5 fun things to do with Flickr

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We all love Flickr, and one of the great things about it is its extensive API is open to programmers who create new ways of interacting with the site. Here are five examples I like of using flickr in creative ways, but not directly via flickr itself.

Write words with Flickr

The Spell with Flickr site (metaatem.net/words/) allows you to input text and get your words or sentence back written in pictures of letters. So for the image below I typed in 'hello flickr fans' and it came up with this:

Click the pic to open Spell with Flickr in a new window

What's nice about the site is you can click on any letter and it will replace it with another example, so you play with the aesthetic until it suits what you need. When I've used this (on the front of this slide deck for example) I've taken a print screen and chopped the words up into separate images, so I could arrange them in a way that suited me rather than as the site provides them.

 

Find only the outstanding images on Flickr

Lurvely (www.lurvely.com) works by choosing only pictures from Flickr's 'interesting' streams, which have been favourited by lots of other flickr users. You're left with some pretty outstanding photograpy.

Click the pic to open Lurvely in a new window

Search Flickr by colour

I've mentioned the Multicolr Search Engine (labs.tineye.com/multicolr/) on this blog before - I absolutely love it. Put up to five colours into the engine and it brings back an extraordinary amount of Creative Commons pictures which match those colours. You can then move the sliders around to reduce or increase the amount of each colour in the pictures it finds. Hours of fun!

Click the pic to open the Multicolr Search Engine in a new window

Use a sketch or image to find similarly constructed images on Flickr

An odd one, this; retrievr (labs.systemone.at/retrievr) allows you to upload your own image - or, more intriguingly, make a sketch there and then using your mouse - and then it finds images of a similar construction. With, it must be said, varying degrees of success! I put in the lightbulb logo from this site's homepage, and here's what it found. Needless to say my favourite is the dog on the top row:

Click the pic to open Retrievr in a new window

Make a jigsaw out of a Flickr pic

And finally... If you have a super unexciting picture or screengrab, perhaps it would be livened up by being jigsawified? Maybe..?

Click the pic to open the Jigsaw creator in a new window

If you know of any other interesting or fun flickr tools, let me know in a comment.

(The picture in the header is a Creative Commons flickr image by Zanthia.)

Size matters: Cheat Sheets for Optimal Image Sizing and Update Length on Social Media

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This posts features two massive infographics: thanks to Darren Jones and Claire Dolan who I saw tweeting about these a while back.

First of all we have the Social Media Design Sizing Cheat Sheet

The Omnicoreagency.com cheat sheet below shows you exactly how big (to the pixel) the images for each element of your social media profile need to be. This is genuinely useful for organisations on social media, as you can get a huge amount of customer interaction via Twitter and Facebook; the wrong sized image will either be distorted to auto-cropped in your profile or header pics, which undermines how professional you appear. Consistency is important on social media for organisations, but you can't literally use the same image in all circumstances because the dimensions won't be appropriate.

So for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and (both) Google+ users, here's all the info on image sizing you'll ever need...

(Scroll waaaay down to below the infographic to find a tool which will resize your images for you!)

Second of all we have the Social Image Resizer Tool

So perhaps you're convinced that size matters when it comes to social media images - but wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to actually crop your images yourself? All that faffing about and resizing to the exact pixel.

Well step forward the Social Image Resizer Tool - give it your image, then choose from various Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google and YouTube image sizes and it'll crop your image down to the right proportions.

Click to go to open the Image Resizer Tool in a new window

Finally we have the Optimal Length of (almost) Everything Online Cheat Sheet

This one from Buffer is less definitively useful, but interesting all the same. Which length of Tweet, hashtag, Facebook update, blog headline, email subject line etc gets the most engagement? Glad you asked, right this way:

Peripheral Vision: the non-traditional things we do to help our library users

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Below is a Storify of responses I got, when I asked on Twitter what 'non-traditional' library services they offered their users. I'm interested in the ways Library's plug gaps and address their communities' needs, even if what this entails is either only distantly related, or entirely unrelated, to the core library offering. This appearing in places our users don't expect - in their peripheral vision - is often really important in building relationships, and establishing the importance and usefulness of library staff. It opens doors.

People asked me to share what I found, so here we go:

Library Marketing and the Terminology Problem

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When I first started writing and talking about marketing libraries, I was very keen to see libraries adopt the strategies and idioms of business. Libraries were being threatened by massive corporations like Google, Wikipedia and Amazon, whose function or output was for a lot of people a perfectly acceptable replacement for what libraries offered. So we needed to fight back, and market ourselves aggressively - just because we weren't chasing profits didn't mean we shouldn't be chasing customers.

Part of the reason libraries were in a state was that they didn't take marketing seriously, they were in fact scared of the term entirely, and were unwilling to recognise that letting the people come to us was simply not fit for purpose any more. We had to go to the people, and convince them of our value. Finding the term (or the idea of) marketing distasteful was holding us back.

I don't feel entirely differently about this today, although my view has become more nuanced, and I'd rather see Libraries effectively communicating the value of the other aspects of what we do, rather than directly trying to compete with, for example, Google: a fight we'll never win (and shouldn't need to).

However.

In 2010 David Cameron came to power, and his Conservative Government set about making the UK a worse place to live. Part of what they've done is commodify everything, consumerise everything, and it is with this apparatus that they advance their causes of privitisation, destroying the NHS, making education a source of constant frustration for schools and parents alike, and so on.

Increasingly things with which I was previously comfortable - marketing terminology, describing students as 'customers' and so on - are being strongly associated with things which make me decidedly uncomfortable.

Yet sometimes you need to use the vernacular of what you're describing if, like I do, you spend a lot of time describing it - I run marketing workshops and write about marketing on this blog and in a whole book about it. Increasingly I'm drawn to the word 'communication' - not all communication is marketing, but all marketing is communication. So marketing is a subset of communication. Good marketing is often just a byproduct of good communication. 

Nevertheless, I still use marketing lingo at times, albeit decreasingly so, because on occasion there's no better way to describe something so people will understand it. Whatever you think of the term itself, everything that marketing actually entails (a dialogue between us as library services, and users and potential users of those services - about how and why our services are relevant to their lives) we NEED to be doing.

People pay money to come to my workshops, and I don't want to waste their time explaining what I mean every 10 minutes as I search for an alternative way to express something for which there exists a perfectly good term or phrase - it would be absurd. As the trainer I have to communicate effectively in workshops about communication! But I also don't want to be part of the problem, I don't want to be ushering libraries towards a consumerist future which sees information purely as a commodity.

So yesterday when I ran a workshop called Marketing Libraries: Principles and Actions, for the International Library and Information Group, I put this slide on the screen 5 minutes in, and addressed this issue head-on:

A slide from my marketing workshop. Click to view CC version on Flickr

I wanted to make clear that, although I was trying to avoid certain problematic terminology, I was still going to use some where it would be ludicrous not to - and I wanted to be clear on exactly what library marketers mean they talk about the market.

In essence, your market is your community.

Your community will be very different depending on the type of library you work in. Some libraries have a clearly defined community - I work in Higher Education, so my library's community is the students and staff at the University. (Primarily.) This is our market. This is the audience to which we need to communicate our usefulness. Most Special Libraries have defined communities: a firm, or business, or a school. Public Libraries don't enjoy this luxury of course - for them the market, the community, is everyone in their local area, both users and non-users alike.

However you define your community, this is what people like me are talking about when we say things like 'understand your market' (get to know your community), or 'segment your market' (divide them into appropriate groups so you can tailor communications for each group) or even occasionally 'market share' (if you work at an HEI with 1000 staff and students, and 600 of them use the Library, you have a 60% market share). I talk a lot about libraries being market orientated, and I can't stress enough how I mean community orientated. I actually say 'community orientated' all the time now, but plenty of my past output just used 'market orientated'.

I'm not talking about 'the free market' here. There are economic definitions of 'market oriented' and marketing definitions of 'market orientated' and I'm (very obviously) referring to the latter, as are other people who go on about library marketing. I'm talking about libraries offering services that their community needs, rather than merely offering services they've always offered, irrespective of their community. 

In traditional marketing there are two ways or orientating your organisation: Product Orientated, and Market Orientated. This 'services you've always offered' alternative, in marketing terms, is to be Product Orientated. This means focusing on the thing you do, rather than the needs of your market / community. This worked for libraries for a looooong time. We did books. It was great. But we all know that's not enough any more, hence the move towards market-orientation - towards working with the community.) It's about working closely with the people who use (or may use) your library, understanding what they need and what they'd like, and then trying to deliver that.

(There is a further complication here, in that people don't always KNOW what they need. So I tell libraries to continue to do everything people need, but to focus the marketing on what people want.)

As the slide says, everything - everything - comes back to your community. The library being at the heart of the community is a very popular refrain - but as pointed out on Twitter recently after this sentiment reached a critical mass in conference season, just saying the library is at the heart of the community doesn't make it so. To BE at the heart of your community you have to understand them and offer services based on what they require. Your community is your market. You are therefore market orientated if you want to thrive.

So next time you hear someone talk about library marketing, remember that a) we're trying to make libraries communicate more effectively so people use them more, and b) we're using marketing rather than economic definitions, and c), most importantly, 'our market' is our community, and we must work in collaboration with them in order to succeed.

This is brilliant: Broken library communications and how to fix them

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Very occasionally I feature someone else's slides on this blog, and this is one of those times - because this presentation brilliantly elucidates almost everything I feel about modern library communication.

Broken library communications and how to fix them from Information and Library Services, Cambridge Judge Business School

(Andy and Ange are on Twitter if you want to follow them for more.)

I worry that there's a sort of echo-chamber thing here, where people who already think like this nod and go 'yes absolutely' and people who don't agree shake their heads and say 'but what about [insert reason to carry on doing things ineffectively here]?' and none of us really change our thinking - but I hope that's not the case.

I think some people might think that the issues described in the presentation above are window-dressing or otherwise somehow superficial, but they absolutely are not - communication is at the heart of what we do in the information profession.

All of these things add up to make a huge contribution to the user experience - and ultimately the user experience defines whether your library is successful or not.

So in keeping with the advice in the slides, let's end with a call to action - is there one change you can make to the way you or your library does things, based on the above? Whether it's simply amending your signs so that if they say 'You can't do X here' they ALSO say 'but you can do it in location Y - here's how to get there' or a full-scale review of the communications in your institution, try and make a change!