David Lee King » community management

Social Media as Place

David Lee King — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:00:43 +0000

My last post about those billboards reminded me about the difference between a library’s normal forms of content (books, DVDs, music CDs, etc) and social media.

What’s that difference?

Content – a book, a video, etc – is something you DO. You read a book, you watch a movie.
Social Media is a place you visit in order to DO. You visit Facebook in order to share something with your mom.

Think of social media as a crowded room in a pretty social setting. A bar, a party, hanging out with friends, etc. You go there to talk, to share, to listen. It’s a place you visit so that you can do something.

There are a couple of cool intersections though. Things like this:

Go to Twitter (a place) to talk (something to do) about a book that everyone’s reading (content).
Visiting the library (a place) to use the computer to access Facebook to reconnect with a friend (something to do).

So librarians … use your mad powers of social media to connect with your customers to talk about your content. Then see what happens.

image by Bigstock

Update those Library Policy pages!

David Lee King — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:06:27 +0000

This morning, I’ve been watching a small PR fiasco unfold. According to CBS Boston, Charlton Public Library sent a police officer to collect overdue books from a 5-year-old. The story also made the Drudge Report and the UK’s Daily Mail – gotta love that international media attention!

OK – there’s obviously a LOT more to the story that was left out. For example, there’s no mention in the article of the reporter actually talking to library staff, who could have filled in the details (they DID talk to the library – it’s mentioned in the video version of the story).

Via Facebook, the library filled in some pertinent details (i.e., what actually happened) after getting some nasty Facebook comments:

“Library materials are purchased using taxpayer dollars. We feel as library staff that it is our duty to safeguard those tax dollars. We have asked the Charlton Police Dept. to help recover items from those patrons who have been delinquent in returning materials for more than 6 months and who have at least $100 worth of unreturned materials at their homes. We follow our standard procedure of phonecalls and/or emails to remind patrons to return their materials. A bill is sent out once an item is overdue for a month. Sending out the police is a last resort effort to get back some of our most valuable items. The police visited 13 families whose outstanding balance totaled $2634.00 in library materials.” (from Charlton Public Library’s Facebook Page - also just added to the main page of the library’s website).

So good for them for using Facebook and their website to quickly respond to the story.

After I read the article, I first visited the library’s website and tried to find their fines and fees policy. Here’s all I found (until they updated the site and their Facebook Page):

Print and audio materials accrue a 10 cent daily overdue fine with a $3.00 maximum fine per item.
Dvd and video items accrue a $1.00 daily overdue fine with a maximum fine of $5.00 per item.
Patrons are responsible for the repair or replacement of lost or damaged items. Failure to pay fines or damages will result in the loss of borrowing privileges at C/WMARS libraries.
from their Library Services page

What’s missing here? Any information about the process, what happens if you don’t pay your late fees, etc – other than the “loss of borrowing privileges” info. That sounds VERY different than explanation from the library quoted above, doesn’t it?

How can this be improved? Simple – if you have a policy, a guideline, a process for fines and fees (or for anything else, for that matter) – put it on your website. Probably in a Library Policies section, or a link to appropriate places on your site. For example, the late fee policy/process could be added to your “get a library card” page.

Then, when the media calls asking why you’re sending police to a poor 5 year old child, you can explain … but you can also email them a link to the appropriate policy and process.

Question – if one of your library customers had a policy-type question, could that question be answered using your website?

Update button by Bigstock

Focus on Youtube – Summary and Why?

David Lee King — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:00:08 +0000

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been writing and thinking about Youtube for awhile. Here’s a list of my recent Youtube posts:

Why have I been focused on Youtube? Well, a couple of reasons. One, I really needed to re-focus on Youtube a bit at work. Writing and thinking about this stuff really helps me figure out what I need to do next for my library’s Youtube account.

One more reason – Youtube is a social network, with subscribers, friends, content creators, comments, likes, and favorites. If you want friends, subscribers, comments … and more importantly, video viewers, you need to be there. You need to watch videos, leave comments, likes, favorites, share videos, etc. That gets you noticed by others in the Youtube community (and your local customers who use Youtube).

Try out some of my suggestions, and see if you can increase engagement in Youtube in 2012!

Community pic by Bigstock

Youtube – Calls to Action

David Lee King — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 16:00:23 +0000

Still reading the Youtube Creator Playbook … do you include a Call to Action in your videos?

Being successful in online video, especially in Youtube, includes being able to build community engagement and an audience (which is done through subscriptions to your Youtube account). There’s quite a lot of potential community engagement built right into Youtube. Things like comments, likes, favorites, sharing, and subscribing.

Not getting those? maybe you aren’t asking.

Which leads us to creating a Call to Action in your videos. You could also think of these as Next Steps. Basically, your goal should be to tell people watching the video what to do next – give them something to do (something that actually relates to your organization).

Here’s what Youtube suggests:

Decide what actions you want your viewers to take for each video.
Use Youtube annotations to ask, or have the host in the video ask for it (I’ll talk more about Youtube Annotations in a future video).

Two simple steps! Some Youtube-ish calls to action might include:

asking people to subscribe to your video channel
asking people to like or favorite the video
asking a question, and then asking them to answer it in the comments box
asking them to watch an older video (and providing a link to the video)

This works on your website, too. Embed your video in your website, then ask viewers to leave a comment on your organization’s blog. Or point out an organization-specific action, like checking out a book or registering for an event. You could include a link to the event in your blog post, on your website, or even in the Youtube description box.

Either way – don’t waste your time creating a video if you don’t have a next step or a call to action. Give your viewers at least one “what should I do next” instruction, and see what happens. They just might actually DO it.

So here’s YOUR next step – tell me what types of next steps might work well in a video for your library or organization in the comments. That’ll give readers a great list of ideas that they can use next time they create a video!

Next Steps pic from Bigstock

Changing Face of Privacy

David Lee King — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:39:15 +0000

I’m leading a webinar on Facebook tomorrow, and because of that, I’ve been thinking a lot about changes I’m seeing in online privacy.

So, as librarians, we historically have been defenders of our patrons’ right to privacy. It’s in our Code of Ethics: “We protect each library user’s right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.”

On the opposite end of that are some pretty hip social media companies, like Google Plus and Facebook. Those two companies seem to have an unstated goal of making our world open and transparent … or at least, as open and transparent as we want to be.

Facebook does this by setting default privacy settings to Public. Google Plus does this (at least for now) by requiring us to use our real names on accounts.

Interestingly enough, some of our library tools are pushing for openness in different ways, too. Here are two examples of that:

Many of us are familiar with the Overdrive/Amazon deal. Amazon knows what your patrons have checked out, because they send them an offer to buy the ebook 3 days before it’s due. Amazon is, in essence, using what us librarians consider private info that we would never share, to sell ebooks to our patrons. It’s actually a handy thing to do… but flies in the face of our privacy ethics.
My library is in the process of moving to Polaris for our ILS/Library catalog. One really cool feature we’ll be getting is public lists. As a patron, I will be able to keep a list of books that I’ve read … and make that public, embed it on my blog, etc, via an RSS feed. It’s an opt-in feature, but still… very public, and very different from what us libraries have traditionally done.

This brings up quite a few questions in my mind:

Are libraries ready for opt-in/opt-out transparency?
Are we ready to check TOS agreements to catch and discuss things like that with vendors?
Some of us are bound by local or state laws on privacy. Are we ready to have discussions about those laws?
At the ALA level … are we ready to start discussing potential changes to our code of ethics and other privacy-driven discussions at a national level?
Are you ready to protect your own level of privacy
Are you ready to learn privacy settings in each online tool, and teach these to your customers?

So – what do you think? And how is your library addressing privacy issues online? I want to know!

pic by alancleaver_2000

Poking Around in YouTube Insights

David Lee King — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:00:10 +0000

A couple of days ago, I was poking around in my library’s YouTube account – generally tidying up the place, adding some info to video descriptions, etc (more on that in a future post perhaps). While doing that, I started looking at our YouTube Insights (that’s what YouTube calls statistics or analytics), and discovered some neat stuff.

And I thought I’d share. The stats are from Jan 1 , 2011- Oct 23, 2011). I created four “Big Insights” that I noticed, and each insight has a Takeaway. See if you can add some takeaways or insights to my list!

Big insight #1: Most people watching our videos are coming directly from YouTube.

32,929 from youtube – almost 70%
embedded player – 8657 – 18%
mobile devices – 5223 – 10.9%
youtube channel page – 985 – 2%

Takeaway: Youtube is its own community. If we want to grow engagement (ie., get more comments, video views, likes, etc), we need to start interacting there. Only 18% of our total video views come from the “embedded player” – which means people watching our videos from the library’s website.

Big Insight #2: Tags are really important!

Links followed to this video – 28% (13,471). This means that someone was watching a video in Youtube, glanced over at the Related Videos sidebar, and clicked on one of our videos.

Takeaway: fill up the Tags box for each Youtube video (found on the Video Information page), and use very descriptive Keywords. Doing this will help your videos be found.

Big Insight #3: Post videos about what you do.

Turning Strangers into Friends

David Lee King — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:00:46 +0000

The Thank You Economy

I just read The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk. Good read. Here’s an interesting thought I got out of it that relates to libraries.

On page 53, he writes about Nielson conducting a study on what drives consumer trust. 70% of people said they turn to family and friends for advice when making purchasing decisions.

Then Gary says this: “The ROI of your relationship with your mother is going to be much higher than that of the one you have with a good friend. Both, however, are more valuable than the one you have with an acquaintance, which trumps the relationship you have with a stranger. Without social media, you and your customer are relegated to strangers; with it, depending on your efforts, you can potentially upgrade your relationship to that of casual acquaintances, and even, in time, to friends. The power of that relationship can go so far as to convert a casual browser into a committed buyer, or a buyer into an advocate.” (pg 54-55).

This idea of turning strangers into friends works great in libraries, too. The goal is simply this – become casual acquaintances, or even friends, with our customers. We have done that for years in our buildings – I’d say that’s business as usual.

Online? We can do the same thing by using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook. Start friending people in your community. Your customers. That’s how you start turning strangers into friends … and into customers of your library.

Here’s what Gary did – he created Twitter alerts for wine words like Merlot. When someone had a question about that term, he answered it … and started growing a reputation about actually knowing something about wine.

We know stuff too – we are librarians, after all! Use a tool like Twitter. Do a zip code search for your local area or a town search … then add some words to that search, like book, reading, etc. Or business terms … or whatever the hot issues in your town happen to be.

Then start answering questions or making comments as they seem relevant. Point to your stuff, like the book that answers it, when it makes sense. Be helpful … like you already are in your building.

It’s a way to get out in the community without actually leaving the air conditioning!

Pic by Steven Rosenbaum

Seriously Social: Focus on Facebook (new presentation)

David Lee King — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:00:31 +0000

I recently gave this presentation at ALA11 and at the Virtual ALA11 conference, along with Kolene Allen who focused on Twitter. Both sessions went well … and someone has been asking me to post my slides! So here they are:

Seriously Social – Leveraging Social Media: Focus on Facebook

View more presentations from David King.

In my part of the presentation, I talked about what libraries can do with Facebook Pages, and why they might want to use Facebook Pages to reach out to customers.

If you’re interested, this fall (November 2) I’ll be doing a 90-minute version of this, through the great ALA Techsource webinars – stay tuned for that later on this year!

The Daily Grape and the Daily Book?

David Lee King — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 13:00:08 +0000

Gary Vaynerchuk, who made videos about wine at Wine Library TV and now at the Daily Grape, has a really cool idea about how to add value to his wine videos, and to help his viewers keep track of (and buy) wine they’re interesting in trying.

Here’s what Gary wants to do (from episode #1 of the Daily Grape):

Create mobile app-based video (and have a web-based version too)
Make his videos shorter
Make the content entertaining and usable
Created a mobile app (Daily Grape in the iTunes app store) that goes along with the videos

Gary noticed that he mentions a lot of wine, and some of his viewers forget about the wine after they’re done watching the video. So why not make an app to solve that problem?

Here’s how Gary’s app works:

sign up for a free account through the Daily Grape app.
Then, watch one of Gary’s videos
If you like the sound of a wine Gary mentions, you can click through to the video details, and add the wine to your wish list.
Then you have a handy list when you’re at a restaurant or a wine store.
You can also comment on the wines found on the app.

Cool idea, huh? Believe it or not, I think this could work for libraries, too. More wine for everybody! No, just kidding.

We have books, don’t we? My library has a collection of almost 500,000 books/videos/etc. Do you think our patrons can remember all those titles?

Right – probably not. But that’s why some of the newer ILS’s include things like wish lists, tags, and comments. I’ve seen some library catalogs that let you take those wish lists and turn them into RSS feeds, which gives your patrons the ability to embed their lists wherever they want.

That’s cool. But what if library staff did the same thing? Why not keep a running list of staff picks that can be discovered in the catalog and on the website. And on the library’s blog sidebar (since it’s embeddable). And in Facebook (with a little coding added in).

In fact, my library is already providing some of that, in the form of blog posts with links to good books that happen to be in our collection.

So – just a slightly different, slightly more purposeful way to think about content created by library staff. Be a bit purposeful, like Gary Vaynerchuk – direct your customer to good content, help them check stuff out – and provide them with ways to remember the books they want to read.

Do you do that? If so – how do you do it?

Facebook for Libraries – an article in American Libraries

David Lee King — Tue, 31 May 2011 13:00:52 +0000

I have an article about Facebook for Libraries – in American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association (ALA). Here’s an excerpt:

“Today, I spent part of the day connecting with people. I complained about a silly election video, chatted with a college friend about a band, and put some finishing touches on plans for a conference taking place at the library.

I did all this through Facebook. These days, it seems like everyone has a Facebook account. Quite a few of my professional colleagues and most of my family have Facebook accounts. Nationally, I’m a bit ahead of the curve: Approximately 41% of the U.S. population has a personal Facebook profile, according to a 2010 study from Edison Research (PDF file). According to Wikipedia, 50% of those Facebook users actually log into their Facebook accounts every day. Total Facebook population? Globally, over 600 million of us currently use Facebook, MSNBC reported in January, and most of them interact every day with an average of 130 Facebook friends and acquaintances.

Think about that for a second. What library wouldn’t love to have a direct, free line to potentially 41% of your community’s ear? Keep in mind, these people could be connected to another 130 people in your community. That’s a lot of free communication!

So, stake a claim in this digital land and create a Facebook Page for your library. Here’s how to set up a Facebook account, and how to use it to connect with your community.”

Go read the rest of the article!

David Lee King » community management

Social Media as Place

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