social media | emerging trends | libraries
On Sunday, I had the privilege of presenting about digital experiences with John Blyberg, Bobbi Newman, and Toby Greenwalt. The room was packed, there were great questions afterwards … and I think it went well!
Here are the slides for my portion of the talk (and here’s a link to Toby’s too).
I recently spoke at the UGame ULearn conference in Delft, Netherlands … and had some time to visit the DOK Library Concept Centre while I was there.
DOK is Delft’s local public library – but my, what a library! Cool building, forward-thinking staff, lovely setting … and lots of amazing technology, too. So I took some video!
This video highlights some of the neat projects DOK creates for their community. In each of them, you’ll notice a nice melding of technology, content, and community. Whether they’re working with a Microsoft Surface, creating a video, or setting up gaming in the kids area, they always include content and community connections.
I think the best example of this is highlighted towards the end of the video, when Erik Boekesteijn explains how their art gallery works with local schools to remotely display art in the classroom. Students can view a digitized version of the painting on a TV monitor setup in the classroom – they might see 20-30 works of art, have classroom discussions, etc. Then they take a trip to the library to see the actual painting.
Connecting community to content through technology – nicely done, DOK!
photo of DOK in the video by dmsmidt
Yesterday, I presented Designing the Digital Experience at the UGame ULearn conference … here are my slides! And an fyi – I took notes for the other presentations, and I’ll be posting those in the next couple of days. So stay tuned!
I love how some companies do that “informal language” thing – like Einstein Bros Bagels. Have you seen what they call their cream cheese? They call it “shmear.” Because you “shmear” it onto your bagel, right?
When businesses do that type of thing – use informal slang, or informal visuals in signage, or even when they always do certain things the same way – they are expressing their organizational personality.
What do I mean by organizational personality? Well – have you ever walked into a store, a business, even a restaurant … and felt the “vibe” of the place? Suddenly felt like you needed to whisper, for example? Or the atmosphere of the place felt light and lively, and immediately put a smile on your face?
Those businesses are most likely aware of that vibe … and have even planned for it. When they focus on creating certain types of consistent experiences, and on consistent touch points, they are expressing their organizational personality.
And once that personality is created, an organization can consistently express it everywhere – in a storefront, online, out of the office, even in print material.
Does your organization have a personality? You bet. Do you know what it is, and how to express it in different venues? Probably not, I’m guessing. Libraries are a great example of this. For many of us, the in-the-library personality is expressed as a fun, casual, maybe even sometimes inspirational one – smiles, helpful staff, colorful books, etc. That adds up to a light, informal, casual-but-hip organizational personality.
But when you visit the library’s website, you get a different personality entirely. Frequently, the website isn’t fun at all – instead, it’s all columns, formality, staid colors, and no friendly chatter at all. Very different personality from the in-the-library experience, isn’t it?
Give it some thought – figur out what your organization’s personality is, and how it’s being expressed. Then work on making that organizational personality consistent everywhere. It’ll add up to a better, more consistent experience for your customers.
A “Book and Digital Media Studies” student (wow – what a cool-sounding program!) emailed me last week, asking about my favorite university library Facebook Pages. Well … to be honest, I can’t say I frequent university library Facebook Pages much.
But I followed up a bit, and did a search in Facebook for university library then narrowed the search to Pages, and found over 500 university libraries with Facebook Pages.
As I browsed through the list, I started noticing that some Pages had low friend counts in the 0-30 range, and many were in the 70-200 range. And there were a handful that had thousands of friends:
Why do these Pages have more friends? Glancing through them, it looks like they are doing one thing – they are humanizing their Facebook Pages. What do I mean by that?
They’re “doing stuff.” Stuff like this:
How about libraries with a low fan count? Here’s one example – the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Main Library, with 7 fans. What are they doing? Nothing. They have 1 status update, from August 2009. Their most recent activity was adding the library’s website url, mailing address, and phone number.
So, to answer the question “Do students friend university library Facebook Pages?” (I hear that one a lot) the answer would be yes – IF those pages are being humanized. Looks like the pages with high fan counts have constant activity streams. Pretty much every day or so, something is happening on those Pages – there are regular status update posts, photos or videos are being added, and event reminders are being posted.
Basically, activity attracts Facebook users. Think of your Facebook Page like a party. Anyone ever attended a dead party? If there’s nothing going on, the party goers quickly find an excuse to leave, because the party is boring, right? In the same way, if your Facebook Page has no updates … your party is boring, and you are inviting your students to go do something else.
This is easily fixable if you do one simple thing. Post an update every day, and make it interesting. Examples from the Fan-heavy pages above include helping students out – pointing to a book/resource that has the “answers” for an assignment, just sharing an interesting tidbit of university or library news, sharing quotes, etc. Pretty normal stuff – just shared with Facebook users.
But if you’re not human, if nothing’s going on … no one will show up to your party.
Bunny by Alyssa Miller