David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

Preparing for Emerging Trends

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I think about emerging trends a lot, and realized that sometimes that’s not good enough. I think about them, research them, share those ideas and projects out with other staff. Sometimes those ideas stick, and sometimes they don’t.

What’s missing? Having a plan for those emerging trends, BEFORE YOU KNOW ABOUT THEM.

How does that work? Watch my video to hear my ideas on that. I focus on these points:

  1. Being a Nimble Organization
  2. Have a Flexible Staff
  3. Budget for it!
  4. Assign Staff
  5. Use Listening Tools
  6. Attend Conferences out of your “Comfort Zone”
  7. Just Do It!

Those are my thoughts. What would you add?

6 Slick Improvements for 2016 – New Emerald Article

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I have a new article up at Emerald Group Publishing titled Six Slick Improvements for 2016. Here’s what I talk about:

Whew – you made it through the holidays and vacations, and now it’s a new year. Time to look at your technology plans, and see what needs to be improved.

Here are six improvements you can make, or at least start, in 2016. They include:

  1. Share – customers STILL don’t know all the cool stuff we do.
  2. Market the website inside the building.
  3. Make your website mobile-friendly.
  4. Privacy issues (you’ve seen the new Pew Report on Privacy, right?).
  5. Delete (as in, all those 10-year old emails you have, etc).
  6. Community creation spaces (expand those makerspaces for non-geeks).

Go visit Emerald Group Publishing to read the rest of the article!

Image by Stephen

Newest Pew Report on Social Media for 2015

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smartphone in action!Pew Research Center recently posted their newest report on social media – Mobile Messaging and Social Media 2015. Like most Pew reports, it’s focused on American adults, aged 18 and older.

It’s an interesting report on the “face” of social media and mobile messaging for 2015. Go read it! Here are some highlights and observations from the report:

General Internet and smartphone use:

  • 85% of American adults are internet users
  • 67% are smartphone users

Me: Think about your customers. Does your website work great on a smartphone? Because most of your customers have one at this point. So what’s holding you up?

Mobile Messaging:

  • 36% of smartphone owners report using messaging apps like WhatsApp, Kik or iMessage
  • 49% of smartphone owners age 18-29 use these types of apps.

Me: Messaging used to be easy. It was email, web-based chat, and texting. Now, it’s still all those … plus Facebook Messaging, Twitter, LinkedIn messaging (just overhauled their messaging service), and apps like WhatsApp or Kik.

How are you asking customers to interact with you? Do you need to change anything? Definitely something to look into.

Social Media Growth:

  • Facebook – 62% of adults use it
    • 70% log on daily
    • 43% log on several times a day
  • Pinterest – 26% of adults use it (more women than men)
  • Instagram – 24% of adults use it.
    • Really popular with non-whites and young adults, slightly more women than men
    • 59% of Instagram users are not he platform daily!
    • 35% visit several times a day (guilty!)
  • LinkIn – 22% of American adults
  • Twitter – 20% of American adults.
    • More urban than rural, more popular with younger adults.

Me: Facebook is still HUGE. People are logging on several times a day. Do you have new content there for them? Focused on your library (in an interesting, fun way)? How about Instagram? Who’s on “Instagram duty” at your library?

Again – really good report. Read it, digest it, share it with your colleagues. And give some thought to how your library needs to adapt as your customers adapt.

Photo of a phone by Nicola

 

What’s the Most Visited Part of your Library?

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Do you adequately staff the busiest parts of your library? For example, if you have a busy reference desk, you probably make sure there are staff to meet demand.

If your circulation desk gets busy in the afternoons, you probably put another person there to help.

But what if your digital branch is the busiest part of your library? What then?

Here’s what I mean. Take a peek at some annual stats from my library:

  • Door count: 797,478 people
  • Meeting room use: 137,882 people
  • Library program attendance: 76,043 attendees
  • Art Gallery visitors: 25,231 visitors
  • Reference questions: 271,315 questions asked

How about website visits? We had 1,113,146 total visits to the website in 2014. The only larger number is is our circulation count (2,300,865 items).

The busiest part of my library is our digital branch – our website. More visits than meeting room attendance. More visits than library classes and events. More visits than our art gallery.

More visits than our physical building.

I’ll guess your library is similar. So how do we staff for this? I know, I know. Website visits are different than a person visiting the building. Building visitors will most likely stay longer, will need furniture to use, will step on carpet that needs cleaning, and will use computers that need to be maintained. While a digital branch visit might only last for two minutes.

Still – do you see a potential disparity here?

So I’ll ask my question again: Do you adequately staff the busiest parts of your library?

Image by Mervyn Chua