Marketing men

When people think of marketing they associate it with advertising more than as an essential part of the work of the a librarian. Which is a good excuse for a picture of Don Draper from Mad Men.

Now I've got that out of my system I can talk about libraries! For me the modern librarian has to 'market' the service in the broadest possible sense - if marketing is providing the right services and making people aware that we are providing these services - which is surely part of what librarians should be doing every day.

Web 2.0 can help with marketing simply because it provides so many new outlets for contact with users, or potential users. A significant number of the things we've looked at so far can be used in this way. Facebook and Twitter are brilliant ways to keep in contact with people and tell them about new services, or remind them or services they may have forgotten about - surely marketing by another name.

The opportunities to connect with other librarians that Twitter and professional social networking like LinkedIn are also useful to see what other people are doing: sharing ideas and getting inspiration.

Also the possibilities of things like Delicious, RSS feeds and Zotero to help students are - in the right situation - an excellent opportunity to show how good library services are. Someone who is struggling with referencing, for example could be pointed in the direction of Zotero (or, in an ideal world, given training) by a librarian, and given a positive experience of the support librarians can provide.

Finally the Creative Commons on Flickr seem to me to offer a brilliant way to improve more traditional forms of marketing (posters etc.) as wonderful images can be found and used easily and for free. This is more interesting and professional looking which again hopefully gives a better impression of the library.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn sounds like an interesting idea - professional social networking is surely something to be explored when personal social networking like Facebook is so popular. It was all fairly easy to set up although it seems quite difficult to initially start networking as it covers all industries. The people LinkedIn suggested I should link to weren't that relevant either, as they were people I know personally, and their industries range from health care to volunteering management - so not hugely library related! This might be because I've only recently started working in the profession so don't have a large contact base to start from.

I've recently joined the newly launched LIS New Professionals Network, which is also designed for professional networking - but is focused entirely on new professionals within the information and library field in the UK. It shares many similar features with LinkedIn - discussion groups and networking for example, although it has less emphasis on the CV/profile element. I think for me at the moment LISNPN is more helpful because it is more specific and relevant, although I will probably try and keep my LinkedIn profile up-to-date and explore it more in the future.

I'm Face-bookin'

Aah so I've finally reached Facebook - which I'm a keen user of. I know all the arguments against Facebook: the privacy concerns, the copyright issues, the general confusion of my parents about why anyone would want to put so much information on any type of website.

I am still, however, a fan, I probably log into Facebook more than any other website. This is partly because, aside from my mobile, Facebook is the main way I keep in contact with people - sharing photos, organising events and sending messages.
That I conduct and organise my social life through Facebook is a bit lazy - although at least I can be comforted with the fact that, as Facebook's popularity grows and grows, I'm definitely not the only lazy person in the world! Facebook's popularity is of course what makes it a useful tool for libraries - it is the easiest way to connect to students via the web simply because so many students use Facebook.

The library I work at recently set up a Facebook page which has been quite successful fairly quickly - after one email saying we had a library Facebook page, about 60 people 'liked' us.

This page is now used to let people know about small pieces of library news. It's an advantage that the followers of the page have opted themselves in, so although we don't want to pester them, they are obviously happy to receive a bit more information about the library than they get from emails. It's also probably easier for them to get news about the library this way, especially, if like me, they log into Facebook frequently. Facebook would never become the main way a library contacts users: a lot of people wouldn't 'like' the library and therefore wouldn't see the updates. And despite its popularity there are still a lot of people who don't use Facebook. For those who do though, it is a handy way to provide more information about the library, if they would like it, in an informal way, and on a site they are familiar with.

Visual distraction

Flickr is the kind of thing that I can accidentally spend hours on - I get slightly addicted to looking up places I know, or events I've been to. I like the fact that it almost acts as a visual Twitter, although not quite so up the moment, getting many different perspectives on large events if people are kind enough to upload pictures and then tag them. You can find such specific images on there - you can see my childhood home in the distance here for example:

With thanks to orangeaurochs.

There were even some images of paternoster lifts. My department at university had to be reached by a paternoster, which always used to break down on essay deadline days. There are a surprising number of lift-fanciers out there posting (working) paternoster videos on YouTube. I was pleased to see on Flickr that the one in Sheffield has similar technical problems to 'my' paternoster.

With thanks to iwouldstay.

Saying all this, however, I do think there are better ways of sharing pictures without the collective, social, elements of Flickr. I know Facebook has been mentioned by a lot of Cam23 people as the most effective way of sharing photos online, and I do certainly use this to upload photos of people who are also on Facebook. I prefer Photobucket or Picasa though if I want to show albums - with less of the community/tagging available on Flickr - to people without Facebook accounts or that contain pictures of no interest to my Facebook friends.

Where Flickr becomes invaluable to libraries though is in the simple copyright rules of the Creative Commons agreement. I hadn't come across the Creative Commons element of Flickr before and it is really useful to have such a large source of copyright friendly images - I can imagine when doing presentations, user education or library marketing materials in the future it will be a really handy resource.

Blog blog blog

When I originally logged into my Google account at the start of 23 things, I had a brief moment of panic where I decided the internet is definitely a BAD THING whose purpose is to hold embarrassing information to be rediscovered later in life. And not just those photos on Facebook that make my face look 'squishy' in the words of one of my friends. I found a blog I kept back in the day, otherwise known as around 2004. I don't think it's quite as bad as The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, but I still wanted to make sure I had removed all trace of teenage confessions from public view before releasing more of my 'blogging' on the world.

My old blog pretty much had the purpose of a diary - a way of keeping up with friends, sharing photographs etc. before Facebook made all that easy. Writing a blog for 23 Things - which should have some sort of point and content rather than just musings - is hopefully going to be more useful (and also hopefully won't, in six years time, be hideously embarrassing, although there is still time!).

I find Blogger fairly user friendly, especially when just writing posts: automatically saving drafts every so often is a brilliant feature which anyone who has ever lost a long email through a bad internet connection or accidental page refresh will appreciate. I also love the new template designer, which allows lovely background images - there is no rhyme or reason why I chose cliffs, except I like them and having a picture of the tweed library suit from the Mighty Boosh would have been a bit too psychedelic for me! The template designer also makes it easier to change things like post layout and where the gadgets display on the page.

I now just need to start this blogging malarkey properly and get up to date with the things!

iGoogle, I get distracted

I had used iGoogle before - I assume the nice little button saying either 'try' and/or 'new' caught me in the right mood. Never having logged in again since my initial play I felt I should give a bit of time to explore it properly.

So I created a general homepage adding Twitter, Facebook, email, news headlines as well as retaining some of the standard gadgets like Google Maps.

I was also a little bit too excited on discovering that the theme I'd selected (of penguins) could be complimented by little animated penguins on the main page. I felt this was a good thing even though I can't really explain why.

I think this may be the problem for me of using iGoogle, it seems very high tech and convenient to be able to check social media and email in one space, but, for similar reasons as why I don't Tweet on my phone, I don't actually like that level of permanent distraction.

I also felt the gadgets themselves didn't work that well - I haven't been able to remove the 'dark shadow' (which sounds lovely and Gothic) off the Facebook gadget. Clicking through from the gadget sends you to the mobile interface, which isn't as clear as the regular Facebook display, so I would then just log into regular Facebook to see whatever it was that caught my attention, which rather defeats the point. The Twitter gadget worked a lot better although, as Library Wanderer points out, the delay in updates still makes the main Twitter site the best way to follow what's happening.

Although I didn't like using iGoogle at home, I felt having a launch page at work might be more useful. I really liked the ability to create multiple landing pages so set up a 'Library' tab. To this I added the COPAC search box, as suggested by 23 things and which I wouldn't have though of searching for myself, a currency converter, a few RSS feeds and Google Translate. This seems to make more sense than the glowing lava lamp of distraction that is my main page, as having these things on one page should save time.


Again though I had problems with the gadget on iGoogle not working as well as the main page - looking something up on the map gadget, for example, you couldn't click through to Google Streetview. I found this quite annoying and again sent me back to Google maps proper, as I love being able to see where I'm supposed to be going as well as having the map.

I think perhaps I'd be more inclined to carry on using iGoogle at work if some of the gadgets were improved, on the whole though, moving penguins on my homepage are a stage too far for me!