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.