David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

5 Tips for Dealing with Difficult Patrons on the Web

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I have been working on a video series for WebJunction, and the first video is up! I have it embedded in this post – so you can watch it here.

This video focuses on dealing with difficult online patrons. I give 5 tips that I’ve used and seen in action that seem to work. And I’d love for you to chime in and add your own observations, too.

But it’d be more fun to click through to the WebJunction site, and comment there. I think you have to log in at WebJunction to comment, which is cool – they have a lot of great content there. For example, the managers at my library are taking a WebJunction-hosted course on change management right now – good stuff.

So – do you have a tip for dealing with difficult patrons on the web? Please – go share it over at WebJunction, and enjoy the video too – there will be more.

PS – looks like I made the WebJunction Crossroads newsletter, too – go check it out as well, if you’re not already familiar with it.

Answer these Questions for your Website

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We’re in the midst of a website redesign for our library. As we start looking at content, links, buttons, headings, etc – stuff like that – you know what we’re thinking?

We’re thinking this: does this link/content/heading/etc answer these questions for our customers?

  • What can I do here?
  • What can I do next?
  • Why should I care?

Answering these are really hard! Think about it for a sec – take a pretty normal link, like the library web designer’s favorite – “Library Databases.” Answering that “what can I do here” question certainly gets into how you label that section of your website (’cause we all know that “Library Databases” means nothing). Perhaps something like “Find articles” or “do some research” might work better?

Or think about a blog post – answering the “what can I do next” question can be as easy as linking to a set of related articles, topics, or even related books at the end of the post. I do this on my blog – when you’re reading it on the actual website, when you finish reading the article, you’ll see a list of related blog posts I wrote. What’s this get you? Website visitors staying on your site for longer amounts of time. More clicks. Hopefully, more conversions – more people clicking “attend this event” or checking out a book, etc.

“Why should I care” is a favorite one of our library director, and it’s probably the hardest of the three questions to answer. One way to do this is in the content itself. So your first couple of questions get the customer to your content … and then your content itself will need to answer that “why should I care” thing.

The answer could be any number of things, ranging from “because you can borrow it for free” to “because you’re a small business owner, and these resources will help you be profitable.” See where I’m going with this? Another way to say “why should I care” is to ask “what’s in it for me” or “why is this interesting?” Give them that reason.

Give your customers a reason to stay on your site by having great content AND by actually telling them why they might want to stay. Do that, and my guess is that … they actually WILL stay on your site – your digital banch – longer, doing more things.

Could be a good thing!

pic by Marco Bellucci

Day 1 at Internet Librarian 2010

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I’m at Internet Librarian 2010 in Monterey, CA – wonderful conference full of librarian techie joy. Here are some of the highlights I picked up yesterday:

The keynote presentation was: Why Libraries Have a Future: Adding Value to your Community, presented by Patricia Martin, CEO Litlamp Communications & Author, Renaissance Generation: The Rise of the CUltural Consumer and What it Means to Your Business

Her book = what it looks like right before a renaissance.

Here’s what she means by that:

as soon as something is deemed less relevant, it starts getting shed… her goal is to help us figure out how to still be relevant (so libraries don’t get shed)

Interesting aside – capitalism is based on conformity (ie., 9 billion people eating the same hamburger)

Cool idea – Irene Au at Google – created a team that looked around the org, and proposes improvements to the user experience at parts of google. This can work for a library!

She asked users what the minimal user experience should be, then works to get those integrated.

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Managing Your Library’s Online Presence

Jennifer Koerber, Boston Public Library

think about voice. Be consistent in your voice online. use a styleguide with a team of authors.

pre-load some preferred tags, so when busy authors are ready to tag … they can pick some “good” ones.

fonts can give you a voice

banners – you can add these to websites, youtube, separate blogs, etc – it is a visual way to pull everything together visually

Logos – easy way to anchor your sites and services

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SuHui Ho – University of California

Managing today’s e-Library

it takes a village to build, staff, and manage an e-library.

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Colleen Brazil -Sno-Isle Libraries

Used Overdrive as example – said we should always continue the conversation about when patrons have a bad experience with a product we use – keep the dialogue open, communicate with vendor and patrons

Two Pieces of Ebook Silliness

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Just came across a couple of posts from The UK Publisher’s Association and from the CEO of Overdrive. Gotta say, it’s very interesting to watch and listen … but it’s a bit disappointing, too. Here’s a couple bits of what each of them said:

From Richard Mollet, Chief Executive, The Publishers Association, in his PA statement regarding our position on library e-lending post: “Ultimately, the activities of selling and lending have to be able to co-exist with neither unduly harming the other. If ebook lending were untrammelled (as some comments seem to propose) it would pose an extremely potent threat to the retail market which in the long-term would undermine the ability of authors, and the companies which invest in them, to see a reward for their creativity.  This would be hugely a negative outcome for everyone, including libraries and their communities.”

What? Did Mr. Mollet just say that if library patrons could download ebooks in an “untrammeled” way (which for them, I think means being able to check it out and download it from home), it would be a huge threat to the retail ebook market. Really? I’d love to see your numbers to back that up.

And how in the world would patrons checking out ebooks remotely “undermine the ability of authors … to see a reward for their creativity” ??? Come on.

Translation – We think ebook lending, if made too easy, will put us out of business. And, he very obviously doesn’t know how the whole checking out an ebook thing actually works (see below for a little more on that). Explains a lot, I think.

Next up: Steve Potash, CEO of OverDrive, with A statement on the Publishers Association’s position on eBook lending, writing in response to the silliness above: “OverDrive licenses eBooks under a “one-book, one-user” lending model … This model has successfully worked for years around the world, providing libraries with access to premium content while generating revenue for publishers.”

“Successfully worked” – if that means that libraries subscribe, then ok. But if it means our customers get it, then not so much. This statement sorta reminds me of the automotive industry CEOs, when they say “going to the gas pump is a time-honored tradition.” Hmm…

And I found this statement weird – maybe I’m not understanding it: “In 2009, visitors to OverDrive-powered library websites viewed more than 401 million pages. Among unique visitors to these download library pages, 80 percent did not check out a digital title, yet still visited 13 pages on average.”

Is he really saying that lots of people visited Overdrive’s service … but a whopping 80% didn’t check anything out??? Cause that’s what it sounds like to me. And if so … Well, that’s because Overdrive is SO VERY HARD TO USE.

Here’s an example from my library that happened last week. Topeka is currently participating in the Big Read, a grant-funded community-wide reading program. We picked The Maltese Falcon as our Big Read book – it’s available in paper and in a digital audiobook version from Overdrive. One of Topeka’s library customers (who happens to be the general manager of a local TV station) decided to checkout the digital audiobook version … on his Mac. After an hour of frustration on his part, he called the library for some help.

Were we able to help him? No, not really. For some reason, his web browser didn’t like the Overdrive website (he tried Google Chrome and Apple Safari). He wasn’t able to download the “unlimited use” version of the digital audiobook, because it was in the Microsoft Windows-based wma format. Although he could download the Mac-friendly mp3 format, it was checked out and therefore unavailable … which of course didn’t really make much sense to the patron.

Our library customer ended up frustrated at Overdrive, at the library (and told us so), and had a bad experience with our digital content.

Overdrive, Publisher’s Association guys, etc – you can do better than this.

Pic by Dick Rochester

One More on The Networked Nonprofit: Social Media Guidelines

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One more post on The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change, by Beth Kanter and Allison H. Fine. I like the book – good read, and much to think about. I had to do a little “translation” work – non-profits and libraries are similar in some ways, different in others.

On to the subject of this post – social media guidelines! Beth and Allison point out some good ideas for “codifying the social culture” by creating social media guidelines for staff.

In the process, they two useful posts:

#1 – 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy, from Mashable. Their points are really good, and include: Be Responsible for What You Write, Consider Your Audience, and Bring Value. Go read the post – good stuff there.

#2 – A Twitterable Twitter Policy, from the Gruntled Employees blog. Again, another great post – go read it. But here’s the tweetable policy: Be professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well. Remember that you can’t control it once you hit “update.” They call it a Twitter Policy, but I think it works pretty well for any social media.

So – good stuff. Check out the book!