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.

RSS-sssssssssss feeds

As the news came in last week that snake numbers are declining worldwide, I couldn't resist making my blog title reference this!

I have used RSS feeds before, having set myself up a Google Reader account a few months ago. This was mostly to scan for stories about libraries in the news and following interesting librarian blogs before my library school interviews so that I could keep an eye on any news stories they might ask me about.

I particularly liked the way you could make an RSS feed of keyword searches on the BBC news website, which is a brilliantly lazy way of looking out for interesting news stories. I love that little orange square! Although when I went to have a play for 23 Things I noticed that the BBC search doesn't support this any more. If there are any wonderfully teccy people who know how to save keyword searches on sites that don't have the magic orange square I'd be really pleased to know about it.

Since going to my interviews I have to say that I haven't looked at Reader that often. I find that it is easy to organise different feeds and look at the ones of interest on Google Reader so I can just dip in and out. I was excited that I could subscribe to all of the Cambridge 23 Things blogs at once though - thanks to Girl in the Moon! I really like being able to scan all the blogs and being able to see which ones I have looked at although I'm unfortunately not going to have anywhere near enough time to read them all properly!

My instinct is that RSS feeds could be usefully utilised within libraries, in certain situations. I like the feature to be able to create a feed and then share it with others - this could be of use for collecting relevant feeds together for researchers, although obviously they would have to happy to get a RSS reader (or iGoogle or similar of course) themselves. It is essentially a very logical way of collecting together information which will be of use and/or interest on the net. This won't replace actively searching for information, or browsing, which can throw up unexpected items of interest, but is a useful addition to other research methods.