The Library Marketing Toolkit

The ridiculous reach of Slideshare

2013-05-17T15:22:00.002+01:00

Reblogged from thewikiman

I'm always banging on about Slideshare.net to anyone who'll listen - I think it's the great underrated social network, the secret weapon of communication. And people do listen - whether it's librarians on presentation skills or social media courses, or academics on web 2.0 / edtech courses, people are amazed at the reach Slideshare can provide. An example I like to give is of a presentation I created a couple of years back called The Time For Libraries Is Now - it's essentially pro-library propaganda packaged up in such a way that non-librarians will hopefully look at it. I've only given that presentation once to a room full of people, but it's been viewed over 70,000 times online - that's the equivalent of my having presented at Wembley Stadium! It's more or less the same amount of effort, for hundreds of times the audience and reach, and that makes Slideshare invaluable. People LOVE to share presentations, they tweet links to them, they talk about them on Facebook, they embed them on their own blogs and sites - and they view them a lot more readily than they'll read an article or a blogpost. It's all about packaging up a message for maximum impact; I've said before on this blog, that if I have something really important to say, I'll say it with slides. Here's my main Slideshare profile. I also have a LibMarketing one associated with this blog and the book.

Anyhow, Slideshare have just started emailing users with updates on how their decks are doing. This week I got this:

What struck me (apart from the fact that the Tweets / FB stats are wrong for some reason) is the sheer number of views per week - for things I've already done, and don't update or even regularly add to. Around two thousand views a week! That's more than this blog gets.

So, information professionals with something to say - make a nice slidedeck and get it on Slideshare. Libraries with key messages for users and potential users - by all means use all the usual channels, but use Slideshare as well! Got some new facilities? Make a slide deck about it, full of nice pictures of those facilities, and embed it on your library homepage. Got some new courses coming up? Create a PowerPoint with what the courses are, why they'll benefit the users, and some quotes from previously satisfied customers - stick it on Slideshare and embed it on your bookings page. Teaching information skills? Put the PowerPoint on Slideshare afterwards so your students can refer back to it.

In terms of getting your message to stick, and generally making slide decks which are nice enough to get shared a lot on Slideshare (and perhaps picked up and featured on their homepage, which guarentees a huge amount of exposure), here's some tips I've previously posted on here - on a slidedeck of course!

Good presentations matter from Ned Potter

And if you're interested and haven't seen it, here's the Time For Libraries Is Now deck I mentioned at the top of the piece.

The time for Libraries is NOW from Ned Potter

Creating ambient awareness of the Library as authoritative source

2013-05-07T15:48:00.001+01:00

Reblogged from thewikiman

I've recently become a columnist for Library Journal, along with several others, as part of an Advocates Corner feature all about library marketing and advocacy. Here's where you can read the first of my columns, about the increasingly important practice of marketing with video. The second one went online last week - you can read it here.

It's about creating ambient awareness of the Library as authoritative source - the reason it doesn't say that in the article itself is that it's a much better way of putting it than I could come up with myself! The particular phrase comes from Valarie Kingsland, as part of this tweet responding to the article (see more response below).

The central tenet of the article is something I first grasped when Terry Kendrick explained it to me - that it's very hard to get anyone to take an action as a result of any one-off piece of marketing, and that it is this unrealistic expectation which leaves so many library marketers disappointed. You really have to build an awareness of what you do over time, so you're the first thing people thing of when they DO need your services - rather than expecting them to drop what they're doing and run to the Library when they see your tweet / poster / email / leaflet or whatever... Hence the title of the column - marketing libraries is like marketing mayonnaise, in that no one sees an ad for Hellman's Mayo and rushes out to buy some, but when it comes to the time when they need mayonnaise, Hellman's are foremost in their minds because they see so many ads and promotions. Read the article to see what I'm on about!

The reaction to the piece was fantastic, and I'm really pleased to see how many people really 'got' it. I've documented a small selection of it on Storify.

Digital Marketing Toolkit workshop, 21st May, Edinburgh

2013-04-25T09:52:00.002+01:00

Reblogged from thewikiman

Next month I'm running a workshop on marketing information services using new technologies. It's a course I really enjoy teaching - during the full-day we discuss marketing with video, mobile, online publishing, geolocation (Foursquare), actual real-life useful things to do with QR Codes, social media... The emphasis as always is on talking not just about why they're relevant, but what actual next-steps you might take towards using them.

The course is being put on by UKeIG - full details can be found on their website.

Here's some pariticpant feedback from last time we ran it:

Really useful, great delivery. Thanks!
Brilliant workshop, well done!
Perfect; taught me more about things I was using and also some new
Excellent day
Very informative, paced well
Hugely useful
Thought it was a great overview, got a lot from it.

So, I hope to you see some of you there!

A small change in the way these blogs operate

2013-04-19T10:20:00.000+01:00

Fine tuning the blogs. Flickr CC pic by JanneM.

Short version of this post

I will occasionally be reblogging content from this marketing blog onto my other blog, thewikiman.org.

Longer version

I created this website and this blog to go along with the book, and as you know if you've read these pages before, it's all about marketing libraries. I also run another blog at thewikiman.org which I've had for years, and which, used to have a lot of content about marketing libraries on it (which is partly why I got asked to write the book in the first place).

When the book came out and I launched this site, I started blogging about marketing stuff on here, and in order not duplicate content, I stopped talking about marketing stuff on thewikiman. However, after thinking about it for a while and talking to people who read one or both of the blogs, I'll now be reblogging relevant content from the Toolkit blog on thewikiman blog. This for a number of reasons:

The content I'll be reblogging is relevant to both audiences
I blog far less these days anyway so splitting the posts between blogs makes them even scarcer...
I still sometimes hear this wikiman blog referred to on Twitter as 'one to follow for marketing' so there's an expectation that it'll have some marketing stuff!
The wikiman blog has been around for much longer so has a lot of subscribers, and gets a larger audience than this Toolkit blog; generally speaking I want as many people to read my posts as possible

So I'm going to start by reblogging the last couple of posts from here on to thewikiman, and then carry on as normal from there. It won't be that the blogs are identical - there'll be plenty of stuff on thewikiman about library issues generally which doesn't make it onto the here, and the odd obscure marketing post on the Toolkit blog that doesn't make it on to thewikiman.

I hope that's okay with everyone! :)

Cheers,

Ned

It's okay that people don't know about all the services we offer - they only need to know about what's relevant to THEM...

2013-04-17T10:24:00.000+01:00

Pew Internet have just released their 10 key findings from their Library research:

Greatest Hits from Pew Internet’s Library Research from Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

The slide I'm particularly interested in is number 11, which tells us that:

22% say they know all or most of the services their libraries offer
46% know some of what their libraries offer
31% know not much or nothing at all of what their libraries offer

Initially this makes somewhat depressing reading, statistical proof of what we've all known for a long time: the public don't understand what modern libraries actually DO. The library brand is so synonymous with 'book' that there's little room for the many and varied services we offer, and it really is the services we must emphasize in our marketing, now the content we provide is often readily available by other means. Ambiguity or confusion is the enemy of great marketing - simple messages stick so much better. But inevitably, as we change to accommodate the new needs of our users, and add more and more aspects to the offer we make, it becomes harder to summarize the modern library and easily communicate how we can help people in their lives.

Actually though, the figures aren't that bad. 22% is a surprisingly high number to know most or all of the services their library offers - I'm not sure I know all the services my library offers and I work there! With an offering as diverse as ours no one needs ALL that we offer, so what matters is not everyone knowing everything, but each group knowing what is relevant for them. Perhaps it's time to stop worrying about whether people 'understand' modern libraries in general, and move on to simply ensuring that the parents know what services we offer for children, the people on the wrong side of the digital divide know we can help them get online and use new technology , the people who hold the purse strings know how important we are to the local community, and so on.

This process is formally referred to as 'segmentation' or 'segmenting the market' - dividing your users up into groups, basically, and tailoring the message to suit each one. It's something library marketing types go on about a lot, and perhaps fills non-marketing types with dread... But it doesn't have to be intimidating. At its simplest level, you’re targeting each group with a slightly different aspect of the same message, making sure they know about one key service relevant to them, and then letting them discover the rest once they’re in through the door.

Going back to Pew’s findings. the 31% who know nothing of the library is much more worrying. But again, the approach needn't be 'how do we tell all 31% everything we do in the Library!' - it can be about dividing that 31% up into existing segments, and targeting them with relevant services. The average person in the street doesn't need to think 'I know all about the Library'; they just need to think 'I want to start looking into the genealogy of my family tree, and I know the Library can help me', or whatever their need might be. Segmenting the market is hard to do, but it's proper marketing - the results can be hugely beneficial.

Repeat after me: host externally, embed locally

2013-02-19T08:30:00.000Z

Modern library websites now have ALL KINDS of content. Where there used to be lots of text and a few images, there's now much more dynamic content. We've got presentations, videos, audio, even embedded documents. This opens up a great opportunity to reach more and varied people.

It is possible to host all this stuff on your own website. But why do that when you can host them externally, and just embed them locally? It will save you an enormous amount of bandwidth, but more importantly, it will make your content infinitely more discoverable.

As we all know, a lot of people don't know what libraries can do these days. If we host our content elsewhere on the internet, we're going to the people rather than relying on them guessing that the library might be the one to help. We're showing up in their searches. We're appearing on the platforms they frequent anyway. We're boosting our reputation among other libraries.

If you host a video on YouTube it will get views from people browsing that platform, as well as the views it will get embedded in your library website. The same applies for images which, if they're magnificent Special Collections images for example, you could put on Flickr in their own group, and embed them in the Library website (and why not set a up a Tumblr blog or a Pinterest board for them while you're at it?).

If you have Prezi or Slideshare presentations these can be picked up and featured by the hosting sites, leading to an exponentially increased audience. The same goes for PDFs too - host them on Issuu.com (like the new case studies for this website) or Scribd.com and they look good, get a lot more use (because people know what they're getting without having to open a file) and could become featured documents.

Here's a PDF I recently uploaded to Scribd, to my organisation's account. It's been seen by around 3,000 people in its first two weeks of publication, because Scribd featured it on their homepage. So it was very useful locally, because putting on Scribd meant we could embed it locally making it more useable for our staff and students. But it was also useful internationally because it helped our instiution reach a large audience, as a provider of useful guidance in an emerging area.

Twitter for research by University of York Information

And what about Library news - why write it on the library website itself when you can host it on a blog and embed the RSS feed on your own site? Basically anything you think of can be hosted externally, embedded locally. What this means is you are AMPLIFYING your content and increasing discoverability - essentially, the work you put into your resources is going to be more richly rewarded.

So, repeat after me! Host externally, embed locally

NYPL knock it out of the park, again - because they had strategy

2013-02-07T15:15:00.002Z

The library behemoth that is New York Public Library certainly seem to get things right a lot of the time. Being a massive library can often mean that you are ocean-liner like - powerful, big, but not very agile (especially when it comes to big objects on the horizon)... But somehow, particularly through their excellent use of social media (you can read about their work with Twitter in a case study in the book!) NYPL keep innovating and they stay light on their feet.

The latest triumph comes as part of National Library Card Sign-up Month, run every September by the ALA.Times are tough and marketing budgets non-existent, so of course they used social media - NYPL have a reach of more than 550,000 people via Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest etc.

NYPL decided to go with quotes - quotes about libraries and reading, given to them specifically from the project by high profile figures and celebrities. They used these as part of the campaign, and it was incredibly successful - they managed to increase library card sign-ups in that month by 35%! The levels of engagement they had for their social media postings was staggering.You can read more about it, including an interview with in Angela Montefinise, NYPL's Director of PR and Marketing, in this Marketing Sherpa article about the project.

The most popular quote

The real point of this post is to pick up on something related to the focus of the campaign. NYPL decided to go with quotes like the one above because they analysed their social media marketing (something they do every month) and noticed a trend: lots of engagement whenever they quoted celebrities. They were able to see what had worked well, build upon it, and have even greater success as a result.

I and every other library marketer spend a lot of time going on about why strategic marketing works best, and it's not for nothing! Doing marketing as part of a cycle allows you to plan your aims, do the actual promotion, see what works and evaluate the impact. It's harder to market strategically than just to do one-off, unlinked promotion - but it works better. It becomes an ongoing process, with joined-up thinking.

Analysing what you do opens up opportunities to build on the good stuff.

An update on how the book is doing

2013-02-06T13:33:00.002Z

Over on my personal / general library stuff blog, I've posted an update on how the book has done in its first 6 months of sale, with some reviews etc - if you're interested, you can read it here.

New Library Journal column!

2012-12-20T15:52:00.000Z

I am really delighted to have become a columnist for Library Journal. I'm part of a rotating group all writing about marketing and advocacy, so my columns will appear every fourth month.

The first one is all about marketing with video, it's very practical in nature and has links to a bunch of examples, so take a look at it here!

On a related note, have a look at this LJ article about making parody videos, too.

Check out the 658.8 library marketing blog...

2012-12-18T12:19:00.002Z

If any of you have ever read right to the bottom of a page on this website, you'll have seen 5 sites recommended for more library marketing stuff. The top one is 658.8 - Practical Marketing for Public Libraries, which I really like; it's written by Susan Brown.

This week I was honoured to feature in the Marketing Masters series - you can read the brief interview here. We discuss marketing campaigns, library educations, and the marketing books that need to be written...

Latvian Children's Library Portal Revisited!

2012-12-13T11:58:00.004Z

A while back on this blog I wrote about the Latvian Children's Library portal as an example of some fabulous promotion of libraries to the younger generation: you can read the original post here.

Since then I've asked Silvija Tretjakova (Head of the Children's Literature Centre at the National Library of Latvia) some more questions about the project. Here's what she had to say.

Who created the images, and how did you work with them?

Talented children’s book animation artist Reinis Pētersons created the visual concept. Children liked his previous work and he has received several awards, so we chose to work with him. www.reinispetersons.com

There is still more visual material that will be posted on the site.

How did the interactive picture concept come about? What were the reasons for doing this?

The working team come up with the tree as the core motif of the National Library children’s interface www.lasamkoks.lv (known as the reading-tree). The National Library Children’s literature centre experts and artist Reinis Pētersons saw this as a way of attracting children’s attention.

How has the feedback been locally? It's certainly gone down very well internationally with other library professionals! But have the children liked it?

The young readers like it! We saw that during the Museum night activity, when museums across Latvia welcome visitors all night. We had hundreds of people come through the library and the interface was one of the main objects of interest. The Children’s digital library antique children’s book collection was the most popular. We have tested the project among professionals, and the main conclusion is that we need even more interactivity.

Latvian libraries generally seem to take the views of children very seriously, and work with them. Can you talk a little about this approach?

Yes, indeed Latvian libraries do take children’s views very seriously. It might have to do with the Children and Youth Jury reading promotion programme, now in its 12th year. More than 500 libraries and schools participate every year and 10 to 17 thousand young readers express their views on the newest books. We also have well-developed children’s library service monitoring: National Library Children’s Literature Centre serves this function at the national level and regional key libraries do it locally.

An interview with Terry Kendrick, now online!

2012-11-14T10:14:00.000Z

American Libraries magazine has published the Terry Kendrick case study from the Library Marketing Toolkit. You can read it online here.

I also wrote some additional stuff specifically for the article above (which you can also read on the American Libraries page linked above if you scroll down to the bottom of the page):

****

Ned Potter’s Guide to 5 North American Libraries Doing Great Marketing Work

Topeka and Shawnee County (Kans.) Public Library is the king of the digital branch. In my view, its website is everything a library website should be: dynamic, informative, varied, and stylish, in a way we should all aspire to. Go to the library’s website and have a look as soon as you finish reading this. Digital Branch Manager David Lee King, who is also a columnist for American Libraries, provides seven tips for an awesome library website as a case study in the book.

New York Public Library is surely the most successful example of a library absolutely owning its social media. Staff members make excellent use not just of all the tools you’d expect, such as blogs and Facebook, but also the likes of Tumblr, Foursquare, and YouTube. With well more than 200,000 followers on Twitter (@NYPL), it’s the leader of the pack on that platform, and in the Toolkit, NYPL provides a case study to tell you how the library did it.

Calgary Public Library, over the border in Alberta, Canada, proves that even in the age of social media, good old-fashioned advertising campaigns can be extremely effective. Its fantastic “Everything You’re Into” campaign has been plastered everywhere: on coffee cups, in grocery stores, and even jet-washed onto local pavement. It aimed to change perceptions, and it really worked.

Columbus (Ohio) Metropolitan Library is a great example of a library that has brilliantly overhauled its marketing. It started by segmenting users by behavior, then rebranded its services to appeal to different groups, and moved forward from there. Library staff members provide a case study in the book about going beyond counting (outputs) to measuring behavioral change (outcomes).

Troy (Mich.) Public Library recently came in fifth in a marketing-industry poll of most-effective advertisers in the US, just behind Microsoft and ahead of Ikea, Unilever, and American Express. Its most eye-catching initiative has undoubtedly been its incredibly brave (and fabulously effective) reverse-psychology book-burning campaign, which saved the library from closure. Watch the video about it on YouTube.

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I'm also quoted elsewhere in the issue, in Laurie Putnam's excellent article on Writing for Civilians!

YouTube versus Vimeo: which one is best for Library marketing?

2012-11-09T12:58:00.000Z

Flickr CC image by imjustcreative - view the original at http://www.flickr.com/photos/grahamsblog/5676087647/sizes/z/in/photostream/

Video is a pretty essential format for marketing your library these days, and can be done surprisingly cheaply and easily. (I'll be writing more about this as part of a new column for Library Journal -UPDATE: this is now online here.) If you've produced your videos - whether they're tutorials, advertising, virtual tours or whatever - then where do you put them to maximise their impact?

The answer has to be to put them on a video sharing site. I've seen videos in weird formats on Library websites which are either available for download, or require Windows Media Player, or otherwise put a potential barrier in between the user and the video - this is COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE! Seriously, do not exclude a section of your audience by putting a video online that only works for some people - just stick it on YouTube or Vimeo and then you can embed it wherever you like, in the knowledge that it'll work for pretty much everyone with an internet connection, AND that there's the potential for people to discover it externally (as opposed on your website) as well.

So what are the differences between the big two video sharing sites, YouTube and Vimeo, and how should they play in to your marketing choices?

YouTube is...

Free to use
The biggest video network - your potential audience is absolutely huge, and more importantly, they're already on the network themselves
Easy to use - you can probably shoot a video on your phone and upload it and tweet a link to it in less than 5 minutes
Unlimited in terms of the number of videos you can upload
NOT unlimited in terms of the length of the videos, at least initially - the maximum at the time of writing is 15 minutes unless you have a partner account. With the exception of putting a video up of a talk or workshop, 10 minutes is more than you'd ideally want for most marketing videos or tutorials anyway - people just won't watch that much. However, you can increase the limits if you verify via a mobile phone - here's how to do that.
NOT unlimited in terms of size of the files you upload - it's currently 2gig per video, which is less than it sounds for something like a virtual tour, but still much more generous than Vimeo. Link in the previous bullet point also tells you how to increase this limit to 5gig.
NOT lockdownable - as in, you can't limit access to a video to certain people or groups
NOT a place that brings out the best in humanity - your videos will be hosted on the same site as lot of pretty horrific stuff, and the comments in YouTube videos are often amongst the most despair-inducing the internet has to offer...
Note also that as a Library you can turn off advertising in your videos - which is great - but you can only exert so much control over the 'suggested videos' which appear at the end of your own films. So any video that deals with loan periods can expect a suggested video or two from dodgy loan companies - it works on the metadata, so obviously it can't be expected to know whether 'loan' refers to something financial or book-related...

Vimeo is...

Able to give your users better quality videos and so a better viewing experience
Able to offer longer videos - you can stick hour long vids up there if you want to (although I wouldn't recommend this in most cases! Plus there's file-size limits - see below - which stop your videos being too long anyhow)
Able to give you better analytics than YouTube - the built in stats have a bit more to offer in terms of actionable results
More customisable in some areas - for example you can put your own branding in to the player you embed into a website, whereas YouTube will always display the YouTube logo
Able to offer you a 'private' setting - if you don't want to open your video up to the whole world, then it's possible to lock it down to password access (and you can also lock-down a whole portfolio of vids with the $199 a year PRO account)
)A rather more... tasteful community. Unlike YouTube which is used by everyone, Vimeo has built a reputation as being somewhat artist driven, with more of an emphasis on quality documentaries and the like. It's risky to generalise, but the types of people who actually might use libraries are probably more likely to be found on Vimeo. The comments and community engagement are generally nicer / better.
NOT completely free depending on how much you'll use it - there is a Basic account (free) and a Plus account (around $60 a year). Here is a comparison between the features of the accounts, but I'll talk about the limitations that matter most in a second
NOT keen on commercial videos - according to its terms and conditions, Vimeo requires you to have a Plus license for a commercial video. It's up to you to decide whether you think the 'marketing' aspect of your videos is outweighed by the fact that you're (presumably) a not-for-profit library and therefore could consider yourself non-commercial...
NOT nearly as popular as YouTube - this although this is offset somewhat by the nature of the user community, it does mean your videos won't rank to highly on search engines, which is a shame
NOT very generous with its upload limits - it's 500mb a month on the basic account, and even the Plus account for which you pay puts a yearly cap on

So: what does all this actually MEAN?

Different libraries will have different needs (when is that not the case?) but generally speaking, I think the restrictions Vimeo places on its Basic account mean that YouTube is the better option for most libraries. However, and this is the key point here, the two platforms are of course NOT mutually exclusive - you can have accounts on both, and even display the same videos on both.

I would recommend using YouTube for everything and using Vimeo for particularly important videos (assuming you can get them in under the file-size limits) as well - and then embedding the Vimeo versions on your library website, for the cleaner branding, the reduction in dodgy user-generation content and so on.

Don't rule out getting a Pro account and using Vimeo more widely, however - with the Pro account it's probably the better option over all. We have a tendancy to think '$200 - we can't afford that!' but actually, in the context of multi-million dollar / pound budget, it's an absolute drop in the ocean. At my own institution we recently launched a YouTube channel which the stats tell us had 85 hours worth of views in its first month. It's hard to think of any other way we could achieve 85 hours of marketing to a captive audience in that time-frame! Marketing with video is hugely effective, and worth the investment.

3 common Twitter mistakes to avoid

2012-09-05T13:08:00.000+01:00

Flickr CC image by Mathamm

Each social network comes with its own quirks, and people make little mistakes all the time. This doesn't really matter too much for a personal account, but for an organisation's account it's more important to get it right and make the most of the opportunity Twitter presents. With this in mind, here's 3 surprisingly common mistakes institutions and individuals make (even experienced Twitter users) because of a lack of in-depth understanding of Twitter's quirks. This is how to avoid no-can-do DMs, follower-excluding @ replies, and chaos-causing hashtags.

1: Asking for people to DM you

The way Direct Messaging (DM) works is, if someone follows you, you can message them directly within Twitter. So you can DM all your followers - but the mistake is to assume they can all DM you. This is only possible for the ones you've followed back. I've seen people and organisations on Twitter soliciting competition entries, volunteers for things, even expressions of interest for a vacancy - and ended the tweet with 'DM me for details', or even worse, 'DM me for details, and please RT' which is particularly perverse as you're just opening the tweet to a vast new audience, none of whom can DM you.

So the solution is to say '@ reply to me and I'll follow you, then we can DM the details' or to just ask people to email / use some other method of contact that doesn't involve Direct Messaging at all.

2: Excluding most of your followers with an @ reply

In order that your Timeline isn't completely overwhelming with a gazillion conversations, Twitter limits what you can see to a: regular tweets from people you follow, b: ReTweets from people you follow, and c: conversations BETWEEN PEOPLE YOU FOLLOW. Which is to say, you have to be following BOTH participants in the conversation to see the tweets in your tineline.

So let's say you follow @libmarketing on Twitter, and I'm having two conversations - one with @librarianbyday who you also follow, and one with my friend Pete who you don't. You'll see the tweets I'm sending to @librarianbyday, but none of the tweets from my conversation with Pete will appear in your timeline. So in fact (and many people don't realise this), the vast majority of any tweeter's tweets don't get seen by most of their followers.

Why does this matter? Because by starting a tweet with '@username' you are almost certainly excluding most of your followers from seeing the tweet, and you may not always wish to do this. For example, if someone asks you about new opening times and you reply "@username - and for anyone else interested - we now close at 10pm" then the chances are only @username will actually see the tweet - unless loads of your followers also follow @username. Or if I post a guide to Twitter you think people will find useful, and you tweet "@libmarketing's new guide to Twitter is out - take a look at [link]" then the only people who will see this are your followers who ALSO follow my @libmarketing account (who, of course, may well have seen me tweeting about the guide anyway).

So the solution is to put any kind of character BEFORE the @username - so you can either literally just put a full-stop or something in there before the name, or you can phrase the tweet differently: "See @LibMarketing's guide to Twitter here" or "For @username and others asking - we now shut at 10pm." This turns the tweet into a regular tweet, which will go into every single one of your followers' timelines.

3: Creating a hashtag which is already in use

Hashtags are a way of bringing tweets on the same theme together - they're useful for holding a wider conversation across Twitter where all the participants don't necessarily have to follow each other. People often use them for events and for themed discussion. However, a classic and common error is not to search for your hashtag before announcing it to the world: a brief search of Twitter will reveal whether any other group or event is ALSO using the hashtag, in which case it's best to come up with a new one entirely - or things can quickly get very confused indeed.

Using Storify to market upwards in your library

2012-08-17T12:49:00.000+01:00

The final post of Twitter week is here! You can all four of the previous days' posts via this link - there's lots of useful stuff there for library's using insitutional Twitter accounts. Today's post is on a very handy tool called Storify.

Internal marketing is vital: never assume that the people who count will just know about the things which are working or breaking new ground; they have to be told. Particularly (ironically) with marketing initiatives - successful marketing must be marketed upwards so its value is understood, and so resources are invested in it on an ongoing basis.

Sometimes library Twitter accounts blaze a trail, set up amid general indifference from colleagues who don't understand its potential; at the other end of the scale, sometimes library Twitter accounts are mandated from above and thrust upon the people asked to run it. Either way, when it works (and it so often does - Twitter is a brilliant way to communicate with library patrons and library users fall very much into the Twitter user demographic) you'll often find yourself wishing you had a way to bottle examples of success and easily disseminate it to your managers or just other staff in the library. Look, look what we did! See how we helped people! Look at this feedback we got via this new channel! But it's not straightforward to effectively 'export' tweets into a format useful for dissemination - not without a lot of copy/paste/editing or training up your managers to log into your twitter account and check for themselves.

There is a ready-made solution to this problem, which will allow you to internally market your success with Twitter campaigns: Storify.com.

What is Storify?

Storify is a tool which allows you to collect social media content from all over the web (Tweets, Facebook updates, Instagram pictures, YouTube videos etc etc) and organise it into a cohesive story - plus you can add your own title, introduction, and comments at any time. You can basically create your own archive of any conversation or event on social media, and add your own context and framing around it.

It's a very useful tool in general, just for recording things of interest and being able to easily share conversations more widely. I've used it before to crowd-source information and views on a certain topic, and then feed all that knowledge back to anyone who is interested. (For example, this Storify on how New Professionals can get involved with library marketing.)

It's particularly useful for our purposes here, to market our social media successes upwards within the library.

How can I use Storify to record and disseminate the activity on my library's twitter account?

Storify allows you to search your twitter timeline, or replies, or favourites, or just Twitter in general, for whatever you want - you then drag and drop relevant tweets into the timeline, and when you're done you can publish it, embed it, send it to people etc.

So to take a scenario, let's say you've revamped your catalogue and you're relaunching it. The new site goes live, and you ask via your library's twitter account: "What do you think of the new catalogue?" 20 users reply with praise, criticism, comments and ideas - and you use Andy Burkhardt's advanced twitter search techniques to pull in the views of 5 more. You put all of them into a Storify narrative, entitled 'Twitter feedback for the new catalogue', highlight the key comments with notes of your own, and send it on to the web team (so they can bask in the praise / implement some good suggestions) and your bosses (so they can see what a useful channel of communication Twitter is).

Generally speaking, libraries have decent comments and feedback mechanism but they're all quite old-school - fill in a paper comments slip, or send us an email. But actually social media conversations are happening about your library all the time, and these comments are equally valid - in some cases more so because they pick up the grey areas (as opposed to the love it! / hate it! type people who go to the trouble of filling in a comments slip). Storify makes it really easy for you to gather these comments and feed them to management in a format they can easily understand, and which doesn't require them logging in to Twitter or, worse, you copying and pasting a load of Tweets into a Word document and emailing them.

Can you show me a ready-made example?

I can't show you one that we've used at my own institution because I don't want to publicise tweets from users which were basically just meant for our eyes. But I can show you an example of a feedback Storify, which I put together back in June just to illustrate this blog post (which got rather delayed...):

View the story "Small feedback example" on Storify Small feedback example An example of using Storify to collate and dissemninate feedback, for a post on the librarymarketingtoolkit.com blog. Imagine these are tweets about your library - you could take 5 minutes to Storify good and bad feedback, then just circulate / send a link to your bosses. Storified by Ned Potter · Fri, Aug 17 2012 04:43:54 Useful tips on using Twitter advanced search to engage with library users.http://t.co/4pmi2lly Will be giving it a go.Thanks @LibMarketing.Sarah Munks Check out the Library Marketing Toolkit website! http://www.librarymarketingtoolkit.com/p/about-author_11.html via @LibMarketingDr Karen McAulay Sound advice in this. RT @therealwikiman: Yesterday's @LibMarketing post: Are QR Codes fab or fad? Doesn't matter. http://www.librarymarketingtoolkit.com/2012/05/are-qr-codes-fab-or-fad-doesnt-matter.html?spref=twKatie Birkwood Blippar! Wow! Check out the video! http://www.librarymarketingtoolkit.com/2012/05/are-qr-codes-fab-or-fad-doesnt-matter.html via @LibMarketingKjarstad Orkney My sentiments exactly re. QRs..“@LibMarketing: The Library Marketing Toolkit: Are QR Codes fab or fad? Doesn't matter. http://www.librarymarketingtoolkit.com/2012/05/are-qr-codes-fab-or-fad-doesnt-matter.html?spref=tw”rn12 Put together for the purposes of this blogpost: http://www.librarymarketingtoolkit.com/2012/08/using-storify-to-market-upwards-in-your.html

So - have a go for yourself and see if it works for you!

Do you need a disclaimer for your institutional social media accounts?

2012-08-16T12:02:00.001+01:00

Flickr CC image from Marcin Wichary

Day 4 of Twitter Week on the Toolkit blog: disclaimers.

Many library Twitter accounts tweet third-party content - in other words, they ReTweet other people or post links to things, which aren't actually library resources. This is all part of being a good Twitter account, and should definitely be encouraged - but do you need a disclaimer? In a worst-case scenario a patron or student could follow a link you Tweeted, then act on some advice contained therein, suffer some unfavourable consequences, and then claim they thought the library was responsible.

There are three main issues here - firstly do you need a disclaimer and secondly if you do, where do you put it? Thirdly, what should it say?

Here's my own disclaimer about this post: it's just my opinions here, and I'm certainly no legal expert. I'm approaching this from the point of view of someone with an interest in social media, rather than someone with an interest in the law... The information provided in this article should not be used as a subtitute for competent professional advice from a professional liability risk management consultant or a legal professional.

Phew!

Who should have a disclaimer?

Every library has to make its own decision here but my instinct would be that most normal public or academic libraries don't need a disclaimer - we can trust our patrons to be sensible. That said, a disclaimer won't hurt - unless it's taking up valuable space in your profile. For more specialised libraries, particularly in the Health or Pharma field, a disclaimer would definitely be worth having. If it's something you're worried about, check out what your competitors or peers are doing.

Of course, if the wider organisation in which your library sits (University, council, govt, business etc) requires a disclaimer, this trumps whatever views you may have on the subject.

Where should it go?

So if you decide you need one, it can't really go on, for example, your Twitter profile itself. The 160 characters you get for your bio is too valuable to give over to disclaimers. So it needs to go on your website somewhere, ideally on the site linked to from the Twitter profile - or from a site linked to from the site linked to in the Twitter profile... Something on your homepage which says 'Find out more about our social media' and then goes to a page telling people where they can read your blogs, see your tweets, participate in your Pinterest boards etc - that's the ideal place to put the disclaimer in.

What should it say?

The point of a disclaimer in this context is to make it absolutely clear that your linking to content that isn't your own, and that said content isn't necessarily representative of the library's view on things. This shouldn't be too complicated to express. So something like:

The library's twitter account may broadcast third-party content, which is to say information, opinions and links which are not the library's own. These are provided for information only, and do not constitute library advice, policy or views.

That said, if you wanted to really go to town, a more comprehensive disclaimer might read:

All data and information provided on the library's social media platforms [list them here] is for informational purposes only. The library makes no representations as to accuracy, completeness, currentness, suitability, or validity of any information on this site and will not be liable for any errors, omissions, or delays in this information or any losses, injuries, or damages arising from its display or use.

If you have any disclaimer related advice or tales you'd like to share, please leave them in a comment below.

Advanced Twitter Search for social monitoring and patron interaction

2012-08-15T13:04:00.000+01:00

It's NEW CASE STUDY time!

In the 'Marketing with social media' chapter of The Library Marketing Toolkit there's a section on using Twitter's advanced search to find out what people are saying about your library online, and to start relationships that way. Lack of space dictated that it wasn't a very long section, so there's more information here via a new case study from Andy Burkhardt.

Andy is Emerging Technologies Librarian (surely the best job title ever?) at Champlain College in Burlington, and uses Twitter's advanced search in a really interesting way to find and engage with patrons. Here's what he had to say about the possibilities.

***

As with the previous case study on the Bodleian Library's amazing mobile app, and all future case studies, Andy's article is presented in the LibMarketing magazine format, via Issuu. If for any reason you'd prefer to just read it in plainer text on this website, you can do so here.

Open publication

***

You can read Andy's blog at Information Tyrannosaur. If you have any questions about social monitoring or Twitter's advanced search, leave them in a comment!

This post is part of Twitter week on the blog - the first post on a useful Twitter tool is here, and the second post on when Twitter goes wrong, is here...

When Twitter Goes BAD! Part 2: Dealing with spam, and being hacked

2012-08-14T09:41:00.000+01:00

On the second day of Twitter week here on the Toolkit blog, we'll look at what to do when your account gets hacked (and how to reduce the chances of this happening in the first place) and dealing with spam.

This is actually Part 2 of a post from a while back; Part 1, on mistakes, mistweets and abuse, can be read here.

Help! My Twitter account has been hacked!

Sometimes Twitter accounts get hacked - what usually then happens is it sends out Direct Messages (DMs) to your followers, with a link to something dodgy. The DM will often take the form of something designed to compell you to click the link - for example 'Some people online are saying really nasty things about you: [link]'. Obviously, if you receive one of these, don't click the link! And let the account-holder know.

If you find out what your account has been hacked:

The first thing to do is change your password so the hackers no longer have access - just go to the passwords tab and choose a new one
Tweet something to the effect that the account has been compromised, apologise, and advise your followers NOT to click on any links contained in DMs sent from the account
Go to your Direct Message screen and see who the spam messages have been sent to. If the recipient has already deleted the message it won't show up here - but that's okay, it's safe to assume they know it is spam and that's why they've deleted it. It's everyone else you need to worry about - so message all the remaining people DM'd by the hacking programme to say something like 'Please ignore the previous DM - our account was hacked but we have now regained control. Apologies.' It may take a while but it's the responsible thing to do to avoid people getting viruses on their PCs etc - this is doubly important with an institutional account.
This is a really key part - revoke access to 3rd party apps. The most likely way your account was compromised is because some 3rd-party app which has access to your account has also been compromised. So for example every time your authorise another website to use your twitter account - either to tweet (as in 'I just watches this video on Youtube' using YouTube's sharing buttons - or whatever it may be ) or to analyse (as in, a statistics app has accessed your account to calculate where your followers are located or how often you get @ replies - or whatever it may be) - another app gets added to the list of programmes that in effect 'have' your Twitter username and password. If you go to Settings > Apps on Twitter you can see the list - it'll probably be a lot longer than you'd imagine for your personal account, but hopefully not THAT long for your library's account. One of these apps will likely be the culprit, so revoke access to every single one which you don't 100% need, or which looks like it may no longer be active, or is just in any way dodgy. If there's anything there you don't recognise, that may well be the culprit
Here are Twitter's own guidelines on the subject

When you can't log-in because the hacker has changed your password, immediately request a password reset from Twitter, change your password, log-in, then follow the same steps as above. Twitter's support page on that subject is here. If the hackers have also hacked your email so you can't even do that, then - well, you're beyond my help anyway. :)

Tweetbots, spambots, & spam tweets

Twitter has many accounts which are entirely automated - known as bots. Some are completely harmless - Shakespeare bots scan the Twitterverse for people quoting Shakespeare and quote some more back at them, for example. There are many, many spambots, however, which will tweet @ millions of accounts at once with a message and a link - as always, the aim is to get you to click a dodgy link. Quite often the message will be nonsensical and just a mixture of currently trending topics to try and hook as many people as possible - but sometimes they're a bit more subtle. Basically, if someone tweets @ you with a link, don't click on it unless you know the person or are convinced as to what the link is.

From an institutional Twitter account point-of-view, the important thing is click the 'block' button (or the 'report for spam and block' button) so that the Tweet no longer appears in your timeline - because multiple people tweet as the library, and not all of them may realise what is a spam tweet and what isn't. Don't take any chances on someone clicking something they shouldn't, and just get rid of the tweet.

It goes without saying, that if you're on the receiving ends of one of the spam DMs discussed in the section above, this too should be deleted with all haste, and the links they contain should not be clicked under any circumstances.

There are certain types of spam which are completely benign - various bots comb Twitter for references to Shakespeare for example, and reply in verse. Once you start talking back to them, you can lose hours in conversation...

ClickToTweet is a really useful tool for your library's Twitter account

2012-08-13T12:12:00.000+01:00

After an unscheduled delay, Twitter week on the Toolkit blog is finally here! Subscribe to get 5 posts over the next 5 days about using Twitter productively in your library - starting with a nice little tool I found out about via Elyssa Kroski's OEDb blog called ClickToTweet. It's still in beta but it seems like a really simple, useful, progressive idea.

ClickToTweet: What is it?

You can find the site at clicktotweet.com and it allows you to make any sentence, link, or combination of the two, easily tweetable with a click. So in the same way you would offer a RT button on a blog post to easily enable you to tweet a link to that post, so you offer a button to tweet anything you want - for example, specific headlines, facts or statistics from a website or post.

How does it work?

You go to clicktotweet.com and type in the message you want people to tweet. It gives you a URL. You write the same message on your website or blog and write 'Tweet this' or whatever next to it, hyperlinked to the URL. Your users click the link, and the text is automatically in their Twitter send box, ready for them to click 'Tweet'.

Are you with me? So here's an example:

I'm just trying out clicktotweet.com, after reading about it via this article on @LibMarketing: http://bit.ly/RGPN7A | [tweet this]

Click the button, and you'll see how it works for the user. (You don't have to actually send the tweet if you don't want to!)

Step-by-step

So for that link above, I went to the site, and I generated the link like this:

Then I copied and pasted the URL it gave me, and used it to hyperlink [tweet this] above. Then when people click that link, they get my customised message, which'll look like this:

Good eh? NB: I used bit.ly to shorten the link - if you've got used to Twitter shortening links for you, you may be surprised to see your potential tweet exceeding the number of characters available, like I was! But bit.ly will sort that out.

How might we use it?

As always, the real question is not 'how good is the tool?' but 'can we use it to successfully engage our users?'

Here are some ideas:

Adding it in lieu of a RT button where one isn't readily available (e.g. for tweeting a link to a LibGuides page on an academic library website)
'Take-homes' from an educational blogpost (e.g. "Signing out of Google when searching is one technique for avoiding the filter-bubble - via @yourlibrary")
Top stats to tweet from a factual blog post (e.g. "Research shows that for the best response, emails should be sent between 2pm and 3pm - via @yourlibrary")
Calls to action (e.g "I just enrolled on the Library's such-and-such course, at [insert link here]"
Sharing events ("I'm going to the library's such-and-sucj - details here! [link]"
Basically any kind of headlines as they appear on a webpage or blogpost (e.g. you write 'Try Compfight or BlueMountains for finding high-quality Creative Commons images" and next to it put a 'tweet this' link - the actual tweet it self says "The YourLibrary website recommends Compfight or BlueMountains for high-quality CC images")

I'm sure you can imagine much better ones - leave them in a comment if you'd like to share them. One last obvious tip: even if you're not including a link in the pre-prepared tweets, try and include your library's Twitter handle at least, so people know where all this amazing information is coming from when they read the tweets...

Here's one last link, to Tweet about this post!

Building a digital branch of the library

2012-08-08T12:31:00.000+01:00

David Lee King is one of the most useful people to follow online - he talks and writes about technology and web stuff relating to libraries (and provides a fantastic case study for the book on 7 essential elements for an awesome library website...).

I just discovered this presentation of his on Slideshare, about Building a Digital Branch - it's worth a look, particularly as it examines whose responsibility this is and how his own library went about doing it.

David is Digital Branch Manager at Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library and their website is the best example of a public library website I've seen - it's dynamic, useful, fresh and visually interesting, so check it out here.

Anyhow, here's the presentation.

Designing the Digital Branch: it's Everyone's Job from David King

Good slides are good marketing

2012-07-06T11:18:00.000+01:00

Good slides matter, good slides are important. Good slides are a brilliant marketing opportunity. And in fact bad slides are also a marketing opportunity (to make your organisation look bad), whether you like it or not.

There's a thousand and one presentations and articles out there about Death by PowerPoint, so must people now know that lots of text in a small font divided up by bullet points are probably a bad idea. But is there any theory behind this, beyond 'it looks nice to have nice slides'? From a marketing point of view, we want to know: will our message be remembered and understood better if we make an effort with our PowerPoint? The answer is emphatically yes.

This presentation details some research into good communication via digital media, and gives you tips, tricks, links and resources to make a great presentation with which to market.

Good slides matter

View more presentations from Library Marketing Toolkit

For public libraries in particular (but for all libraries) putting good presentations up on Slideshare is a must. If Slideshare pick the presentation up and make it a featured presentation, this guarentees a few thousand extra views - if they make it a Presentation of the Day, you'll get tens of thousands. There's few other ways, if any, of getting so much exposure to a message you want to send out. 'But none of those people are our patrons so it won't matter!' you say... Not neccessarily - I've seen a fantastic presentation about a US Public Library featured on Slideshare's homepage, and with all the good online publicity it brought it filtered down to the local people, the kind of people who might not visit a library because they don't know what it does these days, but WILL visit online sources of good information, like Slideshare.

Just as libraries should assume discovery of information happens everywhere and focus on fulfillment, we should market on platforms our users use and assume they'll discover us 'externally' as well as locally. We should be popping up where patrons and potential patrons least expect, as well as where they do expect...

The Toolkit is GO! The Library Marketing Toolkit is out now

2012-07-05T07:53:00.000+01:00

[Generally speaking I won't cross-post stuff on this blog and thewikiman.org, but this is a very special occasion!]

The book I spent 2011 writing is finally out! Facet Publishing have printed and released the Library Marketing Toolkit and the pre-orders have been sent.

There are details of what the book contains, and who writes its 27 case studies, elsewhere on this site - but I really like slide-presentations as a way of getting info across in a non-boring way; with that in mind, here's what you can expect from the book. Chapters, themes covered, case studies, etc.

A preview of the Library Marketing Toolkit

View more presentations from Ned Potter

Still too early for full reviews, but some pre-prints were sent out and have been getting some good feedback:

‘Ned Potter's book will help any library succeed in creating a community that is aware and engaged in its library. He has written an easy to follow tool kit targeted at the specific marketing needs of librarians that is sure to become a favourite resource for anyone involved in marketing a library. There are case studies from libraries around the world that will inspire you no matter whether your library is large or small. You'll love this book!’ - NANCY DOWD, AUTHOR OF 'BITE-SIZED MARKETING'

‘[The Toolkit] is brilliant and a great addition to the library professional discourse.’ – ANDY WOODWORTH

'The Library Marketing Toolkit is packed full of useful, informative and above all practical information about the best ways of getting your message across, and it should be on the shelf of every librarian and information professional who needs to promote the idea of the library and its value in a modern day society.' – PHIL BRADLEY, CILIP PRESIDENT You can click here to buy in the US, via Amazon.com, or if you're in Canada you can click to buy via Amazon.ca or finally in the UK you can click here to order via Amazon UK - or just get it straight from the publisher.

It's finally done!

How to market your service using comic sans

2012-07-04T13:23:00.000+01:00

A step-by-step guide...

How to market your service using COMIC SANS

View more presentations from Library Marketing Toolkit

6 ways you (yes YOU!) can market your information service

2012-07-02T15:34:00.000+01:00

Last week I presented at an SLA-Europe event called Marketing yourself, marketing your service (#SLALeeds). It was aimed roughly at New Professionals in librarianship, so the idea of this talk was to find ways which people still in relatively junior positions (as opposed to senior marketing-type posts) could get involved. Here's the presentation:

6 things you (yes YOU!) can do to market your service on Prezi

For an explanation of what I was actually saying to accompany what was on the Prezi, look no further than Penny Andrews' review on the SLA-E blog, which summarises it all brilliantly. I also liked Laura Woods's comprehensive Storify of tweets from the event, and see also co-presenter Bethan's account of the day, and there's more notes here and here.

At the end of the event we tried something new I'd devised - Competitive Unseen-Slides Battle

Summarising™! Essentially this involved volunteers from the audience delivering a presentation based on what they'd just seen - using slides they'd never seen before which automatically changed every 15 seconds. Katie and Laura stepped up to compete, and they were both MAGNIFICENT! (It was a draw, by the way - you couldn't seperate their equal genius...)

The idea behind this was that we were in a pub so it seemed appropriate, plus I've always wanted to do Battledecks (which happens in the US a lot), plus peer-to-peer summary is very effective. Generally speaking I think it was ace, and will be trying it again...

Pinterest 101: A Primer for Libraries

2012-06-21T10:16:00.000+01:00

Pinterest.com is a site you'll have heard of - it's THE social media platform of the moment. It has already become one of the top-10 social media sites in terms of numbers of users (and in January 2012 became the fastest website in history to reach 10 million users), and attracted a lot of press coverage when recent investment valued the brand at $1billion. Of course, none of that REALLY matters to us as librarians - we care about how it can be used to bring together communities in libraries, and market our services. The mantra, as always, is about market penetration - are our users there? If so, we should be there too.

What does Pinterest actually do?

So what does it do? Pinterest allows you to pin photos (and videos) to boards, arranged and organised by theme. The images are known as pins, the boards as pinboards. It's very easy to use, and you can pin anything from anywhere online - you can mix your own original content with other things you pull in from elsewhere (this is an increasingly important feature for a web 2.0 tool to make easy, in my view). It's very easy to share. It's very easy to collaborate. It's very easy for people to express their likes and interests and hobbies and passions visually. It doesn't sound like much, but it's clearly enough.

A Pinterest board looks like this:

A nice example from Yarra Plenty, in Australia

Pinterest offers an intuitive way of sharing content with your library's community, across different themes or topics. And it allows your community to share back - that shouldn't be underestimated, it's a rare and excellent opportunity.

Good examples from the world of libraries

I like what Kansas City Library are doing with Pinterest, like this Pin Your Perfect Library theme. They're inviting their users to get involved and to pin things, and getting a really good response. They're linking Pinterest with their other social media presences effectively, too.

Savedelete.com offers a post with 20 different ways for libraries to use Pinterest. There's ideas you'd expect like using Pins to showcase new acquisitions, but also some great ideas around helping people with research interests, marketing archives, and managing reading programmes. Edudemic offers pretty much the exact same 20 things.

Also relevant from the information-literacy side of things is this guide to Pinterest and teaching / learning, from zdnet.com. They suggest using it for lesson-plans, sharing ideas and project-based learning - and offer some tips on etiquette on the platform too.

5 headlines from Sony's example

One of the blogs recommended on the Essential Tools and Resources of this website is eConsultancy. It isn't about libraries but much of their marketing expertise (which tends to be of a digital nature) is applicable in our field.

A recent post on how Sony uses Pinterest to drive traffic to their website may be of interest to both libraries using Pinterest already and those thinking about taking the plunge. It's worth reading the whole thing but here's 5 headlines I picked out from it:

Sony found out what kinds of things people would be interested in posting on a pinboard by searching Pinterest for existing pins related to the company. This is obviously a useful exercise ('our' equivalent may be looking at what people are posting on library sites - libraries like our own institutions) but the key thing here is that they used it to inform their own posts. If you pin the kind of things your patrons will pin, they'll be more likely to engage.
Before launching, they had an internal competition for employees to make Pinboards about Sony. I really like this as a method for encouraging interest in (and facilitating familiarity with) a new tool, meaning that it's not just the office social media whizzkid who's engaging with it. It also meant they had a load of content ready to go at lauch, without any one person having to put in hours and hours of work
Sony isn't just having a bit of fun with this - they have a strategy with three main goals. Libraries can and should use social media in this way too: what do we want to get out of this? What are the gains here, what are the targets? This can help inform how much time to devote to it. If the goal is to drive traffic to the main library websites, pinboards need to be set up with that in mind
They get 2.5 x the traffic to their website from Pinterest than they do from Twitter! This is amazing when you consider how much more established Twitter is - and particularly when you consider the total number of followers they have on Pinterest is around 3% of their total Twitter followers... So in other words, Pinterest is a website which encourages ACTION from its users, which is really key (it's no use having a gazillion Facebook friends for your library if none of them act any differently towards your library as result of it)
Responsy's Chad White reckons that by September at least 50% of retailers will be using Pinterest and promoting it to their customers - which will mean more people using it overall, and more people expecting to interact with their library on that platform too

If you have any outstanding examples of libraries using Pinterest (even if it's your own!) I'd love to see them in a comment.

The Library Marketing Toolkit

The ridiculous reach of Slideshare

Creating ambient awareness of the Library as authoritative source

Digital Marketing Toolkit workshop, 21st May, Edinburgh

A small change in the way these blogs operate

Short version of this post

Longer version

It's okay that people don't know about all the services we offer - they only need to know about what's relevant to THEM...

Repeat after me: host externally, embed locally

NYPL knock it out of the park, again - because they had *strategy*

An update on how the book is doing

New Library Journal column!

Check out the 658.8 library marketing blog...

Latvian Children's Library Portal Revisited!

Who created the images, and how did you work with them?

How did the interactive picture concept come about? What were the reasons for doing this?

How has the feedback been locally? It's certainly gone down very well internationally with other library professionals! But have the children liked it?

Latvian libraries generally seem to take the views of children very seriously, and work with them. Can you talk a little about this approach?

An interview with Terry Kendrick, now online!

Ned Potter’s Guide to 5 North American Libraries Doing Great Marketing Work

YouTube versus Vimeo: which one is best for Library marketing?

YouTube is...

Vimeo is...

So: what does all this actually MEAN?

3 common Twitter mistakes to avoid

1: Asking for people to DM you

2: Excluding most of your followers with an @ reply

3: Creating a hashtag which is already in use

Using Storify to market upwards in your library

What is Storify?

How can I use Storify to record and disseminate the activity on my library's twitter account?

Can you show me a ready-made example?

Do you need a disclaimer for your institutional social media accounts?

Who should have a disclaimer?

Where should it go?

What should it say?

Advanced Twitter Search for social monitoring and patron interaction

When Twitter Goes BAD! Part 2: Dealing with spam, and being hacked

Help! My Twitter account has been hacked!

Tweetbots, spambots, & spam tweets

ClickToTweet is a really useful tool for your library's Twitter account

ClickToTweet: What is it?

How does it work?

Step-by-step

How might we use it?

Building a digital branch of the library

Good slides are good marketing

The Toolkit is GO! The Library Marketing Toolkit is out now

How to market your service using comic sans

6 ways you (yes YOU!) can market your information service

Pinterest 101: A Primer for Libraries

What does Pinterest actually do?

Good examples from the world of libraries

5 headlines from Sony's example

NYPL knock it out of the park, again - because they had strategy