The Library Marketing Toolkit is OUT NOW! Here's what's in it

The book I spent 2011 writing is finally out! Facet Publishing have printed and released the Library Marketing Toolkit and the pre-orders have been sent. There are details of what the book contains, and who writes its 27 case studies, on librarymarketingtoolkit.com, but as you'll know if you've read this blog before I really like slide-presentations as a way of getting info across in a non-boring way; with that in mind, here's what you can expect from the book. Chapters, themes covered, case studies, etc.

A preview of the Library Marketing Toolkit

View more presentations from Ned Potter

Still too early for full reviews, but some pre-prints were sent out and have been getting some good feedback:

‘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 'BITE-SIZED MARKETING'

‘[The Toolkit] is brilliant and  a great addition to the library professional discourse.’ – ANDY WOODWORTH

'The Library Marketing Toolkit is packed full of useful, informative and above all practical information about the best ways of getting your message across, and it should be on the shelf of every librarian and information professional who needs to promote the idea of the library and its value in a modern day society.' – PHIL BRADLEY, CILIP PRESIDENT

You can click here to buy in the US, via Amazon.com, or if you're in Canada you can click to buy via Amazon.ca or finally in the UK you can click here to order via Amazon UK - or just get it straight from the publisher.

It's finally done!

- Ned

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

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

Free chapter of the Library Marketing Toolkit available for download!

My book on marketing libraries is completely finished, done, dusted, and is currently awaiting printing by Facet Publishing. It'll be out in July.

WOOT! :)

You can get info about how to order it from Facet, if you think it'll be useful for your library - in the meantime, anyone can download a free chapter (PDF) from the CILIP website. We've chosen the Introduction because it talks about the importance of marketing libraries, gives an overview of the book and descriptions of each chapter, and contains a case-study matrix which lists every single one of the 27 contributors, where they're from, what they cover, which sector they're relevant to etc etc. So basically it provides the best possible overview of the book, so you can decide if you want to order a copy or not...

This is a pre-final proofs version of the chapter so there will be one or two minor changes in the real thing, but most of the content is the same.

Let me know if you have any feedback!

- 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