She’s been reading it, and blogged about it (very awesome – thanks, Valeria)! And in the process, she has some really good pointers about mapping the customer journey (which I wrote about in Chapter 11). She came up with some steps to mapping a customer’s journey:
Connect the dots between internal preparedness and external needs – overcoming internal processes and barriers that block you from giving your customer a better “journey”
Integrate what you say with what you do – “How are all of the messages you’re sending out in each medium integrating with the feedback you receive in that medium, for example? What are you learning and feeding back into the process?”
Innovate at each touch point – “What process or tool have you not updated for a long time and needs revisiting, for example?”
… and each point discusses the “moment of truth” found in each of those steps.
Yes, I had a new iPhone waiting for me when I got home from Florida (among other things). I upgraded to the new iPhone 3GS … which takes video! Here’s what I’m finding out so far about the video quality:
The video quality is about the same as you’d find on a Flip camera, so not too shabby! It films in QuickTime .mov format, using AAC for audio and H.264 for the video codec. It makes a standard-sized video of 640X480 when held in landscape mode.
So – I like having a video camera ALWAYS with me, in my pocket. What I’m not quite used to yet is how the iPhone decides when it’s going to be in landscape or vertical modes. For example, this video …
… was filmed and sent to YouTube in landscape mode … but it came out vertical (fyi – this shows off the iPhone’s macro video mode, too). This isn’t the first time that’s happened to me. Out of the four videos I’ve posted to YouTube so far, two are in landscape mode and two are vertical.
And that’s not the only place I’ve discovered quirks. Look what happened in iPhoto!
Even weirder in iMovie – check out the thumbnails iMovie generated – the thumbnails are sideways are squished for some strange reason, but the actual video is in landscape mode!
It’s quite possible I just haven’t figured out something yet, but this is a bit irksome. Otherwise, uploading to a variety of places seems to work fine. So far, I have been able to upload my videos to:
my computer, to iPhoto and iMovie for editing (haven’t tried importing to Final Cut Express, but I’m sure that will work fine, too)
blip.tv via blip’s uploading tool (the first video in this post). I have also tried blip’s mobile email uploader, but haven’t seen any video show up in my blip account yet. We’ll see what happens with that!
And one more thing – editing. Yes, you can do some extremely basic editing of your iPhone video – right on the iPhone. Here’s how it looks:
See the timeline at the top of the video? You can click the beginning and ending points and trim the video’s beginning and ending. And that’s all. But that’s ok – I’ll probably end up dumping video to my Mac anyway for editing later. For some people, this will be pretty useful stuff.
So – my iPhone video report so far… will david figure out how to succeed in landscape mode? Will Apple usher in a new era of vertical video? Don’t hold your breath to find out!
The second presentation I gave at NEFLIN in Jacksonville, FL was Tinkering in the Techie Toybox – here’s the Slideshare version and a couple of links included in the presentation. Enjoy!
Last Friday, I gave two presentations at NEFLIN’s technology conference in Jacksonville, FL. The first one was Designing the Digital Experience, which is based on my book. Here’s the Slideshare version of the presentation!
Who are your competitors? Umm … David … we don’t have competitors … we’re a public library. I think you DO indeed have competitors. You probably have more competitors than you ever did, for that matter.
Think about it for a sec.
If I want a book, where can I go? The public library… unless it’s a popular book. Then I’m put on a waiting list. Or, I could just visit Barnes & Noble or Amazon and buy the book. I could even hang out at a Barnes & Noble for awhile, and read it there without buying. And drink a latte while reading, for that matter.
How about movies? Well, some libraries don’t carry blockbuster hits, so there’s really no competition there – come get your old documentaries here!
But my library carries new popular movies. And we have competition. The local Blockbuster and Hollywood Video rental stores are certainly alternatives. Also those Redbox movie dealies that are installed a couple places around Topeka. And Netflix. Which delivers to your door for a small monthly fee. You can even rent a movie from iTunes. Why spend any money? I can simply visit Hulu or YouTube for a quick video fix.
Music? Same thing. iTunes, blip.fm, last.fm, Pandora. Etc.
Gaming – surely that’s something we have down better. Possibly. Unless you have a mega-church in town. They probably have a better gaming setup than you.
Hmm … reference. That’s what we do well. Unless you venture online (see previous posts). Here, we are usually the last resort – people go to friends, family, and online services before us (read the OCLC Perceptions report for more info on that).
OK – so libraries have competition. What can you do about that? Here are some thoughts – please add more:
What do you do better than everyone else? Focus on that. Prioritize that.
You’re a natural community gathering place. Focus on your community. Feed it. Grow it.
Ask people why they don’t use your library. Use that information to improve your services.
Find your largest population segment of “potential patrons” and focus on growing patrons there.
Don’t focus on yourself or your stuff – instead, turn your focus on your customers and their needs.
Maybe it’s something as simple as rearranging your stuff so normal people can actually find things. We can do better than LC or Dewey call number order. Really.
Work on improving the experience at your library – both in the library and digitally.
What are you doing to compete for your patrons’ attention? And … since it’s a competition – what can we do to win?
The article includes a brief intro to Twitter, then Jay talks about employee policies and Twitter use. The best part of the article is this – he created a Twitter policy using only 140 characters (so it’s Twitterable):
Be professional, kind, discreet, authentic. Represent us well. Remember that you can’t control it once you hit “update.”
Good stuff to remember when posting ANYTHING on the web, I think!
I’ve been reading and thinking about websites lately (oh really David? Who would have guessed?). Organizations simply don’t have one nice, tidy website to manage anymore. First, take a gander at these three articles:
OK – read those? Good. I think these guys are on to something. Some people are finding tools that work better for them. More social tools are appearing. Take blogs, for example. Some people were just blogging for the interaction, which they were getting, in a convoluted way, from comment boxes and RSS feeds. Twitter and Facebook status updates meet those needs much better – the interaction is there, it’s easy, and they can pass on fun remarks and pass URLs back and forth easier than through blogs and comments.
But the end of the destination era, like Steve Rubel claims? I’m not so sure about that. Instead of saying “it appears the destination web era is drawing to a close,” I’d say it’s morphing. Our traditional destination websites are not as important anymore. Why? Well… assuming you’ve placed your organization in all the current social media tools that your customers use … there are now more options. Want to find out about something at the library? You can go to our website. Or our Twitter tweet. Or our Facebook event. Want to read a post? You can visit the website to do that – but that’s not the best way to read blogs. Much better to subscribe to the feed.
Blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, SlideShare … those sites are created so you don’t have to visit the actual destination page. Instead, through RSS and embedding tools, it’s really pretty easy to subscribe to the content you’re interested in. Your destination isn’t the organization’s website – your destination is your feed reader.
But I said “I’m not so sure…” The destination site is still there for some things. Want to create a YouTube account? Gotta go to YouTube. Want a new library card? Have to fill out our form … on our website. Want to buy a book at Amazon? You can certainly browse elsewhere, but when it comes time to put in your credit card number, you’re (hopefully) doing that at amazon’s actual website.
And all that is not taking one big thing into account – our customers. Yes, at my library, some of our customers tweet. Some use Facebook. But right now, anyway, probably a majority of our customers still need to visit the website to do stuff (and I’m not even mentioning those that only walk in to the physical library).
You’ve heard it many times – go where your customers are. For libraries, the majority are still on our destination websites and in our buildings. But that is definitely spreading out. Some parts of our websites were really never intended to be destinations (conversations better suited to Twitter or a forum, for example). And those parts are going where they’re better suited. But some parts ARE still destinations. Why? Because those are places you can do the stuff of the organization (checking out, signing up, buying, filling out, etc).
Remember my post on TSCPL’s Meebo chat widget embedded in our library catalog? Since then, we have stopped using the Meebo Me widget. It was great – it helped us start our IM reference service, and it was easy to embed pretty much wherever we wanted. But we grew out of it!
We discovered a few shortcomings, like not being able to send hotlinks through it, and our public services staff really wanted the ability to send an IM to someone else. So now, we’re using Libraryh3lp for our IM reference service. Libraryh3lp gives us those added benefits and more.
And we’re doing a few different things with the catalog embed, too. Here’s a pic of the keyword, No Records Found search:
We’re trying to make instructions clear, friendly and attractive. If you click the Ask Now button, you get a tiny IM widget pop-up page. Why pop-up? With our Meebo widget, we discovered that a lot of people would start asking a question, then click something … and they’d be gone, because they had clicked away from the page with the embedded IM widget. Bumer! With our new pop-up version, that problem is solved. Users can click away all they want … and still interact with us.
But even cooler than that – Michael, our web designer (one of his many hats) discovered a way to embed a similar thing on the Search Results page:
This provides more opportunities for patrons to ask questions when they get stuck on a search – even if they’re finding things. Basically, they have access to us ON EVERY SEARCH they do.
And not just IM access – that’s provided via the Ask Now button. But we also include our phone number and a link to our email Ask a Librarian form.
We’re excited about this – should be fun to see if we get more catalog-related questions.
Last post, I covered things I think about when making personal friend connections in a bunch of social networks I use. I also said “for MPOW, it’s slightly different – I might cover that in another post.” Here’s that other post.
As an institution, who should you friend? Why? This is pretty subjective of course, but here are some general guidelines to get you started:
Friend patrons/customers/members. Friend people living in your service area, or who are likely to use your services. Find them using tools like Twitter’s Find People search or any number of third party search services. Your goal is to share your stuff, your events, and yourselves with other people and organizations who can actually use and benefit your content in a social network.
If someone friends you, check them out. Look at their posts, look at their bio, and where they’re from. If they live close by, friend them. Then start sharing.
Friend other local organizations. Again, the goal is to share your stuff with other organizations that can potentially partner with you, or otherwise send people your way.
Friend others who are interested in your stuff. Have a local history collection that focuses on a certain individual or era? Friend others who are interested in the same things. This should hold true especially on social networks that focus on multimedia, like Flickr and YouTube.
Other Considerations
Facebook Groups – these can have a narrower focus, so you might be friending fewer people in a group, especially if it’s more of a niche group. For example, if you have a Facebook Group focused on teens, you’ll want to friend actual teens, rather than just anyone of any age.
YouTube – do your local news media outlets have YouTube accounts? Make sure to friend them, and favorite some of their videos.
Finally, be friend-neutral. Don’t agree with what the person says, or don’t like their content? Remind yourself that this isn’t your personal social network you’re developing, but your organization’s network. And most likeley, you take all shapes and sizes of friend connections.
Further reading: my set of posts on attracting friends, starting with Don’t Friend Me.
What am I missing? Any other groups it might be good to friend? Not to friend?
Awhile back, I sent Valeria Maltoni (who writes the cool Conversation Agent blog) a copy of my book – Designing the Digital Experience.
