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.

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.

What is the point of Twitter?

Well there is no way I'm going to be able to answer that one in a single blog post, but as this is a question I always get asked about Twitter I thought I should at least try - at least so I have a good answer next time it happens!

I love the collective feeling of Twitter - although this unfortunately can mean the Fail Whale makes an appearance more regularly than one would like, especially during the World Cup.

Twitter is a place where people share major news stories, and therefore sometimes where we first hear of major events, as this article from India Knight in the Sunday Times about the death of Michael Jackson and the Twittersphere illustrates.  I followed election night on Twitter which was fascinating: from the culty number one trending topic of 'Long Legged Cleggy Weggy' from the comedy show Russell Howard's Good News to more serious comment on the results coming in to the standard of political debate offered on TV - on Twitter I could get a running commentary as well as a lot of humour and irreverence.

This was why I initially got into Twitter - but I have become more and more impressed about the uses for library networking in the last few weeks. #hashtags make it really easy to follow things like #cam23. Following librarians means I hear about important library news stories instantly - such as the KPMG report which suggested cuts in professional staff in public libraries among other things - and can follow the reactions of librarians. This is a really invaluable learning tool for someone at the beginning of their career like myself. I can now get an idea of what's being said at conferences without actually attending - I followed Tweets from the CILIP New Professionals Conference 2010 from other graduate trainees who were there: a brilliant way to get ideas and information immediately and from miles away. I feel Twitter keeps me better informed and part of a larger community of librarians which is fantastic, and unavailable anywhere but Twitter. 

Collective jokes and news, sharing information and being part of a network of librarians - this is the point of Twitter for me!

"A doodle. I do doodle. You too. You do doodle too."

I have to confess it - I love Doodle, in fact I love it so much I quote from the Buffyverse to introduce it.

I was introduced to it by Delve and Discover a few months ago as a means to organise a meet up of around nine people. It is a brilliant tool if you need to find out when people can do, rather than actually organising the whole meeting/event which can be done alongside Doodle with emails, texts and perhaps even a good old fashioned chat!

Not having to enter a password is key to this of course - anyone with an internet connection can be included with Doodle, rather than anyone with an internet connection who is willing to register. It takes about two minutes clicking to select when you can attend, which you can edit later if plans change. I also like how entirely user determined it is - you can enter attendees as couples or multiple names and can select a number of different times when initially setting up the event. I had a brief look at Tungle.me and it was handy you could log in through a different account password - such as Twitter, you still have to log in which makes the process more complicated. Similarly, with Meet-O-Matic, although you can set up a meeting without logging in you can't use the advanced options such as selecting multiple times of day.

The genius of Doodle is its simplicity in solving an annoying but small problem. I can't see Doodle ever taking off for organising meet ups with one or two people but when trying to get big groups of people with lots of other commitments together it is hugely useful. I really like it when technology makes things easier and Doodle does that.

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!