Marketing Libraries: What the not-for-profits can learn from the lots-of-profits!

A couple of weeks ago I presented a webinar for WebJunction on marketing libraries. Part 1 of this post is all the information from the presentation, including a video archive of it, and Part 2 is about the process of presenting in a webinar, for anyone interested in that side of things.

Part 1: Marketing Libraries

The webinar covered marketing principles (several ways to start thinking like a library marketer) - and marketing actions (ways to communicate including Word of Mouth, the website, social media etc). There are various ways you can access the content.

If you want a brief overview:

Here are the slides, with a couple of bits of info added in so they make sense without me talking over the top of them.

Marketing Libraries: What the not-for-profits can learn from the lots-of-profits! from Ned Potter

If you want the full detail:

You can view the full Archive (combined archive of audio, chat, and slides) - this requires JAVA and is a bit more technically complicated than the options above and below, but you get the full experience of the slides, me narrating them in real time, and the chat happening in real time, where you'll find lots of good ideas.

If you want a version you can watch on any device:

Here is the YouTube vid of the webinar - the good thing is you can watch this on a phone etc, the downside is some key points are missed where it skips or the live-streaming briefly went down, and it's hard to read the chat that added so much to the presentation. (You can, however, download the  chat (xls) to read in Excel as you go along.)

When I get a bit of time I'm going to break this down into smaller videos on each topic.

Part 2: Presenting a Webinar

Presenting a webinar is an inherently odd experience because you can't see the faces and responses of your audience. I rely on this a lot to know what is working and what isn't - a presentation is all about communication, after all. Not only that but it's a much bigger audience than for a normal talk - there was nearly 600 people watching this as it happened.

Above is what my desk looked like - iPad to monitor tweetstream (which I didn't have the wherewithall to actually do), landline phone to speak into (I had it pressed against my ear for the first half hour before realising there was nothing to actually hear), G&T to drink (later decanted into a glass with ice, don't worry), iPhone to live-tweet pre-written draft tweets from (it was too stressful to do this well, so I sort of tweeted them in clumsy groups), PC to present from and clock to keep to time by.

I asked for some advice on Twitter about what makes a good webinar - much of it was about good presenting generally, but the web-specific stuff centered around making it as interactive as possible (the technology limited how much I could do this, but I tried...) and giving people time to catch up (I think I pretty much failed to do this). Very useful advice from Jennifer at Web Junction included not putting any animations on the slides because these don't render well in the webinar environment (if I wanted stuff to appear on a slide as I went along, I made two versions of the slide and moved between them). The particular platform we used meant I had to dial in with a phone - a PHONE! - and talk into that whilst manipulating the slides, that was very strange. I had a practice run the night before and I'm glad I did - in essence I found out I just cannot present sitting down, I need the energy that comes from pacing around, so I ended up using my slide-clicker so I could wonder about my house without having to be too close to the PC... The downside to this is I couldn't monitor the chat nearly as well as I wanted to, to respond to questions, because I often wasn't close enough to read the small text.

This was the first time I'd done one of these solo - previous webinar experience had been as part of a panel. As is often the case, as soon as I've done something properly and learned how it works, I want to do it again but much improved based on what I now know. So I'm hoping to work with WebJunction again next year (I find their site a really useful source of information and expert opinion). But the feedback from this one was great, some really nice comments in the chat and even a reference to my accent via private message...

I enjoyed this whole thing, and clearly live-streaming and web-based events are going to be more and more important. They're very convenient for attendees, less so for presenters (I had to banish my family upstairs for example!) but I did get to wear shorts for a presentation for the first time, and even drink Gin & Tonic during it, and that was ace.

Running sessions on Web 2.0 tools for researchers

Edit: This post has been sitting, completed and tagged, in my drafts folder for over a month - it was meant as a direct follow up to a previous post (linked below) but then the gender and digital idenity thing came up (which is now EVERYWHERE in the media - glad the issue is getting proper coverage) and after that my second daughter was born, so it all got pushed back... Anyhow, here it is. I recently ran a suite of 3 workshops, collectively entitled Becoming a Networked Researcher. I've put all the presentation materials elsewhere on the blog, so check them out if you're interested. This post covers the approach, what worked, what didn't, and general stuff about librarians getting involved with running researcher events that cover new online tools.

It's definitely time to do this

I've been wanting to do workshops like these for years... I run workshops for information professionals so I know how valuable it can be to learn about these tools - and blogs like the LSE Impact Blog show that in Higher Education generally, more and more people are finding Web 2.0 essential. As info pros a lot of us have this knowledge, so why not share it with an academic community who will be grateful for it and will benefit from it?

Previously some people may have thought I was something of a stuck record on this topic - just banging on about Twitter because it was what I knew about, when actually the Library should be focusing more on the traditional things we do with Researchers. (No one directly said this to me so I may well just be projecting!) But the thing about stuff like this is it opens doors - it positions the library or librarian as expert, and gains us respect. It means researchers become more open to the other things we have to offer.

Anyhow, demand for these sessions was huge. We're going to be running them twice a year from now on as once isn't enough. So if you have expertise in this area, try and make something happen!

What to cover?

I'd previously run an 'Enhancing your online reputation' workshop for academics which mainly covered blogs and twitter only, due to time constraints - I still see these as the big two. They're arguably the two most important platforms or tools, and they're definitely the right foundations on which to build a useful presence.

I also ran a taster session on online tools for academics which covered no less than 9 different things - interestingly, lots of them put in their feedback forms that of all the tools we covered, they'd want more training on Prezi. So I put Prezi into the collaboration and dissemination session, but actually it needs its own bespoke training really - it's too big to cover as part of something else.

I put in Academia.edu because I think it's actually quite useful, I put in LinkedIn because everyone else TELLS me it's useful, I put in Slideshare because I think it's the great underrated secret weapon of communicating ideas. I left out ResearchGate because I'd heard they're pretty aggressive in emailing people once they sign up, in a way which is annoying.

Anyhow, the Blogging session and Twitter session were much more successful than the other session, so I'd advise starting with these, and adding more if there's demand.

What worked

• Collaborating with RDT. The Researcher Development Team are nothing to do with the library, but thankfully they're open to collaboration. I managed to meet up with Russell Grant, who runs a couple of social media courses anyway, and suggest the suite described above to build on what he'd already done - in theory, an academic could have attended his two workshops and then my three workshops and they'd have all worked together, building knowledge and understanding. I really like working with departments outside the library generally - not least because then the events aren't 'Library events' that no one shows up for, they're University events which happen to be delivered by a librarian
• They What, Why, Examples, How method. I try do this in most of my training. You have to introduce a tool and tell an audience what it is - but it's vital to then go on to why they might want to use it before you go into the detail of how it works... With relevant examples if at all possible. Lots of the feedback suggests people really value this approach.
• Enthusiasm. I'm really enthusiastic about these topics, and that always helps...

What didn't

• Doing the workshops with only one-day gaps between them - I felt like it completely defined my week and didn't leave much room for anything else
• Not enough example - I tried to put loads in (academic examples specifically) but I could always use more
• The Collaboration and Dissemination session tried to fit too much into the time. We're splitting it up in future (see below)
• I can't make LinkedIn sound exciting... I know it's important. Everyone says it's important, researchers particularly. But I can't seem to convey its value well
• Some logisitical stuff to do with rooms and timing, with which I won't bore you now...

Future plans

We're running a tweaked programme in the next academic year, and it's going to be different in a few ways.

• It'll be run twice, once in the Spring and once in the Summer - the Autumn term is just too crazy for everyone concerned
• It'll have one session per week. Last time round I did all three sessions in a week and I'm not sure that really benefited the participants much - it just made me feel like I was having a crazy week
• There'll be a blogging session as before, a Twitter session as before, but the Collaboration and Dissemination session we're splitting up into two. We're doing a Prezi session, and then a 'social networks for researchers' session - I've asked a colleague from the Researcher Development Team if he can do the latter, because I think he'd be better at it than me
• I'm splitting the blogging and Twitter sessions into a 'PhD and Masters researchers' session and an 'academics' session - there's 90% crossover between those two groups, but the other 10% I found it frustrating only giving examples that worked fully for one or other group. Seeing as the sessions were over-subscribed anyhow, we may as well provide targeted workshops for each group
• So what this means is, in consecutive weeks we're offering an Introduction to Social Media (talk, given by my colleague Russell Grant), Enhacing your Online Reputation (workshop by Russell), Blogs (workshops, by me - one for postgrads and one for academics), Twitter (workshop, by me - workshops, by me - one for postgrads and one for academics), Social Networks For Researchers (workshop, by Rusell) and Prezi (workshop, by me). All one and a half hours except the Prezi one which needs to be 3hrs - I've tried teaching Prezi in less but it doesn't really work... .

Exciting stuff!

A letter to a younger me

I've not been blogging for a month or so due to the arrival of baby Grace! But I'm back at work on Monday so I'm gradually easing back in to the world of librarianship, starting with some stuff I meant to blog links to ages ago but never got around to... I was delighted to be asked to write a post on the Letters to a Young Librarian blog run by Jessica Olin. It's a really good blog and one that I read a lot anyway, so it was really nice to do something for it. Here's my post.

I tried to really honestly (and at the risk of embarassing myself a bit) write a letter to the me that was about to start his first day in libraries, aged 25-and-a-half, back in 2006. I also tried to make it as relevant and useful as possible to a new professional today, so check it out and and tell me what you think. It includes a list of things I think we really should be doing in our profession:

• Communicating our value PROPERLY at every opportunity.
• Embracing informality.
• Trying to inspire people rather than placate.
• Understanding that work-life balance is important enough that it should not be considered with reference to what ANYONE ELSE IS DOING. 
• Libraries have always been product orientated, but now they need to be market orientated. .

Each of these is expanded in the post; it was fun to think about this stuff. Thanks to Jessica for asking me and the reader of her blog who requested the post!

I've written quite a lot of stuff on platforms other than here (or the Toolkit blog) in recent months - there's a complete list in the Guest Posts On... section down the right-hand side of the website (you'll need to scroll down!) but here are the most recent:

• Circulating Ideas - l was honoured to be a guest on the Librarian interview podcast. Listen to it here
• Expert tips for marketing your library - interview for LIBER
• Rebranding a Library: how did it all go so right? - for Information Today
• Marketing libraries is like marketing mayonnaise - for Library Journal
• Marketing your library - for American Libraries Magazine
• Marketing with video - my first column for Library Journal
• Six Questions with me about marketing stuff, on the 658.8 blog .

Normal blog service will now be resumed!

The only way we will definitely be screwed is if we screw CILIP

 

CILIP have been getting flak from the Library community since before I became aware of its existence. I gave out some of the flak myself – my post on CILIP and its lack of media presence remains one of the most commented-upon post this blog has ever had. I spoke up to try and constructively catalyse change – whether by coincidence (almost certainly) or not (it’s a nice thought) CILIP has since addressed the issue and it a much more vocal presence in the media.

The trouble I have with some of the criticism it gets is the level of at best dismissiveness and at worst, bile (or perhaps scorn) that doesn’t seem to be accompanied by much that could be considered constructive. Lots of people are happy to express the opinion that the rebranding process needs halting, but fewer have suggested what we should then do about the fact that CILIP still needs rebranding and (almost certainly) have entered into a legally binding contract with a consultancy firm.

People seem to imagine CILIP is an abstract entity which is perhaps ignorant of or indifferent to the needs of libraries, librarians and information professionals. What CILIP actually is, of course, is a group of individual human beings who care very much about libraries, librarians and information professionals and are doing their best to support all of them. To say otherwise is ignorant. I’ve met a lot of CILIP people and never once have any of them given me even an inkling that they didn’t care, or weren’t working hard, or were not qualified to do their jobs.

CILIP is a big unwieldy company with a royal charter, and it has a lot of armchair critics. A lot of people who’ve never led a massive charity-registered organisation appear to think they’d be awesome at it if given the chance; a chance 99% of them would not take if it actually came down to it, of course. Perhaps because smaller groups have achieved amazing things online, people expect CILIP to be able to do the same – but it has responsibilities and processes which prevent it from being so agile. Rowing a boat is not the same as running a big old paddle-steamer with thousands of paying customers. I know of no big organisations with massive budgetary constraints that consistently do everything right.

Traditionally I’ve supported CILIP. Recently I’ve lazily drifted into the camp of taking easy shots at them, and I was horrified at the thought of £35k (if that figure is indeed correct) being spent on the rebrand. I didn’t renew my membership right away when it lapsed. One of the reasons is that people I respect have tried to work with CILIP and found it untenable.

But I’m a member now and will continue to be one. This is partly because certain individuals previously or currently at CILIP (particularly Kathy Ennis, Biddy Fisher and Phil Bradley) have been really supportive of me and given me confidence and valuable opportunities. It’s partly because the Career Development Group helped me develop my career – in fact they’ve helped me develop my career to a stage where I no longer need them anymore. But it seems a bit callous to just say ‘okay thanks, bye!’ and no longer put any money into the organisation. If CILIP has helped you get just ONE pay-grade higher, then that’s more than a decade’s worth of annual subscriptions in extra salary you earn every year – it only seems fair to reinvest a fraction in the organisation.

But the third reason I’ll continue to support CILIP – even when they do things I don’t agree with – is because the only way we’ll be completely screwed is if we screw CILIP. By supporting them and letting them speak for us, we might be screwed – they might get it wrong. Just doing one’s best is not a guarantee of success. But by withdrawing our support, dismissing them, being scornful of them, bringing up absurd conspiracy theories online – that way we’re definitely screwed. Because like it or not CILIP speaks for the profession in this country – that’s precisely why they’re going through the controversial rebranding in the first place, because they feel (and most of us have felt for a long time) that ‘CILIP’ and 'Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals' are not working for their role as mouthpiece. The way some people talk on social media, you’d think CILIP are quite enjoying this complicated process, and are just doing it as a way to thumb their nose at the members.

I think there’s an undercurrent to all this of ‘If we don’t renew our membership and say how much we hate what CILIP doing, that’ll show them – they’ll HAVE to change then’. But know this – if the personnel at CILIP changes, we’ll be replacing one set of hard-working people doing their best for the profession with (hopefully) another set of hard-working people doing their best for the profession, and they may not make choices you like any better. We are, after all, talking about very difficult choices here. Have you tried trying to change and adapt, move forward without leaving people behind, maintain the responsibilities of being a registered charity and having the royal charter, and trying to include everyone and yet speak with one clear and unambiguous voice, and all that at a time when there’s a hostile government, a public mostly indifferent or steeped in happy but irrelevant nostalgia, and unprecedented threats to the very existence and value of libraries? ME EITHER. I imagine that’s quite hard to do. It is not through lack of effort that these controversial decisions are being arrived at.

By all means criticise CILIP. By all means make your voice heard. But support the organisation at the same time. Criticism and support are NOT mutually exclusive. Make suggestions. (By suggestions I don’t mean ‘stop what you’re doing I hate it I hate it’, I mean suggestions which work towards addressing the problems which CILIP are dealing with in ways not currently to your liking). If half as much energy was put into helping CILIP as was put into slagging it off, it could get a lot more done.

Remember that running a big chartered institute is nothing like running a social media campaign or a pressure group. And above all remember that CILIP is a bunch of humans working all day on our behalf, on the really very tricky problems we face as an industry and a profession.

Libraries are in a bit of a state. I don't want a professional body that keeps everybody happy, I just want a professional body which gets shit done. CILIP can get more done with us, than without us.

Is it the end of an era for librarian blogging?

 

Update: the day after posting this, I'm adding a little disclaimer: I am NOT saying blogging is finished! I'm saying a specific era is possibly coming to an end. And I still think blogging is, for information professionals, still extremely useful, very rewarding, and a great thing to do. Okay, glad that's sorted.

Recently Andy Woodworth blogged about how he wasn't blogging that much any more, and today @tinamreynolds sparked a debate on Twitter about whether the library bloggging community was slowing down, and if so, why?

I've definitely noticed this. There was a set of around 10 blogs that diverted into an 'Essentials' folder in my Google Reader which I read all the time, and there was at least 30 more that I regularly caught up with. But hardly any of the bloggers in question are producing regular articles in 2013. I don't really use a Reader any more - I just pick stuff up via Twitter. I don't blog nearly as much as I used to - and when I do it tends to be about things which happened ages ago (my last post, published late last week, was about an event which happened in February, 3 months back).

Lack of time is the biggest reason given for not blogging these days, and that makes a lot of sense. But I think it might be a changing of the guard, rather than an overall slow-down - a bunch of new professionals becoming older professionals, and newer ones attacking the biblioblogosphere with a fervor in their place. If we interact online in loosely defined sets (in my case, it's largely 'the people who were new professionals in 2009 when I went to the new professionals conference') then it stands to reason that there would be a collective ebb and flow in our activity. As we get up the career ladder we become busier and have less time to blog, and we're on similar cycles of activity, commitments, and enthusiasm...

I really, really enjoyed being part of a thriving, dynamic online community of info-pro bloggers. But I don't miss it now it's gone.

For me though it's not just lack of time - it's lack of energy for the profession itself. I think I'd make time if it was all as important to me as it used to be. Which isn't to say it's not important - I'm quite passionate about libraries, and still very passionate about librarians and our community. But I said a LOT of things on this blog in the first 3 years or so I wrote it, and that level of momentum - that fire - wasn't really sustainable. There are librarians whose CPD is seemingly never subject to atrophy - I admire that, but don't aspire towards it, weirdly.

I just don't have that much to say anymore. I used to write posts like this one, about the state of play - I used to love it when lots of people commented and we had a big debate about stuff. But now when I write things on here it tends to be more focused and specific: the last four posts have been about an online tool, a marketing idea, an event, and a presentation. These kinds of posts don't get as many views as the old debate type posts, but the blog gets more views overall because there's now so much of it for Google to find!

So if you blog, do you blog less now than you used to? Is it the end of an era for librarian blogging? And if so, to what do you attribute this - is it just lack of time, or are there other reasons too?

p.s just as I was about to hit publish on this, I saw this tweet from @barlowjk which sums up one of the problems very nicely - we have finite mental real estate! And SO much stuff filling it up these days...