CIL 2012 Day 3 - Ideas to Steal: 11 Free Marketing Strategies

 My final session for Computers in Libraries 2012 was co-presented by three different people from different libraries (and different kinds of libraries):

• Lindsay Sarin, E-Reference Librarian, University of the District of Columbia
• Julie Strange, Statewide Coordinator, Maryland AskUsNow
• Andrea Snyder, Job & Career Center Manager, Enoch Pratt Free Library

The presentation provided fun and informative tips on marketing libraries. The presenters started by covering why marketing is important (“Marketing is like showering – it's to present a clean, prepared image.”) and then divided up 11 tips into categories using a house building analogy (the first steps are for putting down a foundation, the next steps were for renovation, and the last steps were upkeep).

The tips they presented were: 

1. Assess: Know where you stand
   How? Start with the staff. Look at the numbers. And ask the user.
   Some library put a whiteboard up in the lobby with questions and got great feedback.
   Sometimes the truth hurts.
   Figure out what you need to assess.

2. Create a Blueprint
   Know your Goals: Where you want to end up? Use what you know. Think big; start small.
   Visualize where you want to end up. What do your goals look like.
   
3. Clear the Decks
   Don't dilute your message by advertising too much in one place.
   Choose the essential and eliminate everything else
   Examine the things you like from others' and figure out the elements of success. Repeat.
   
4. Create your message
   Keep your message simple (e.g. “Spread the words”, “You belong @ the library”, Turn to us. The choices will surprise you”)
   Do something fun to get people to be creative and submit their ideas.
   Right person. Right place. Right time.
   Cut 60% of the words.
   
5. Reduce Pain
   This makes current customers happy, and they will advertise for you.
   Ask them what they'd change.
   Use your library like a customer and pay attention to the little ways you can make a big difference.
   
6. Be Brave
   Stuffed animal sleepovers / order groceries at the library / ask us now (made people familiar with the service with a contest)
   (At this point in the presentation everyone was supposted to brainstorm with their neighbor to come up with an interesting program idea. Mentioned ideas included encouraging users to take a book on vacation and take a picture of the book in an exotic location and a Kindles, cookies and cocoa Overdrive promotion).
   
7. Give people something to do
   Instead of “you can now text message the library” say “add your number to your phone and then you can contact us at any time.”
   Rewrite an old message in active language.
   
8. Steal ideas
   Steal from other libraries but also steal from outside of libraries
   Immerse yourself in something outside your comfort zone. Pay attention while you're there.
   
9. Get into the Community
   Create elevator speeches / Keep your librarian brain on at all times
   They suggested using http://ifttt.com – recipes or tasks for different services to talk to one another
   
10. Assess the results
    Debrief after everything. Learn.
    
11. Build a toolkit
    

It was a nicely presented session with some good tips.  It was a good finish for CIL 2012.

CIL 2012 Day 3 - Target Marketing Using GIS

In this session Diana Friend, Communications and Marketing Director for Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library (also David Lee King's home library) talked about how they used GIS (Geographic Information System) data to do some targeted marketing in their rather large service area.

Serving a rather large geographical area with a population of 178,000 with 90,000 cardholders, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library wanted to be able improve its services and market its services to targeted under-served populations. To get the greater detail about its service area, they provided anonymized patron data to a GIS expert, who told them that there were 31 different market segments in Shawnee County and gave them a lot of detail about how those market segments lined up with their users. In her presentation, Diana described several examples about how they used this data.

In one case they had figured that an inner-city population was under-served. However when the GIS data and the patron data was lined up, they found that this area actually had a high percentage of cardholders (77%) and had one of the highest average checkouts per customer.

They had been offering a free mailing service which was costing them a lot of money. It was designed for people living on the outskirts of the service area (20 some miles away). They found that the majority of people using the service lived less than 5 miles away, so they stopped offering the service for free.

By dividing using a point system they tried to develop an equitable distribution of off-site resources such as bookmobile routes, lock boxes and dispensers. The GIS data helped them put these in places that made sense and served their population best.

Finally they used the GIS data to send out a bulk mailing to people living in an area where they found they had a lower than expected number of cardholders. Offering a Nook color as a prize for people who signed up for a card in that area, they got well over their desired 1% return (57 new cards for a population of 3600) on the mailing (a high percentage of response for a bulk mailing where a lot of people may not be interested or will just throw it away) which they considered to be a success.

This was an interesting session, but I wonder if my library's service area and population are just too small and homogeneous for this kind of research to be particularly useful.

CIL 2012 Day 3 - The Future of eBooks

 I started my final post-lunch round of sessions with this presentation made by four different ebook vendors:

• Andromeda Yelton from Gluejar
• Ken Breed from EBSCOhost
• Alison Griffin of Ingram Coutts Library Services
• Mike Shontz of Overdrive

With the exception of Andromeda Yelton's presentation, I was generally underwhelmed. I was not previously familiar with Gluejar or their related website http://unglue.it/. The goal of the company is to negotiate open, permissive licenses from publishers for books. Andromeda described this mission in an indirect way by first listing all of the ways that publishers and libraries currently do not agree on the issue of ebook purchasing and distribution, and then presented Gluejar as an approach that might end this strife, at least in some cases. Gluejar currently hasn't worked out any deals and has not books, so it's in an early stage of its development.

Ken Breed's presentation for EBSCOhost was energetic and kind of interesting, but also at times a little confusing as I got overwhelmed by his drawn-out analogy of ebook distribution models to roller coasters. His big point about EBSCO and it's current ebook options is that it's simplified the pricing model by getting rid of extra fees so when you buy the book you pay a simple price. As a library with EBSCO ebooks, this hasn't necessarily been all that great since one of the fees seemed to be the one to allow users to download books and use them on a device, a feature which disappeared a few months ago, from what we've been able to tell.

I wasn't particularly interested in Alison Griffin's presentation as Ingram deals pretty exclusively with academic libraries and the issues were mainly of interest to academic libraries.

Finally Mike Shonz from Overdrive gave his presentation, which was mainly interesting for his mentioning some kind of purchase on demand system they are working on as well as an API which can make it integrate tighter into existing library systems.

The session, overall, felt like it was 75% sales pitch, which wasn't exactly what I was hoping for when I selected it.

CIL 2012 Day 3 - No More Excuses

This was an inspiring presentation largely made by Janie Hermann, Public Programming Librarian at Princeton Public Library, with some bookend presentation bits by Nancy Dowd of EBSCO. Janie related a series of successes that the Princeton Public Library has had, largely by being open-minded and listening to their customers.

The first story she told was of a Python programming group that had tweeted about wanting to meet in a space in the library but being bummed that it would cost $25 a month to do so. Janie saw the tweet and contacted the club offering them six months of meetings in their small meeting room. She figured this might pay off since the demographic in a Python programming club was likely to be quite different from their regular demographic. After 5 months the programming club was very happy with the arrangement and wanted to know if it could continue. Janie offered them the large meeting room in exchange for teaching beginner programming classes at the library. The club enthusiastically agreed and it has grown and the classes that it teaches are very popular. A win-win situation.

Likewise she told a story of a self-proclaimed quirky individual who came in and asked if the library would be willing to host events and promote a Pi day celebration to mark Einstein's birthday (Einstein's birthday being March 14, or 3.14 and Einstein having been a famous resident of Princeton). Several other agencies in the community had been asked by this person but had declined as they thought the idea was strange. The library embraced it and through promotion, the selling of Einstein dolls and programs it has become a big success, drawing in tourists and getting the attention of the New York Times.

The lessons of these stories is to listen to your community and then meet them where they are.

Other interesting things that Princeton has done have been:

• host speed networking events for local business people
• open the library at 5:00 A.M. so residents could communally watch the royal wedding
• post all of their flyers on a page on Flickr
• host a “talk-like-a-pirate” day to promote Mango, which had just released a “pirate” module and through humor brought awareness to the real features of Mango

Janie mentioned some other best practices as well. A neighboring, much larger library just posts its events to Facebook and has about 300 followers on Facebook. Princeton interacts with their users in an active fashion on Facebook, doing much more than promoting their own events, and has 2200 followers.

Other suggestions were:

• Connect and be authentic but still maintain your brand.
• Know your audience interact with them in a variety of locations.
• Keep it local
• Keep it Quirky .. and relevant (Pi day reading list)
• Do #FF and RT local agencies on Twitter

After Janie's presentation, Nancy Dowd demonstrated a new Novelist related product called LibraryAware. It looks like a promising tool for easily developing, printing, and sending consistently designed and professional looking promotional materials. It looks like something that would definitely be worth a look once it's live.

CIL 2012 Day 3 - Leveraging Your Social Media to Gain Friends and Influence People

My first session on day three was a presentation by Julie Theado, Social Media Manager at Columbus Metropolitan Library on how that library effectively used social media as part of an effort to get a levy increase passed to address financial difficulties caused by severe cuts on the state level. This effort was a multi-pronged comprehensive effort and seems to be a good model of how to get support.

When the library started out in 2010 they knew that they needed to communicate their story to their residents, through as many channels as possible and they realized that their social media presence was not focused. They figured that social media would be a good way to promote relationships with their users and the media as well as manage their brand and monitor what was being said about their library.

They realized before they did anything that they needed an overarching strategy. In the strategy there was a social media plan that worked in concert with their marketing and strategic plans. It was the plan that they developed that established guidelines for what was posted to social networks, who they followed, and with whom they communicated. Established processes allowed them to answer questions and see what was being said.

They focused on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, with some additional focus on local bloggers, as those networks were the networks their customers frequented. Using the guideline that “the life of a Facebook post is 3 hours” they posted to Facebook several times a day. The also had chat events on Facebook, posted “Who Knew” items on Wednesday (which were cultivated from questions they'd get on the phone during the week) and they bought Facebook ads.

Julie provided an interesting story demonstrating how they used Twitter. On one occasion a Twitter user indicated that he was a new father and expressed interest in finding books to read to his newborn son. Using some suggestions from the youth services department they turned to Facebook and asked from their Facebook community suggestions for books for the father to read. When they had curated a decent list they tweeted the address of the list back to the father.

On another occasion they had a TweetUp that they got going using Twtvite and then discussed the levy at the TweetUp. This was a successful endeavor for spreading their message

By reaching out to area bloggers and getting the bloggers to come out in support of the levy increase, they were able to get some strong voices saying “vote for the levy increase” which they would never have been able to get from the media and which they could not do by law for themselves.

The levy wound up passing by 66% in a down economy, which was a great success. In the end they had these lessons which they had learned from the process:

• Think about your audience – LinkedIn didn't work for them as a customer outreach tool
• Watch being too self-promotional in social media – 70-20-10 rule
• Write punchy and conversational – too much copy can be difficult.
• Watch the frequency of your posts.
• Approach staff involvement with a strategy
• Don't be afraid to try something new.

Julie also had the following tips:

1. Quality vs. quantity. Creating quality experiences with your customers in social media is more important than the number
2. Measure your success by your measurable objectives
3. Monitor what is being said about you online. Facebook Insights, Google Alerts, NetVibes.com, Twilert.com, Issuu.

I found it to be an informative case study in how to successfully use social networking for issues like referenda and was definitely worth the time spent.

CIL 2012 Day 3 - Keynote

This morning's keynote, Creating Inspiring Services: Going Boldly into the Present, was presented by the always inspiring and thought provoking Michael Edson, Director, Web Strategy & New Media, Office of the CIO, Smithsonian Institution. Edson focused on the fact that the change of cultural and technological change has become so fast, that anticipating the future is hardly possible, as in many cases we haven't even completely absorbed the realities of the present.

To build up to this point, Edson started in the distant past, mentioning that people who lived in stone age Europe had a period lasting 25,000 years in which they had cultural continuity. He mentioned that William Gibson has said that in the 1950's science fiction authors had a 3-5 year period that could be considered “now” which could be used as a relatively stable point from which authors could anticipate the future. Edson mentioned technology that we were looking forward to future versions of in 1997 like dial-up modems, limited digital cameras, Geocities and Windows 95. We've now reached the state that we were imagining in 1997 with largely ubiquitous high-speed internet connections, cheap digital cameras that have made film cameras obsolete, a sophisticated and varied World Wide Web, and mature and (generally) stable operating systems.

Edson mentioned some landmark books and articles from 6 to 10 years ago that anticipated the exact conditions that we have now, namely:

• Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs from 2002
• Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas from 2002
• Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams' Wikinomics from 2006
• Tim O'Reilly's What is Web 2.0 from 2005

We now also have some well established concepts which define many aspects of todays world:

• The Long Tail
• Joy's Law
• Cognitive Surplus
• Network Effects
• Moore's Law & Mobile
• Every user a hero...

All of this adds up to a situation where “the present is far more interesting than most people have noticed” and that the “tangible value of the present moment remains to be exploited.”

The problem lies largely in our perceptions of the present and Edson relayed some concepts to help people develop ways to grapple with our changed world:

• The extraterrestrial space auditor – When your organization says that they stand for something, imagine yourself as a complete outsider and compare the stated mission with collaborative actions.
  
  
• On Ramps and Loading Docks – If you believe that your goal is to help our users be the heros in their own epic journeys we need to think expansively about platforms.
  
  
• Edge to core – The best work happens where we have subject matter experts, data, public together in the same place.
  
  
• Focus on the mission – Everything should focus on the mission, and everything else should go away. Organizations that can articulate what they need to do aren't struggling with how to react to constant change
  
  
• Place the bet – What world am I living in, what impact does my country, my city, my organization want to have in that world, What should I do today?

It was a great keynote and an inspiring one. Now to try to put its ideas into practice.

CIL 2012 Day 2 - Integrating Tablets & Apps Into the Library

This was a fun interesting session with three presentations. The first two presentations were by children's librarians at Darien Library and Norwalk Library respectively.

Keira Parrott presented Apps, iPads & Tech for Kids @ Darien Library in which she discussed the process her library followed as they looked to find a way to integrate iPads into their programming. Initially they had a wall mounted iPad where they put an “app of the day” that patrons could play with. After that had been a modest success, they decided to try circulating iPads in a kit with different apps installed. They decided what apps to put onto the iPads and developed a process by which the iPads are cleaned (physically and digitally) upon being returned. Some favorite apps Keira mentioned were:

• Don't Let the Pigeon Run this App
• eliasMatch
• PopOut! Peter Rabbit
• Pocket Phonics ABC
• There's a Monster at the end of this Book

She also mentioned that they have programs called “app chats” where parents can come in with their iPads and they discuss apps (for children) that they enjoy. They've also developed a whole suite of technology children's programs:

• Little Clickers (2-5)
• Techsplorers (6-8)
• iKids (9-12)
• Storytubes (reeldirector – make a movie using the iPad)
• CoderDojo

Vicki Oatis provided a different story in her presentation titled Check Out an iPad. Norwalk Public Library is less affluent than Darien, and they couldn't afford to circulate iPads. In fact, they bought iPads as an alternative to buying a new computer since they could get more of them with the money.

At Norwalk theycheck out iPads for an hour for in-house use. After the iPads are returned they get their contents restored (to remove bank logins and anything else people put on them).

Norwalk also has had success using iPads with small storytime groups where they allow children to touch and interact with the device.

To choose what apps go on the iPads they have been relying on Kirkus reviews as well as patron requests and recommendations from blogs, magazines and professionals. Their list of favorite apps includes:

• Storytime (project them on the wall)
  • Sandra Boynton Books
  • Go Away Big Green Monster
  • The Sun Goes to Bed
    
• School Visits:
  • Bartleby's book of Buttons
  • Happy Birthday Sue
  • Spot the Dot
    
• Kids at the table:
  • Real Racing
  • Cookie Doodle

Finally Earl Givens and Art Gutierrez of Emporia State University described their efforts with using Android tablets for teaching an Information Literacy and Technology course. They learned a lot in the process and came up with some innovative methods to get a limited budget stretch as far as it could. They felt that there were a lot of things they could do differently to improve the student experience, but largely it seems that their program was a success that can be built upon.