David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

The Librarian IS the Rockstar

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pic by libraryman

About a year ago, I tweeted this:

But I leave u with this to ponder: are your librarians your rockstars in your community? Should they be? If so, how do u get there? (from Twitter).

Here’s where I was going with that tweet: Awhile back, my library’s Communications Specialist said this to one of our librarians, who was worried that an article in our library newsletter focused a bit too much on her. Our Communications person said this (summary) “yep – my goal is to make YOU the rockstar, not me.”

I thought that was an insightful statement.

Our marketing person realized that one HUGE asset our library has, and therefore our community has … are our librarians. So we sometimes need to focus on our staff, rather than just on our stuff.

Why NOT “showcase” some of our fine staff a bit? We do that with all our other important, cool stuff, right? Our Harry Potter books and movies were all over some of our websites a few years ago. We make banners for important author events. We turn our “stuff” into the attraction (which makes sense – people come for our stuff).

How about this – why not create a banner showcasing, say, the librarian storytime dude that plays guitar and attracts a crowd? We’ve actually done that. In the process, instead of focusing on our “stuff” (in this case, the fact that we have storytimes), we focused on the specific staff person that did the storytime.

This also makes sense, because some people come for our stuff … AND our staff. You’ve seen this, too. More kids attending a certain person’s storytime. Patrons asking for a specific person at the reference desk. Maybe even one librarian blogger getting more hits on his/her blog posts because of their more personal writing style. People like our staff.

Is that a bad thing? I don’t think so. We have amazing staff – and I’ll bet you do to. So why not showcase them a bit? Put them out into the community. Get them on the news (we do that on an afternoon news program). I know some librarians that write weekly newspaper columns.

Get out of your building. Step away from the reference desk. Call the newspaper. Start emphasizing your rockstar staff – not just your rockstar stuff.

Then see what happens.

Free State Social – Sarah Evans #fssocial

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Sarah EvansTitle: How to Make Your Brand Stand Out Online

Sarah Evans – She runs Sevans Strategy out of her home

Telling a story about the Chicago earthquake a year or so ago… she was able to be a citizen reporter, and ended up on national news (and got 5 solid client leads from it, too).

First – know what you want to accomplish

9 ways to stand out online

1. Find an opportunity to showcase what you do best

2. Hijack a conversation – gave a example of using the sxsw crowd and speakers to host another simultaneous event

3. Meet a need in an innovative way. She identified a larger need. Asked permission to be in charge of the #journchat thing. Innovate – do something different. It evolves. One pitch – she lets them do one pitch at the end – she gives them something quick to share. We’re a community.

4. Generate a LOT of quality content. Think multimedia.

5. Do it for a good cause. The #beatcancer hash tag as an example. And #crisisovernight as another example.

6. Give freely, give often. Share, acknowledge, give tips and tricks for your industry, trade secrets, etc. Retweet, like, comment post engage. Read your feeds, respond, etc.

7. Think like those you’re trying to reach. Use the tools they use. She checks out people’s twitter feeds before she contacts them to pitch them something and brings something from the feed up in her initial contact. It makes it more personal.

8. Get sourced … A lot. Sign up for helpareporter.com, follow journalists. Online, identify story opportunities where you are the best source and pitch them. Focus on media, bloggers, and online influencers bonus – use Pitchengine for your releases. Write for the consumer and the media…

9. What else? We had audience participation here.

Prtini? A pr blogger. …

How do we manage our message? You. Don’t. You start it, but your community takes it somewhere else.

It cant be a good sign when you have more twitter followers Han t he subscribers to your local newspaper.

@prsarahevans

The Accidental Library Marketer – a Book Review

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Enjoying the accidental library marketer by Kathy DempseyInformation Today sent me a copy of Kathy Dempsey‘s new book, The Accidental Library Marketer (Amazon Associate link). I read it and loved it! Let me tell you a bit about the book.

As Kathy says right in the introduction, on pg. xv – “The Accidental Library Marketer fills a need for library professionals and paraprofessionals who find themselves in an awkward position: they need to promote their libraries and services in the age of the internet, but they’ve never been taught how to do so effectively.”

There’s a lot that’s good in the book (check out my post-it notes in the pic!). Why am I interested in marketing? Well … by being a Digital Branch Manager, I AM part marketer/promoter. Part of my job is sharing the library’s digital branch with Topeka. And that takes … well, marketing and promotion.

Kathy starts with the basics – what IS marketing, anyway? The rest of the book is full of “how to’s” – including creating a marketing plan, basic rules for producing good promotional materials, different ways to get your promotional materials out, and using demographic data as a great starting point. Good stuff indeed – I learned things.

Anything bad about the book? … … well, not the book itself. I was more bummed out that my grad school’s library science program (University of Tennessee) didn’t teach me squat about marketing. Zilch. Seems to be a pretty important topic to me (and it is completely plausible that at the time they DID have classes on marketing, but I wasn’t interested – best-laid plans always seem to change)!

So… go read, go learn. Go market – but not accidentally!

IL2008: Digital Marketing – Successful Plans and Organizations

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Sarah Houghton-Jan and Aaron Schmidt presented

Outreach – connecting users with librarians – important to highlight the librarians!

Make your library website two-way.
– can people register for library cards?
– can they share their opinion?
– can they have an identity?

Make sure you rlibrary is listed correctly in all the library directories (like LibDex, publiclibraries.com, etc)

submit your RSS feeds to blog search engines (Feed Submitter is great)
– look at Robin Good’s list of where to submit your blog/feed
– RSS Specifications list of where to submit, too…

make sure you’re listed on maps (wikimapia, etc)

search engine findability: search for different variations of your library’s name, make sure you’re there.
– also buy adwords from google, hire an SEO to help

wifi:
– list yourself in wifi directories (check the presentation for a list later on)

Community website presence
– list in places like upcoming.org, eventful, etc.

LibraryThing Local – they have a subsite called Local – book events are listed
– they have a “do you work here” link and you can take ownership of the info

presence on local websites, see who’s linking to you

Social Review Websites – yelp (you can claim your business in yelp, too)
– when someone says good stuff about you, USE IT

phone numbers – make sure you’re listed correctly (google maps, askcity, yahoo local, etc)

make a/v content findable – make sure it’s listed in blinkx, singingfish, etc

social networking sites – in ning, flickr, etc

find local blogs – blogs by city, blogdigger local, metroblogging, feedmap

… and interact with these people!

local forums and boards, too

facebook flyer ($10 or so for 5000 ads/flyers)

list your staff in expert sites (yahoo answers, ziki, yadda, etc)

push info out via email/rss
– newsletter software
– use those email addresses

wikipedia – make an entry, update an entry

text a librarian – combines sms, im, email, etc – this is cool!!!

Twitter Best Practices So Far

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I’ve just spent some time subscribing to a bunch of Twitter social media and community manager types (via twitterpacks.pbwiki.com) My goal in doing this is to learn more about digital community management, and how that relates to the library version of digital communities.

But while doing that, I started noticing some similarities in twitter account pages, and thought I’d share those with you.

Twitter Best Practices:

1. Have a bio. When people see an interesting tweet, they might click through and want to read a bit about you – the first place they’ll look is your Twitter bio. Most bios provide a brief outline of who you are. For example, mine currently says “I write about, talk about, and work in libraries!” (yes, that’s a very boring bio – I should change it). “I write about, talk about, and work around libraries, social media, and digital communities. Also check out my videoblog: http://davidleeking.com/etc” (just changed it 🙂

Even better – include an invitation in your bio. Here are two examples:

  • I’m a 35 year -old marketing professional who is learning about new media. Help me learn Twitter please! Follow me and I’ll follow you!
  • New followers: please @ me to start or join a conversation.

2. Extra links in your bio. You can add links to pertinent sites and services in your bio. If the URL is long, make sure to shorten it with one of those tinyURL services. Otherwise, the link text will run into the background of the page… and make you look like you look bad.

3. Spell check your bio text. Misspellings look bad. Nuf said.

4. Use a good headshot for your picture/icon: Best practices for the little pic that accompanies your tweets – a headshot of you, smiling. Or maybe you being silly. If possible, show your personality.

Don’t frown – if you don’t look friendly (or you look scary), others might think twice about friending you. And on the web, thinking twice means you’ve lost them.

5. Add a background image. Any image. Silly. Professional. Ugly. The point here is that using the default Twitter background on your account makes you look like a newbie. And that’s bad, especially when it’s so easy to add an image.

Brownie points for using the image like these two tweeters. See what they’ve done? They smartly positioned an image version of a link list that appears in the far left portion of their twitter page. Nice way to share links and promote themselves!

6. Say “Hi” to new followers. When someone follows you, reply back. That’s nice! Here’s one example: “you might be the first librarian I’ve met. Hi!”

Even better – one person direct messaged me with this message: “Welcome New Follower!! How goes it?” Have you tweeted anything that I should know about that I may have missed?” Wow – he’s asking you to introduce yourself in a very direct and helpful (to him) way. Nice.

7. Silly observations:

  • Social media and community manager types tend to play guitar in a band and mention it in their profiles…
  • they all subscribe to Chris Brogan’s twitter account.

8. Finally, don’t do this: I saw one twitter account (that I didn’t follow) with these characteristics:

  • Bio said the person is a “key executive in digital media”
  • No picture/icon was included
  • No background image was used
  • He’s not following anyone
  • He has 7 followers
  • He’s only written 5 updates

Notice the irony here? This person’s bio and his actual Twitter activity don’t match up. He doesn’t sound like a key executive in “digital media” He needs to take 5 minutes to add a pic, add a background, follow a few usual suspects in his field, and add a couple more tweets. This will make his account look “normal” – and he’ll look more knowledgeable to boot.

Update: after writing a whiz-bang twitter article, I completely forgot to add a link to my own twitter account (twitter.com/davidleeking)! Duh…