Computers in Libraries 2013 officially kicked off this morning with a keynote from Brent Leary who does customer relations consulting with S&P and Microsoft as well as others. It was quite an interesting, although short, keynote followed by a session where he answered questions directed to him by Rebecca Jones of Dysart & Jones (who I saw again in a much later in the day at a different session).
It was an unusual keynote for Computers in Libraries as he doesn't seem to have much of a library background and hasn't really studied them, and didn't really mention them much in the main part of his keynote, but he has considerable expertise in an area where libraries really need to pay attention. His focus was on creating a relationship with your customers, what makes customers value you, and what makes them keep coming back. Leary is apparently working on a book titled The Amazon Effect which investigates what has made Amazon such a popular company and what things it has done to make customers so happy and loyal that they keep coming back.
I got some of the greatest value out of this presentation in the Q&A section at the end where he answered some questions and made some interesting points. He felt that libraries are potentially very well positioned to fill a role that Borders had filled and is now somewhat vacant that cannot be entirely filled by the Internet in facilitating face-to-face sharing between readers.
Speaking of the clients that he has worked with he stated that the most successful clients have been ones who are "willing to embrace cultural change", which is something that many libraries have difficulty with and will certainly be a challenge.
One of the things that I really liked hearing from him was that it's important to consider exactly how you are going to use a technology before adopting it. He likened it to the situation where you might give a car to a teenager who was unprepared to drive it, and that agencies that have started using new technologies (like Facebook or Twitter) without properly thinking them through have sometimes done tremendous damage to themselves far outweighing any benefits gained by adopting the technology quickly.
Throughout the presentation Leary mentioned how important it is to use the information that agencies have about their customers to build a relationship with them, being careful not to "go to the dark side." Jones asked for clarification on how an agency might know if it's going to the dark side or not, a concern that I certainly would have. Leary's response was that when you are thinking of doing something with other people's data you should first consider what you would want other people to do with your data and use that as the guideline. It seems like a pretty good guideline although perhaps challenging to properly adhere to. For better or worse, libraries tend (by law or by policy) not really have much information about the checkout habits of their users, which is an advantage that companies like Amazon have in their ability to make recommendations. There's a lot of data we can mine, but it's a little trickier to use it to build relationships with our users.
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