Social Media: The best times to post

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I like an infographic that actually tells us something useful. So, following the 'social media image sizing' one from a few weeks back, here's a 'when to post' infographic from QuickSprout.

I didn't used to think social media timings were important, but increasingly I think it is worth trying to hit times of peak engagement IF you're tweeting or posting something important, particularly when using social media as an organisation rather than just for yourself. If you've put effort into creating useful content, you want as many people to see it as possible.

Image courtesy of QuickSprout - click on it to view it on their site

9 reasons to love the British Library's Mechanical Curator

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At heart this is a post about discoverability, access, and bringing things to the surface that might otherwise not be seen. The Mechanical Curator of the title is one way of the ways the BL has done this with their digitised images, but only one of many - the point is we all have collections which WOULD engage people if they knew about it, so why not invest some time in getting the message out there in innovative ways?

I ran some workshops for the British Library at the end of last year, aimed at social media 'improvers' (people already using it as part of their professional role, who want to get more engagement and measure their impact etc), during which I talked about Tumblr. I showed various examples and confessed my favourite Tumblr of all was from the BL themselves, the Mechanical Curator.

The Mechanical Curator is Tumblr blog which regularly (and automatically) posts images from 1,000,000+ the BL have scanned from out-of-copyright books from previous centuries. It has been programmed with some Artificial Intelligence - or as far as I can see, more like Artificial Whimsy - and becomes taken with certain shapes, symmetries, and themes, and posts these more often and in clusters. After its set up and tweaking, there's no human intervention - it just gets on with it.

Click the pic to open The Mechanical Curator Tumblr in a new window. Go and explore it! I'll happily wait.

I loved the Mechanical Curator before, but I love it even more now, because I got (my childhood friend!) Ben O'Steen, who is Technical Lead at BL Labs, to come along and talk to the group about the project, as he designed the whole thing. And he gave such an interesting talk about it, and I learned so many new things, that I felt compelled to write this post about how great the whole thing is. Not just in itself, but in what it represents about the new ethos of library sharing, which could be the very thing which ensures our continued relevance.

So here we go, 9 reasons why I love the Mechanical Curator and the project around it:

1. It's the perfect use for a Tumblr. It's not a regular blog which just used Tumblr because it's fashionable, it's a short, snappy alternative to the BL's more traditional blogging output (which happens via Typepad)
2. It helps people engage with the BL even if they wouldn't usually. On a micro-level, people stumble across the weird little Tumblr and its weird little images, and then they can either leave it at that OR follow the links to the BL catalogue for each pic, and engage with the Library through other channels. That's what social media should do for us; exist on its on terms, and as a gateway to other library content. On a macro-level this whole project gets people interested in British Library materials - people who would never visit or even really know about the BL normally - and then allows them to learn more about the organisation if they wish to
3. It takes something vast and makes it accessible one piece at a time. Tumblr is very visual and, like Pinterest, when it first came along I wondered what the point was when we already had Flickr. In this case, all the images the Mechanical Curator brings to the surfaces are on Flickr anyhow. But a digital repository or a Flickr account provide such a MASS of materials, it can be hard to find a way in and make sense of it all. The Tumblr takes one image at a time and gets it out another way, broken down into smaller chunks, which helps people find it, access it, and then explore further
4. It's just the kind of thing you want your national library to be doing. They've taken 1 million images and said: here you go, you can do anything with them, whoever you are. That's fantastic. Not only that but they've done so in a properly interesting and accessible way, with an emphasis on actually REACHING people with the materials, not just making them available in a vacuum
5. Forget librarians as gatekeepers... When I first entered librarianship I was very excited about the fact that while in the past librarians were gatekeepers of knowledge and information, now the gates were open and we were the sherpas who helped people find what they needed. This takes that anaology one step further and, in effect, brings all the content out from behind the gates and just puts it on the street, asking people to help themselves. I love that. We will get nowhere by trying to guard what we have, we need to give of ourselves as much as we can
6. The BL is now immersed in pop-culture. My favourite Buzzfeed article of all time just happens to be this one: 44 Medieval Beasts That Cannot Even Handle It Right Now. All 44 are illustrated from the BL's images, put out by the Manuscripts Team
7. The level of engagement is incredible. Sometimes you do all the right things to bring people in, but nobody comes. Not this time. Over the first 11 months, the images were viewed on Flickr 212 million times! I try not to put too much stock in views alone, but 20 million hits every month is hard to ignore. Not just that but every single one of the images have been viewed at least once, all but a handful 5 times or more. So despite the collosal scale and bredth of the collection, people are engaging with all of it
8. People aren't just viewing the images, they're DOING things with the images. People are doing really creative things with the images: using them in art installations, free colouring-in books for children, as patterns on handbags... I love how this video from Joe Bell brings the images to life
9. Including a huge movement to crowd-source some contextual information. Here's the wikipedia page (not set up by Ben or the BL) aimed at tagging all the maps found in the images with contextual and geographic information. As you can see, there are NONE left still to do: all 29,304 of the maps have been tagged.

It's not just maps - the community have tagged all sorts of things, providing the BL with groups and categories on its flickr page. Crowd-sourcing is great way of engaging a community and giving them ownership of something!

Finally, for some more context, here's one of Ben's presentations about the Mechanical Curator.

The surprising adventures of the mechanical curator from benosteen

SO Can WE ALL do something like this?

As you can tell, I really think this project is ace. It's a template for what libraries can do with their collections - and although there's a tremendous amount of resource behind what the BL has done, we can all learn from it and apply some of their methodology.

Perhaps we can't all make a tumblr with Artificial intelligence, but we might know someone who can take Ben's code, freely available on Github, and apply it to another project. But to get distracted by the AI is to miss the point - the Mechanical Curator's greatest asset, for me, is taking something unmanagably vast and giving people another way to access it. So if your library has digitised materials which are out of copyright, don't just have them sat in a digital library! Get them out for people to happen across, via Tumblr, Pinterest or Instagram.

If you have collections which you own, or which are out of copyright, can you put them into the public domain and encourage people to take them and remix them?

Behind the Scenes at the Texas A&M University Libraries 'Happy' Video

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Some of you may recall that before things got all serious with my post about my daughter, the previous article on this blog was a bit lighter and featured a great library tour video.

Texas A&M University Libraries pastiched Pharrel's Happy (one of the most watched pop videos in 2014) with one of their own. The original features loads of different people dancing to the song; Texas A&M featured loads of people dancing to the song AROUND the library, brilliantly, as way of providing orientation to new students.

This is an update on my previous post, as Texas A&M reached out and provided some great information about the aims behind the film - but first for those who haven't seen it, add to the 66,000+ views it has already had and take a look:

Stephanie Graves, Associate Professor and Cooridinator for Learning and Outreach, provided me with some details. First of all, here are the instructional outcomes they were aiming to achieve:

1)      We are a massive university and the size of the University Libraries can be intimidating.  We want their first introduction to the Libraries to be a positive, engaging experience that reduced library anxiety.  We intentionally choose the theme “Happy” to help accomplish this goal. 

2)      The students are inundated with information from various campus entities during orientation season.  We needed to do something that would be catchy, while relaying just enough information that was memorable.

3)      We have 6 buildings with numerous services.  This can be confusing.  It’s also impossible to give students a “tour” of the libraries on such a large campus.  We wanted the video to highlight our key services and communicate the variety of locations.

Overall, the video turned out to be very successful in reaching these. It's always hard to properly analyse success of this sort of thing, because the video went somewhat viral and that distorts all the statistics. We know it went down well in the library community but that's really on icing on the cake, and the cake is engagement from the library's actual users.

“We had a record breaking attendance at our Library Open House (also Happy themed) with over 3,600 students in a 2 hour period. We ran out of Happy T-shirts (3,500) and had to order another batch (also gone). The library Happy shirt is now a “thing” on campus and you see them every day. Our desk staff get asked where folks can buy one on campus, which is a testament to the social phenomenon of our theme event.”

— Stephanie Graves

This reinforces the belief that the details of these kinds of ventures, really perfecting a video and making sure it is aimed squarely at the target audience (and not librarians) really pays off. I'm so pleased this worked out so well for them. 

Finally, for those planning their own library video, you can see a Shooting Script from a video we made at York embedded in this blog post, and I'll leave the last word to Stephanie on their planning for their own film:

"We intentionally used student dance groups as our “actors” to help communicate that the libraries were student-centered spaces.  We used a student salsa group, our Aggie Wranglers, and a hip-hop group.  We were hopeful that the variety of dance would communicate the diversity of our campus and make all students feel welcome.  We carefully thought of all the locations and services that we wanted to highlight and in what sequential order to present them.  This pre-work was done  and then we met with the videographer to discuss our needs.   We had it planned out enough that the video only took a day and a half to shoot.    We benefited by having our very skilled student dance groups because we librarians had to do very little choreography.   We simply discussed how we wanted to highlight the space or services and the videographer had them dance as they normally would in the shoot. "

A surprisingly good library video...

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In some of the workshops I run there's a section where we look at marketing with video - and people suggest good and bad examples of the art of library video. We watch a few, critique them, try to extract something meaningful we can apply to our own future videos.

Last time I did this, for UKeIG this month, someone posted a video I'd not seen before - Texas A&M University Libraries' take on Pharrell's video for Happy. I'm sure you've heard the song Happy - the video for it has 519 million views at the time I'm writing this and will probably have a million more by the time I hit 'Publish'. (It's a great song, but I love Wierd Al's cover of it more.)

I must admit I was expecting the worst (another Librarians Do Gaga - something which librarians, rather than library users, find funny) but it turned out to be really good, and an excellent way of showcasing a tour of Library facilities in a different way.

Here's the video:

This is what I like about it:

• First and foremost, it's very well done. A LOT of planning has gone into this! The choreography is great, the dancers perform well. Even the librarians on camera move nicely! Great camera-work, good production all round. I can't even imagine how much time they must have spent prepping each (long, continuous) take
• It taps into a cultural meme. It takes something popular and puts its own spin on it to capitalise on the interest. And it worked - the video has had a massive (by Library standards) 65,000-odd views on YouTube, which is about 64,000 than most of the other vides on their chanell. 312 likes, too, and lots of comments; people aren't just passively consuming this, they're engaging in some way with the creators
• It serves a useful purpose. This isn't JUST a well-done video that draws on pop-culture - it's a tour of the Library. You get to see round the building, see the facilities, see what they have to offer. It's learning by stealth! You think you're watching a dance video but you're actually on a virtual tour
• It doesn't get hung up on copyright. A lot of libraries would be too po-faced to take an in-copyright song and use it without permission (I'm assuming this is what has happened; I might be wrong of course but I'd be amazed if they approached the record lable for permission to reproduce Pharrell's work) but they do it here and it's fine. When you upload a copyrighted song to YouTube as part of a video, it recognises the song, and puts in a link - either to buy the song from iTunes or, in this case, to the original artist's own YouTube channel. It's the modern version of copyright (and surely the only viable future for it) - we won't stop you doing it, but we'll try and monetize it for the copyright holder. Everyone's a winner.

That's a nice happy note to end 2014 on! This will probably be the last post for this year (on library matters, anyhow); thanks for reading, see you next year...

How branding SHOULD work versus how branding does work

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When it comes to 'personal brand' there's a lot of fuss in library-land, but the subject of corporate branding is, I hope, relatively uncontroversial. Most companies, organisations, and businesses, whether they're non-profit or profit-chasing, have some kind of branding - a visual style which makes them easily identifiable. We may not want to be corporate, but we do want to be easily recognisable; that's an important part of effective communication.

But often in Libraries I see branding that isn't doing the job branding is supposed to do. What is branding, what's it FOR, really? Well one thing we can be sure it's NOT for is making everything you do look exactly the same. If everything looks the same it just becomes so much white noise.

I read an analogy on the Canva blog which I really liked: "Think of your slides as sisters, not identical twins." They're talking about creating presentations, but really this applies to all branding - it's helpful to think of the visual resources you produce (signage, leaflets, guides, social media presences, the website, merchandise, digital displays, PowerPoints and so on) as being part of the same family, rather than part of a sinister cloning programme... However I'm going to take that analogy and adapt it to be about architectural relationships rather than familial ones.

Because ultimately what branding is for is this: good branding ensures your users understand they're in part of your organisational landscape. It helps people remember you. It helps people recognise when things are connected. It helps people identify something as uniquely yours.

Compare the architectural landscape of the two pictures below:

Click to view a CC version on Flickr

One of the reasons I hate templates in PowerPoint presentations is they make all your slides look the same. They reduce the value and impact of each individual message, and the research shows they actually reduce learning in your audience (as does anything extraneous to that message). The reason organisational templates exist at all is to support branding - they are 'on brand' so the logo, the colours, and often the font, represent the organisation on every slide. But eventually all the slides blend into one - it becomes like looking at the row of London houses above, where they all look the same and you struggle to distinguish what is interesting about each one. So the branding is getting in the way of the message.

Contrast that with the top half of the picture, which shows some lovely Tuscan architecture. All the buildings are different. They aren't identical twins. But they're very recognisably of the same landscape; you could look at one in isolation and recognise that it relates to any of the others. It reinforces the identity of the town, without the white noise of identikit architecture. That's exactly how corporate branding SHOULD work - but often doesn't...

So when it comes to slides, my advice is always to use colour (and font if applicable), rather than your template, to reinforce the brand. Your audience stays within your organisational landscape, but each of your slides have value and unique messages of their own. You don't need the company name and logo on every single slide - no one looks up 40 slides into a 55 slide presentation and goes "Who is this from again? Oh yeah..." - or if they do, they can surely wait for the last slide for confirmation! If necessary use the template on your first and last slides (this makes it easier to ask for forgiveness if anyone pulls you up on it) but not during the content of the presentation. We actually have official permission to do this at York after I made the case to the Comms Team, it's worth seeing you can do the same...

When it comes to wider corporate branding, again what is important is a recognisable style - something which identifies materials across all media as being of your organisation - rather than making everything look the same. Developing a visual 'feel' which is flexible is far better than 'the brand' becoming a millstone around everyone's necks which simply prevents creativity!

[The image above was made using two existing Creative Commons images: Italy by cfwee, and London by A R Driver. The image in the background of the header is of the same Tuscan town - San Gimignano - and is by imagina.]