software online in the past 3 years or so and I think I am finally settling into a few selected ones that I am enjoying. The places I spend at least a little time everyday are Twitter (feel free to follow me - tango2), Facebook and a gaming site Gold Token, besides the several email addresses I monitor for myself, my work, hubby’s business and my church. I also believe in this blog still, although I am not posting as often, probably for a couple of reasons, which I will go into later.

http://oedb.org/blogs/ilibrarian/2007/11/

I tried Library 2.0 on Ning, but there’s only so much you can do online and I find that most of the people I want to be in contact with are on Facebook. I never registered for Linked In, never felt the need because of my Facebook connections. And Facebook has great word games, although I could do without the vampires, zombies, knights etc. I use IM mainly at work, but not much at home, probably because I don’t have many addresses yet, so that could change. I love del.icio.us, but at home I am using it more as ‘I want to know where these websites are when I need them’ account. At work however, I am having a ball, using it for our Olympic Games links. And don’t get me started on podcasts and RSS feeds (both of which I love).

I want to do more with my Library Thing account, maybe integrating it more with my blog, like I have with Twitter, the same with my Flickr account and I haven’t gotten into YouTube or any equivalent yet, except as a regular viewer. We’ll see what happens though. Still that’s a lot to be using and trying to keep up with on a regular basis.

I have a feed from my blog going into my Facebook and I have integrated my Twitter feed into my Facebook and my blog because I don’t want to be concentrated in one spot. I like the idea of being able to be seen and heard in a number of places. Exhibitionist maybe, or maybe just a librarian to the core, making it as easy as possible to find that information. Dispersing my twitter feeds means that have to open them up, which for some people is a legitimate privacy concern, but I can live with that. Again, I guess its the librarian in me that just wants as many access points as possible. On the otherhand, it means that I can’t discuss everything that I may want to (ie. the odd rant), as it would viewable by all, including those about whom I am ranting, but that’s the price you pay.

So why 2008 in the title? Because all this will change. Two years ago I just had the blog, email and a bit of IM. Delicious was something new on the radar for me then too. Its only in the last year that I have really got immersed in Twitter and Facebook. So who knows how the landscape and how I choose to use it, will change in the next year.

So I guess I’m saying, that I plan to be found online in these places: my blog, facebook, twitter, delicious, flickr, library thing (getting there anyway) and that’s enough for now. I like being in all those diverse places, but I also like my content coming together in one place, to give a big picture view, so that’s where this blog will still play a big part.

The blog as I said earlier has been quieter, for a number of reasons. Firstly, because I am spending time in the other places I have mentioned, secondly because I have been doing some presentations, writing papers and have just finished a couple of articles (waiting to hear if they will be published). Thirdly, the big changes that seemed to be happening and happening fast with Web 2.0, seem to be slowing down a bit. Comes from being on the cutting edge I guess, we are now just waiting for everyone else to catch up a bit before we move onto to the next big thing – or maybe we’re just waiting for the next big thing to appear? Or is it just me?

So how do I manage to keep up with all this. I don’t know really. But Clay Shirky, author of “Here comes everybody“, has some thoughts on that. I really recommend you take the time to watch this video, where he explains where the time comes from. Its worth the 15 minute investment (and I really must get the book and stick it on Library Thing).

Anyway, so now you know where to find me. And wherever you go looking for me, you can be guaranteed that you’ll be able to find out what I’m up to. Whether or not you want to, is entirely up to you!

Many of you would already have seen at least some of these, but they are all well worth a look. The videos are all quite short (3 to 4 minutes generally) and do a good job of explaining the topic at hand in layman’s terms. Kind of like a video dummies guide.

From Common Craft – “We produce short videos that make complex subjects easier to understand.” The Common Craft Show is a series of free videos on social media topics, which also help them to showcase their work.

Anyway, the ones most of interest to me and I will assume will be of some interest to you are:
Video: Google Docs in Plain English
Video: Online Photo Sharing in Plain English
Video: Blogs in Plain English
Video: Social Bookmarking in Plain English
Video: Wikis in Plain English
RSS in Plain English

I would also recommend them as ones to show others who may be struggling with the particular idea being discussed. They are brief, easy to understand, user friendly and even a little bit of fun. Take some time to check them out and enjoy!