10 top tips to build momentum in online communities

 

There are more and more communities online - working with people is great, and now it is easy, too. Anyone can create a network, or a movement, or a collaboration. But what works well and what doesn't?

I was originally going to present on how to build momentum in online communities at Online last year, but I ended up not having time to attend and this has been sitting in my drafts folder ever since. I'm going to put this out there and see if there's any more tips people would like to add.

As a bit of background, I've been involved with a few projects that involve online communities in one form or another:  the Library Routes Project,  Buy India a Library, and most relevantly LISNPN, the New Professionals Network. Crucially I've also been involved in at least one project which hasn't worked out, so I've had positive and negative experiences from which to put together these tips.

3 to 6 are basically about people, 7 to 9 are about promotion, and the others are general logistics stuff.

1. The first month is crucial, so work like a madman/woman

The word 'month' is flexible here, but basically the time around the launch is so, so important to building momentum which can be self-sustaining thereafter. It's worth delaying the launch of a new network / community / project until you know you (and your team - see below) have time to dedicate to making it work.

2. Stagger new developments

As much as its tempting to launch your new project in its final, ninja-level awesome state, if you can bring in new developments and ideas over the course of the first few months, this really helps keep up momentum. New things re-engage people, and make them more likely to share links to your project via their existing networks.

3. Assemble a team

Working with other people is BRILLIANT. They'll think of things you haven't thought of, spot potential you hadn't considered, and save you from embarassing or costly mistakes you hadn't forseen. (Or is that just me?) A team of people also means more natural advocates for the project, and more support for the community itself.

4. Empower the members

Trying to control any kind of online space is SO 2005. You're better off giving power and responsibility to the whole membership, rather than trying to micromanage everything. Once your project launches, accept it is going to have a life of its own and try and encourage that. Empowered members are engaged members - they're more likely to feel the kind of ownership which gets them more involved.

5. Have a horizontal hierachy

Very closely related to number 4- as much as it is important to have people acting as administrators in an online space, it's better if people aren't waiting on you (or whoever is nominally in charge) to make things happen. So allow people to edit the online space, to set up their meet-ups, to contribute resources, etc etc.

6. Utilise champions

Word of Mouth Marketing - it can't be beat! If the right people talk to the right networks, that's a far more effective way of spreading the word than doing it all yourself. Find people who love the project, and give them all the information and tools they need to spread the word more widely.

7. Disseminate online - everywhere!

This obvious but there's a really important underlying point here, which it took me AGES to learn - promotion works best if people find out about something in more than one way, and more than once. It's very rare that a single event will have a massive effect - so, a single ad in the perfect journal, or a single blog-post guesting on the perfect blog; you'd think they'd cause a massive amount of people to check out your online community, but they won't. It's actually people seeing the same thing in a variety of sources they trust and value that makes people actually DO SOMETHING - i.e. click a link and have a look at a post or a website. This is why strategic marketing works so much better than one-off-promotion - what Terry Kendrick would call a 'series of touches at the right times' result in positive things happening.

To take a really simplified example - if someone tweets a link to a blog post with a title which doesn't inspire you, you'll probably ignore it; but if 4 or 5 other people you respect RT it, you'll probably think it's worth checking out anyway, and have a look.

8. Use mailing lists

I'm not a fan of mailing lists and don't subscribe to any, but a lot of people do and whenever stuff like LISNPN got promoted on JISCmail lis-serves, there was always a huge increase in clicks on the site and people becoming members. I think it's literally because there's no gap between finding out about something and seeing it in the flesh - you just click the link and your there. For that reason, it's good to link to an intersting page!

9. Avoid print, or at least don't rely on it

I've found the opposite of 8 to be true with 9 - articles in printed publications just don't seem to bring people in. I'm sure it helps in a small way (it continues the series of touches described in number 7) but there's a massive drop-off in direct action resulting from a print-article, probably because there's no link to click so the half-interested never think of it again, and the quite interested don't remember to go back later on when they're at a computer.

10. No one wants to be first onto the empty dance-floor so you need your ducks in a row before you launch

For LISNPN, we got 50 people as members BEFORE we launched, and made sure the forum was populated with some introductory posts etc. After that, for the first month we had an average of 636 page views a day and 10 people signing up per day - that was sufficient to create self-sustaining momentum thereafter.

People are drawn to stuff which is already happening; they don't want the responsibility of making it happen themselves...

- thewikiman

A guide to networking for new librarians

I was really pleased to take part in the Annual programme for the ALA's New Members Round Table, last week - it was a webinar and the whole thing was recorded. You can watch and listen to it online here (it opens in Adobe Connect) - I talk about the 'What' of networking (starting around the five-and-half-minute mark) and finish things off with the 'Why' (around 42 minutes) - in between the How, Who, Where and When are covered by Loida Garcia-Febo, Courtney Young, JP Pocaro and Pat Hawthorne respectively.

Huge thanks to Bohyun Kim for inviting me to present - it was nice to take advantage of the technology to do something with the ALA without having to be at the conference in the US, and I enjoyed the webinar a lot. Appropriately, I made a few connections at the event and found it to be good networking experience.

Being forced to define networking for the purposes of the talk, and take a step back and look at what it means and involves, was a revealing experience, in particular because it made me realise how much of what I think about having a brand can apply to networking. In particular:

• Networking, like developing a brand, is a means to an end and that end is opportunities to do interesting or fun things - you meet and connect with people who expand your horizons, expose you to new ideas, and collaborate with you to do cool stuff. (Unlike brand networking is also an end in itself - it's just fun to talk to nice people.)
• If developing a brand is a natural byproduct of pursuing your professional interests in as networked a way as possible, then developing a network is a natural byproduct of the same thing, really.
• Related to the above: in my experience it's easiest to develop a network by positioning yourself as part of the dialogue in librarianship and contributing, than for example saying 'I'm going to make X connections' and actually setting out specifically to develop a network or market yourself .

I find my network (essentially: you lot) to be THE single most useful thing in my professional life, and in the webinar I reflected on a clear delineation (marked by the 2009 New Professionals Conference) of pre-networked-Ned and networked-Ned - all the interesting things have happened in the latter period. I could neither have written my book nor got my current job without my network. So a: thank you! And b: if you're wondering about taking the plunge and networking more, it's worth it. Becoming part of something bigger is a great thing.

- thewikiman

Introducing the Library Marketing Toolkit website!

Months in the planning, the library marketing toolkit website is finally live! It can be found at www.librarymarketingtoolkit.com.

What's on it?

The site is essentially designed to give you lots of practical advice on how to market your library - be that public, academic, special or archive. There are tools and resources, lots of useful links, new case studies which will be added to on an ongoing basis, and there's info about the Library Marketing Toolkit book and its contributors.

There's also a blog, which will give tips and aim to highlight the best (and sometimes the worst) marketing from libraries around the world. The first post is Marketing libraries with new technologies: what you need to know, and what to do next and features this presentation, which I gave yesterday at an Academic and Research Libraries Group conference on new technologies in libraries:

(Works best on full-screen mode)

Marketing with New Technologies on Prezi

What's coming up next?

The next post on the site will be a fantastic case study from the Bodleian library at Oxford, about their amazing smartphone app which has had everyone from Stephen Fry downwards swooning over it's amazingness.

There's also some additional case study material which I couldn't fit into the book, and several other brand new case studies including stuff from the UnLibrary in Crouch End, high-level tips on crowd-sourcing from JISC's Ben Showers, and a brilliant how-to on social monitoring from Andy Burkhardt.

Subscribing etc

I'd love it if you subscribed to the new blog - you can subscribe by clicking here - and there's a Twitter account too, @libmarketing, which you can follow here. If you want to spread the word about the new website on Twitter (for which I'll love you forever!) here's a ready made click-to-tweet link to it.

About The Library Marketing Toolkit book itself

The Library Marketing Toolkit will be published by Facet Publishing this Summer (probably 20th of July in the UK, and slightly later in the US / Canada. Stateside it will be distrubuted and marketed by Neal-Schuman, who've just been bought by the ALA). It is aimed at public libraries, special libraries, academic libraries and archives, and is extremely practical in nature - ideas you can apply right away to market your library more succesfully.

The best part is, it has 27 fantastic case studies from really amazing people and libraries from the UK, the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Singapore. Contributors include organisations like the British Library and the National Archive, New York Public Library, University of Cambridge, JISC - and amazing individuals too: see the Contributor's page of the Toolkit website for details of all of them.

You can order it direct from Facet, or via Amazon UK, Amazon US, Amazon Canada etc. As mentioned in the previous post, a free chapter is available for download, here (PDF).

We have one advance-copy review so far, a great one from Nancy Dowd, the vertiable QUEEN of marketing libraries!

Ned Potter's  book will help any library succeed in creating a community that is aware and engaged in its library. He has written an easy to follow tool kit targeted at the specific marketing needs of librarians that is sure to become a favourite resource for anyone involved in marketing a library. There are case studies from libraries around the world that will inspire you no matter whether your library is large or small. You'll love this book!’ - Nancy Dowd, Author of ALA's Best Selling Book, Bite-Sized Marketing

- thewikiman

Library adventures in Latvia! (Plus, what we can learn from their approach.)

I've just got back from Latvia where I've been doing some work for the Father's Third Son project - the part of the Ministry of Culture which looks after libraries, basically. This post is part 'here's what I did and how it went' and part 'Latvian libraries are pretty amazing - here's what we can learn from them'. I'll get the embedded presentation out of the way first.

New librarians: this is your time

The first thing I did was based largely on The Time For Libraries is NOW, and the third thing I did was in two separate Prezis which would be a bit complicated to reproduce here, so I'm embedding the middle one. It was delivered to information science students at the University of Latvia, and is basically about how great our profession is...

(For Slideshare file-size limit reasons, I've actually had to take out about 20 slides and get rid of loads of the pictures, but you'll get the general idea. Feel free to embed this wherever you see fit!)

New Librarians: This is your time

View more presentations from Ned Potter

The background

Father's Third Son have been working with Bill and Melinda' Gates's Global Libraries foundation to revolutionise libraries in Latvia.

The name derives from Latvian folklore, a tale which is a bit like a gender-reversed version of Cinderella but with more emphasis on overcoming difficulties and flourishing - the same story also informs the shape of the National Library of Latvia, being built at the moment (see pic below).

It's a project which has been running since 2007, and with great success. (Global Libraries works across 13 countries and Latvia tends to be held up as the example to follow.) Father's Third Son found me via Twitter and later Slideshare and my blog, and asked me to come over and do some presentations as part of their programme.

Latvian libraries

The Latvian libraries system is pretty amazing; they've done some great things in the past 5 years. I learned a lot - it was great to talk to people who'd surmounted some of the problems we have in the UK and the US, and have different issues. It was eye-opening: normally when I talk to librarians we all seem to be going through exactly the same stuff! But this was a little different. Here are some Latvian library headlines:

• They have 874 public libraries. For a population of around 2 million! I think that works out at around 7 times as many libraries per member of the population than we have in the UK.
• Most library users come to the library on foot - on average, nationally, they're an 18 minute walk away from their nearest one
• Check out this map showing how densely populated the country is with libraries!
• Father's Third Son has revolutionised the infrastructure - all the libraries now have PCs with up-to-date Office Suite installed, 24/7 free wifi, and 1800 librarians have had 140 hour training programmes to equip them to deal with the new technology and help others get the most out of it
• There is an information management undergraduate degree, which a lot of people take - but then don't go on to become librarians. So they have a retention issue which we don't have so much here, and not enough young people in the workforce. My second talk was intended to convince the students that this profession holds all sorts of interesting possibilities, so they'll stick with it
• They have a media briefing programme (which I was part of) - apparently one of the issues they have is the media are so positive about libraries most of the time, it's hard to make the case for taking investment to a new level! Imagine that! So part of my role was to look at future trends and tech possibilities, to showcase that the work (and investment) shouldn't stop yet...
• They create little success story videos for different markets which illustrate how the library have helped people (brilliant marketing technique!)
• Librarians are valued by communities as trusted sources of information, and have a very high satisfaction rating of 94%, among Government employees (compared with teachers 84%, and policemen with 48%!)
• They have an internet portal which all libraries are on. ALL of them - the public libraries, the academic libraries, the school libraries. One place which unites all the libraries online - easy for the user, and great potential for a united, cohesive voice for the libraries, too
• Did I mention they have a media briefing programme? .

I found it all pretty inspiring really (and I am quite cynical at heart...). The thing I was most impressed with is that Father's Third Son have managed to take a top-down look at the entire country's library system and implement changes from the ground up, and actually reach their goals and change things for the better. It's hard to imagine the same thing happening in the UK or the US, but it's good to know it can be done. What's really striking is how much infrastructure is put in place on libraries' behalf, I wish we had governmental departments working with us in that way. But we can definitely learn from their confidence of inviting the media, giving them lunch, working with them and escaping the echo chamber on a regular basis in a very direct way.

The trip itself and the presentations

It was a three-day trip, with day 1 mostly consisting of travel to Riga. I was then taken out to dinner by my very generous hosts, who told me a lot of useful info about the presentations I'd be giving. In the run-up to going away I'd been ill for two days so that lack of finishing off time, combined with learning a lot more about the context of the talks that evening, meant I was up late into the night using the hotel bar's wifi to tweak my presentations!

Day two started with a presentation to the Latvian media. How good is that? They have a media programme, and print and broadcast journalists, not just from Riga but all over Latvia, come for a morning of presentations. It's absolutely brilliant echo-chamber escaping, library media-narrative dictating stuff! The presentation before mine was about children's drawings of the library. It was in Latvian but I'd been told enough about it to think it was a wonderful idea - basically they give kids pens and blank paper and say 'draw your ideal library' and give no other instructions than that. Some kids just draw a picture, some add notes as well. Then child psychologists come along and analyse the pics, and they feed it all into their future planning for library design.

IS THAT NOT FABULOUS?

Seriously - the Latvian library system is ace.

Anyhow, I now had around an hour to present to the media. This amounted to around 30 minutes of stuff, to give the translator the other 30 minutes to put it all into Latvian. He was really nice - an English Professor at the University, who does a lot of work with movies to get them into the native language via sub-titles etc - and I made him promise not to stitch me up by saying things like 'This guy is talking complete nonsense. I'm not even going to bore you with an actual translation' etc etc.

The talk was mainly about the future trends in technology and the possibilities for libraries within that - it went quicker than I thought so I ended up ad-libbing a load of stuff about FourSquare which I'd had no intention of putting in there. There was also some stuff about the library at York, the new building and its associated technology etc. I don't think my style of presenting suits big statements followed by gaps for translation but it seemed to go fine, they listened all the way through, and they laughed a lot about the gin part of the great library stereotypometer...

I was then taken to the University for the talk to the students (the presentation embedded above). Because of the whole 'they complete the degree but then don't necessarily go on to become librarians' my brief was to convince them that our job has got all sorts of possibilities they may never had considered - I did my best! I've bought a clicker now to move the slides on, and I have to say I did feel much better being able to stride around the stage rather than being tied to the laptop. There was then an interesting panel discussion with academics in the department - most of which was in Latvian but some of it came my way and was translated into English. We ended up talking about the Widening Participation programme we run at York, the library going into Schools. I enjoyed it, it was fun.

Day 3 featured a recorded presentation at a production company - about marketing and advocacy. The idea is that it will be sub-titled and then circulated on DVD to all the Latvian libraries. I focused on basic principles of marketing, why we need to do it, why strategic marketing is more effective in the long-term, the possibilities and best practices of marketing with social media and how we use it at York, and the echo chamber problem and how to overcome it. I was using two Prezis for this one and I couldn't access them online (they were borked, although they seem alright now - great timing!) so I was incredibly relieved I'd decided to save them to a USB stick.  I had to wear a microphone unit and there were cameras and leads and screens, plus I couldn't have the laptop on the presentation on because it was plugged in to all the recording equipment! I thought it was going to be a nightmare but I asked if the audience could move so I could see them and the big screen without having to turn away from them, and managed to get through it without any restarts. I think it was fine.

Then I met Sanita Maleja who lots of people had told me about in the previous two days - she's like a local ceLIBrity (copyright - @lemurph) for her work with the New Professionals part of the LLA (Latvian Librarian's Association). We had to do a little interview for the New Profs blog but she was kind enough to take me into the old town, which I'd not really been able to see up to this point as I was always on the way somewhere. This was brilliant - Riga is amazing and I really enjoyed just wondering about, plus Sanita and I have very similar views on libraries and on the profession. It was a great end to a great trip.

In the interests of tourism, here's a pic I took, from a tower, of the National Library of Latvia, which is still being built...

The whole thing was very much in the category of 'interesting things I never thought I'd end up doing in my job'. So huge thanks for Father's Third Son for inviting me, and my bosses for allowing me to go, and to everyone for being so nice to me while I was there...

I don't often do blog posts like this where it's like a school report of what I got up to in the holidays, so for those of you who made this far I hope you'll let me off on this occasion! :-)

- thewikiman

Spoon feed them, then give them the spoon, then chuck away the spoon

I seem to have a different view to a lot of information professionals in that I'm all for spoon-feeding. It's a loaded term - I'm actually all for the process it involves, rather than the philosophy it evokes. Above all, I think libraries are there to provide information and we should do this in as straightforward a manner as possible. Crucially, I think we can spoon-feed the students AND give them the skills they need to ditch the spoon entirely over time.

(There's an on-going debate in academic librarianship about spoon-feeding - should we give students all the help they need and make things as easy as possible, or should we be looking to educate them so they can fend for themselves? For example, providing digitised materials via the VLE - many people object to this, because if the reading is put on a plate for them, how will the students learn to find good quality literature? Etc. Simon Barron wrote a very thoughtful post on the subject yesterday, and linked in the comments are other bloggers' views on the same subject: Jo Alcock, Georgina Hardy and Sian Blake.)

Ideally, though, spoon-feeding should be the first step in a structured approach to helping students navigate their way through a degree, with the library embedded and responsive at all stages. I'm all too aware of where the phrase derives from because I have a 17-month-old daughter (or "17 month-yearold" as I always seem to call her) - we feed her with a spoon. We also give her a spoon of her own so she can feed herself. We're just starting to get rid of the spoon, and let her loose on a fork. The point being, spoon-feeding isn't a directive or a philosophy or an way-of-life, it's a stage - just as it should be with information in education.

She absolutely had to be spoon-fed at first because she couldn't feed herself - it was spoon-feed or no food at all. This is analogous for undergrads, for me - I think we underestimate how stark the change is from school and Further Education to Higher Education, and they have a LOT to adjust to in their first term without the library contributing to their problems as part of some misguided belief that it's for 'their own good'. If possible, we should be digitising all the core readings for undergrad modules, and putting them in the VLE, so that the students definitely get to read what they need to read. This allows them to participate fully in their lectures and seminars, which is more important than their level of information literacy at this stage. I used to run a digitisation service that did this, and the lecturers loved it because it allowed them to teach in the knowledge that EVERYONE had done the reading - without it, there were always people who couldn't get hold of the book in the library in time.

One department had a pedagogical objection to the digitisation programme and didn't use it - they said this wasn't preparing the students for real life because they didn't have to come to the library, learn to use the catalogue, find books on the shelves etc. But of course, real life isn't like that - real life is using Google because in 99% of cases that's perfectly adequate. I liked this quote from Georgina Hardy:

We must be very careful not to value process above principles.  Because, let’s face it, the skills of getting good results from a Library Catalogue, remembering to reserve books over a month in advance in order to photocopy a single chapter, and negotiating a complicated, publisher-specific, multi-stage login procedure to access journals from off-campus are skills only useful to those students who wish to go on to become Librarians.

Or, indeed, researchers / academics...

Once students get past the crazyness of their first couple of terms, that's when we can start trying to help them develop the skills to find stuff for themselves. I'm currently looking after English at my institution, and I really like the approach of one of the lecturers - she's requested that the core readings be digitised, but she's got me in to do a workshop (or 7 workshops, actually...) in the second term all about how to find secondary readings, via e-journals, Google Scholar and so on. This is just right, for me - give the students what they need to function, AND teach them how to get stuff for themselves. It doesn't have to be one or the other - spoon-feed whilst teaching them to use the spoon is surely the way forward?

Ideally the library shouldn't be only involved in teaching at the start and the end of the degree. This is often how it works - we do loads of stuff during induction (literally week 1 of their academic lives!) and then get parachuted in at the end to provide much needed aid on the eve of exams or dissertations. Ideally, we'd do some stuff in the 2nd year - guiding their hand as they use the spoon themselves - and again at the start of their 3rd year - getting rid of the spoon and giving them the skills they need to find food for themselves from any number of sources. This 2nd and 3rd year intervention should be based on the level the students have reached, and the needs they have then.

This way, we get to be helpful in the way students actually want (and in the way that will ensure good NSS scores which is, of course, The Only Thing That Matters In HE) and will expect for their 9k a year, and we get to teach them to help themselves in the way they actually need in the long-term. Quite apart from anything else, if the students are getting what they perceive as a good service from us (i.e. we have the provision they need to help them study, so they spend their time studying rather than searching for materials) they'll be more receptive to our instruction about info/digital/all-the-other literacies later.

Spoon-feeding is a useful service to provide, at the beginning of the student lifecycle; we shouldn't eschew it entirely just because we want to teach them to fend for themselves later on.

- thewikiman