A couple months ago, I stayed at a hotel in Wisconsin with this sign … seems pretty useful, huh?
Except if you’re in room 429, like I was. I actually had to hunt a bit to find the room (it wasn’t obvious).
The point? Make sure to check your digital “signage” once in awhile. Make sure your labels and headings still make sense. Did you change the name of a room or a service? Make sure to change that name everywhere on your website, too.
Has your budget shrunk and you needed to drop a few databases? Make sure you removed those links on your database page (and any other page that mentions them, too).
Have you checked the driving directions to your library lately? At a previous job, I checked them out after starting, and discovered they were WRONG. So I actually hopped in my car, and drove around for awhile, taking notes of different ways to get to the library – and updated those directions.
Website maintenance never stops, huh?
Oh – and Happy New Year, too! I am looking forward to a fun, challenging 2010 – how about you?
Found this at Mashable – “Students at Purdue University are experimenting with a new application developed at the school called Hotseat that integrates Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging to help students “backchannel” during class.”
I’ve certainly seen some good uses of status updates during conferences, from discussions about a presenter’s content, to asking questions of other people in multiple committees during an ALA Annual conference, to … yes … planning for lunch with friends.
But this could be a pretty useful tool – from the simple “what did he say again” types of questions, to thinking “out loud” about content …
Cool project! It will be an interesting one to watch, to be sure.
My part of this session is above… I introduced the concept and talked about the variety of interactions available using social networks.
Up next was Amy Kearns and Julie Strange, talking about: Tweet What? 5 sweet ways to connect in 140 characters or less. Notes below:
Searching for tweets with a positive/negative attitude – sentiment at advanced search of search.twitter.com
showing examples of types of tweets from libraries
Twitter can be embedded anywhere…
1. use it for reference
2. connect for customer service
3. broadcast news & events
4. solicit feedback
5. broaden professional networks
6. harness the hive
From the article: “Visitors to your digital space don’t want to think about interacting with your website. They want to—quickly and easily—make a purchase, find information, or have fun. It helps if they can be engaged and enchanted in the process. How can we facilitate this type of digital experience? These ten tips are a great place to start…”
Go visit the article to read my 10 tips (or just buy the book if you haven’t yet ) … and comment there! I’m curious to see what happens.
Watch the screencast and make a comment – what do you think? What are you doing with Facebook Pages?
Show up at my table Monday, July 13, 10:30am. Instead of a formal presentation, show up having watched my screencast … and we’ll have a discussion about Facebook Pages!
So … this screencast is all about Facebook Pages. Here’s what I cover:
The basics of a Facebook Page – I describe what can be done with the Wall, the Info page, friending, status updates, events, discussion boards, and boxes.
Who uses your Facebook Page? I talk about the stats that come with a Facebook Page.
Facebook Apps – I briefly talk about the two apps my library has built
Connecting with customers – I talk about the ways a library can connect with customers using their Facebook Page.
Two posts caught my eye over the past couple of days, and they’re still rumbling around inside my head … let’s see if I can pull a couple thoughts out of the cacophony.
Both posts discuss how lots of industries are at the beginnings of huge restructuring/remaking themselves or are disappearing entirely, and how much of our lives will seem like upheaval until the “new normal” is reached. No one’s exactly sure what “normal” will look like (after the recession and remaking is over) – but everyone’s sure it will be completely different from now.
Here’s the first article, and the main one setting off thoughts for me:The Great Restructuring, by Jeff Jarvis. Jeff talks about our recession – first quoting Umair Haque calling it a great “compression … as an economy built on perceived value reconciles with actual value.”
Jeff also mentions this article from the New York Times and ends up calling our current recession a “great restructuring.” Then, he lists thoughts about quite a few industries and their future. Here’s a partial list of them:
America may well not be in the auto industry soon.
Financial services will have to be completely remade
Newspapers will vanish
Magazines are in worse shape than I would have guessed and many will go
Books’ channels of manufacturing, distribution, and sales will go through upheaval
Broadcast media will become meaningless, replaced by digital delivery
Large-scale retail will shrink and consolidate and then be transformed by a search-and-buy economy
The blockbuster economy in entertainment will become harder to support as more attention and money shifts to the tail.
We should be so lucky that elementary and secondary education will also face such pressure.
And that’s just a few (go read the article for the whole list and some great thoughts).
Here’s the second article raising a ruckus in my head:Big Music Will Surrender, But Not Until At Least 2011 from TechCrunch. This article mainly gives a music executive’s perspective of coming changes for his industry, and how they currently plan to figure it out. So it’s one industry’s perspective on how change will ultimately play out for them. Interesting take.
My question to you – are you ready?
Look at that list from the first article: books, magazines, newspapers, media. All going through huge changes, all going to be remade. And all stuff that’s near and dear to our librarian hearts!
Some of these changes are already starting, you know:
Newspapers and Magazines have already started going digital. It’s just a matter of time before more/most decide to stop printing that paper thing and go completely digital.
Books… {David quickly ducks} DON’T freak out! Of course I think people will still read books. That’s a given. But have you looked around lately and seen the Amazon Kindle? Or the iPhone ebook reader that millions of people are now carrying around? I have a book on mine to read right now. Those 300-page paper things will eventually turn digital – because it’s simply a container for the content – not the content itself.
Music and movies – think LPs/8-Tracks, Cassettes, CDs or super 8, 16 ml, vcr, DVD … and compare that to iTunes or Netflix emerging subscription models. Also going digital!
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg for libraries – most of our huge buildings exist to primarily hold physical stuff. What will we do when there’s no physical stuff to hold? Will you still be able to justify that large building? That staff? (My answer to that is yes, you can … if you are planning for change now).
How are you starting to re-think your services and libraries?My library is in the middle of strategic planning, and we’re going to tackle that whole “re-think everything” approach. Looks like Darien Library has been doing that, too. How about you?
Closing thought – I live in lucky times – I get to see … basically … my whole life change before my eyes. And I get to help it change.
Facebook just changed the way they handle Facebook Pages in a major way. According to their Facebook Pages Product Guide, “Facebook is unifying and simplifying the way people interact on the site by making Pages similar to user Profiles.”
Stuff you can now do on a Facebook Page includes (quotes pulled from the Guide):
Posts by the Page will start to appear in News Feed, giving Pages a
stronger voice to reach their Fans
Posts by the Page will start to appear in News Feed, giving Pages a
stronger voice to reach their Fans
In addition, Pages now have the flexibility of multiple customizable tabs previously
exclusive to user profiles
Like a user profile, your Page can now update its Fans with statuses—short
text-only messages. Soon, these statuses will appear in Fans’ News Feeds
The Facebook Pages Insights tool will include new data on Fans’ engagement with posts from your Page. You’ll be able to see how many comments Fans make on your posts, and you’ll also be able to track how many Facebook users start and stop viewing your posts in News Feed.
And the list goes on. Go read the product guide (it’s a 10-page pdf file) for the whole scoop!
Why do I think this is cool? Until now, there hasn’t been much interaction allowed on Facebook Pages. Any interaction and conversation was essentially relegated to discussion group Q&A and to Wall-type comments.
But now … those of you who are heavy Facebook users … how do you use Facebook? Because you’ll be able to do that stuff. You’ll be able to send daily statuses reminding fans of important stuff happening at your library. I’m hoping this will have the ability to be tied to your organization’s Twitter account … to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.
And a couple of tiny warnings:
Facebook statuses allow comments – so you’ll have to check those comments AND respond. Yes – it’s another thing you have to check. Which I find AWESOME.
Some of you heavy Facebook users LOVE those silly “throw an egg at a friend” type activities… and you participate multiple times each day. My guess? If you do lots of those things with your organizational account … you will be unfriended fast. So – think twice, throw once
What do you think? Anyone else excited about these Facebook Page changes? Anyone have some fear and trepidation about it (sorry – I just wanted to use the word “trepidation”)? Discuss.
We live in a new world. A world in which local decisions made by very small groups can go viral, can be spread by a variety of social media tools, and can even reach global and unintended audiences. We are no longer private or anonymous! I watched just this thing unfold last Thursday at my library’s Board of Trustees meeting.
We Went Viral
By now, some of you have probably heard about the decision my library’s Board of Trustees made last Thursday regarding restricting access to four books in our collection. By the end of the evening, our very local library board meeting was the 7th hottest “trend” in Twitter.
I had decided to tweet the board meeting – I posted play-by-play public comments made by people in the community and the deliberations of the board on a hot topic. I used #tscpl as a hashtag, since I wanted to provide an easy way for people to follow the meeting as it progressed.
And I started tweeting. I took photos of the local TV news vehicles lined up outside the library and a fewpics of the meeting, and posted them to Twitter via the TwitPic service (a service that lets you easily share photos on Twitter). Jim Ogle, general manager at a local TV station (and cool tweep at @jimogle), was also present and tweeting at the meeting, as were a few other Twitter users.
Who followed the conversation? Local Topekans who weren’t at the meeting were following. Library staff that worked the evening shift were following along, too. Since I have my tweets linked to my Facebook status, Facebook friends were also following and participating by making comments and asking questions. Other librarians were following the meeting, as well.
At some point in the evening, our hashtag, #tscpl,”trended” on Twitter. What’s trending? “Trending topics on Twitter are keywords that happen to be popping up in a whole bunch of tweets. We measure these topics and adjust them in real-time throughout the day. It’s a great way of finding out what’s happening right now.” – from Twitter’s blog.
And like I said, we were the 7th hottest trend for a while – sure wish I had a screenshot of that! The screenshot I DID get is from my iPhone, capturing some Twitter Trend-watching services that noticed our hashtag was trending.
We Went Global
The next day, the conversation continued, and it went global. People continued tweeting about the meeting and the decision, and I posted news stories as I found them. An AP reporter was at the Thursday meeting, so we made the AP newswire… and we quickly made the USAToday, the International Herald Tribune, and the Taipei Times, of all places. And of course the usual library-related news sites noticed.
Some unintended but interesting sites: two adult industry news sites (found via twitter searches for tscpl and topeka), some book industry news sites, and a children’s rights group. With some of these, I’m guessing they follow a combination of keyword searches and RSS feeds – they primarily picked up the AP story.
The conversation on those sites is continuing, since many of them allow comments on each article! It’s actually quite interesting to compare the local comments on the Topeka newspaper story to the comments on the USAToday story (98 comments so far).
We’re No Longer Private
What’s this all mean? That Twitter works great as a real-time information spreader and conversation starter. That people are interested even in seemingly local stuff. That … yes … even your small library board meeting is no longer private.
Thought someone might find this useful – it’s the styleguide we use for my library’s digital branch! It’s a long document, broken up into these sections:
General Guidelines for Blog Posts
Citing/Attribution
Featured Section
Comments – What to do with them
Creating a “Voice”
How Can I Get a Conversation Started?
I have a suggestion/problem. What do I do with it?
Staff Responsibilities
******************
Digital Branch Style Guide
Please follow these guidelines when writing blog posts on our public website. This document is a start – I hope to add to it as needed. Notice something glaringly obvious that I haven’t listed? Email it to me.
General Guidelines for Blog Posts
Post frequency/length:
Frequency:
2 posts per week for each Subject Guide
Posts in the Services section – as needed
Length:
sufficient to cover topic
shorter is always better – just enough to cover the content
Formatting:
one space between sentences – not two!
avoid ALL CAPS
use a spell checker
break post into small paragraphs rather than one large chunk of text
Post titles:
keep them short, snappy, and descriptive
capitalize every word except prepositions (like a book title)
Internal Post Structure:
Bulleted lists are great
Subheads are great – helps people quickly scan content
Images that complement article tend to attract readers
specific words – Be consistent with these terms:
email (all one word, all lowercase)
website (all one word, all lowercase)
webpage (all one word, all lowercase)
web (lowercase)
Internet (uppercase “I”)
Our library – first reference is “Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library.” Second reference is “the library.”
Our website is “the Digital Branch.”
Refer to our Neighborhoods by their full title (i.e., the Travel neighborhood, the Health Information neighborhood)
Summary of post
Each post should have a summary – there are two ways to do this:
Create a summary paragraph in the summary box
Leave the summary blank – the beginning of the post will automatically be used as the summary
Tags:
Use 2-3 descriptive tags for each post
Tags are usually keywords that are descriptive of the content of a post
These should be different from a category. Ex – a post could be in the Books Subject Guide with a Category of Sci-Fi, and have tags like Steampunk, Robots, and Mars.
Links:
For book titles
make the book title the link text
don’t include the URL with the book title
Do this: The Hobbit (where “The Hobbit” is the text used for the link)
Don’t do this: The Hobbit – http://catalog.tscpl.org/asdfhasdf/etc.htm (where “The Hobbit” is NOT the link text, but the URL is also used as the link text)
Other links
When linking to webpages or blog posts, make the webpage title or the blog article title the link text
Refer to the link within a sentence, like this: “Topeka has a great library that everyone should visit.” (“great library” would be the link text used for our library’s URL)
Another example: don’t write “you can read the full report here” – using words like “here” or “click here” is generally bad practice. Instead, say “the charity released a report, which said…” (“a report” is the link text, and is incorporated within the sentence). This type of internal link reads better.
Citing / Attribution
It’s important to give proper attribution to sources, even online. Here’s how to do it:
Blog posts, newspaper articles, other websites
See the Links section above for linking
When you quote someone else’s text, make sure to link to the original source.
With the link to the original source, reference the site. For example, say “Here’s a lovely article on the Topeka Ave. bridge project (from the Topeka Capital Journal).” “Lovely article” links to the specific article, and “Topeka Capital Journal” links to the newspaper’s main site.
Images
If using an image from flickr, photobucket, or some other photo sharing service, include some type of attribution/pointer back to the original photo at the end of the article (i.e., “photo courtesy of JimBob” – “JimBob” would link back to the original photo).
Use photos with a Creative Commons license when possible
Videos
Include some type of link/attribution/pointer back to the original video (i.e., link back to the YouTube video if you use a video from YouTube)
How much of a quote can I do?
The U.S. Copyright Office FAQ on fair use (http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html) says this: “it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports. There are no legal rules permitting the use of a specific number of words, a certain number of musical notes, or percentage of a work.”
Don’t quote the whole thing!
Featured Section
The Featured Section is structured this way:
The first Feature Box is called Featured.
It features big programs, events and special features of the library.
Populated by PR and Event Resources
Guidelines for the other Feature Boxes:
The other feature boxes include Books, Research, Movies & Music, Gallery, Kids, and Teens.
These sections usually focus on content (Gallery, Kids and Teens boxes can post about a program)
Handouts, booklists, links should be part of that post. No programs with registration and limits should be posted there.
Comments – what to do with them?
respond
thank them for their comment
add something if possible – point to another similar book, a link on our site, etc.
if it’s a question, answer it
if it’s a criticism, answer it – or refer it to someone who Can respond appropriately
If the comment is negative, don’t repeat it! Respond without repeating the negative question/comment.
In general, don’t edit the comment. Usually, it’s better to correct in another comment. Only edit if the comment:
Has “bad” words (that our automatic naughty word filter didn’t catch)
Is derogatory
Has an unrelated link
delete if spam. For example: “I have checked that really there was great information regarding that. There was another also – http://healthbeautyproduct.blogspot.com/” is a spam comment. Usually, spam comments include this type of stuff:
poor grammar (sounds like they don’t really know the language)
PLUS links to unrelated websites
What to do if you don’t know what to do – ask the web team to read the comment.
Creating a “Voice”
Write in a conversational tone:
goal is to start conversations
if you wouldn’t say it in conversation, don’t write it
write “friendly” – just like we are at the desk!
Use active voice. Example – don’t write “The tree was struck by lightning.” Instead, write “Lightning struck the tree.”
Use inverted pyramid writing style (explanation at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pyramid)
The first couple of sentences of your post displays as the summary, and appears in various places on our site as teasers to the whole article – so make it snappy!
Write in present tense when possible. Ex:
Don’t write “the book signing will be held next Tuesday”
Instead, write “the book signing is next Tuesday”
How Can I Get a Conversation Started?
Here are a couple of ideas on getting conversations started on your blog.
Write great content (always top priority)
Take part in the conversation:
read blogs and Topeka-area newspapers that allow comments
read blogs in your area of expertise
leave comments on those blogs, linking to your post in the comment
also link to those blogs in your post
Focus your posts on goals:
Before you write, answer this – “what do you want the reader to do?”
Provide a call to action (ie., tell them what you want them to do)
Ask for a response
Point them to things (like books in our catalog)
I have a suggestion/problem. What do I do with it?
Problems:
email the web team
tell us what’s wrong
include links or descriptive text if possible
Ideas for the site:
Email the web team/Digital Branch Manager:
Include description of idea
Digital Branch Manager will set up meeting if needed, share idea with web team and/or Managers, etc
Remember – all ideas are great, but not all ideas will be implemented on the site
hold regular meetings
i.e.., fun in Topeka blog meeting
discuss ideas
make suggestions to the web team
Staff Responsibilities
Blog moderator
make sure there are 2 posts per week
encourage writers
check in with Digital Branch Manager periodically
schedule regular meetings of content area
all the blog author stuff
Blog authors
write posts
check links
respond to comments
delete spam
periodically touch base with blog moderator
Digital Branch Manager
big picture development of branch
strategic planning
trend watching
talking to internal groups
talking to external groups
mentoring digital branch staff
developing new content areas and unique services and tools
I recently gave a book-related interview for a local-to-Topeka magazine, TK Magazine. People actually read it! I’ve had a number of people stop me and say they saw “my article” – that’s sorta cool. Here’s the interview:
**********
In the March/April 2008 issue of TK, we introduced you to the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library’s new “Digital Branch” – a library branch that exists entirely on the Web, enabling you to check out books, pick out movies and music, and just about anything you else you want to do at the main library (except you can do it all in your PJs!).
The whiz behind the development of the library’s website [aside - LOTS of very smart people built our website - definitely not just me!] is David Lee King. He has just published his first book, “Designing the Digital Experience,” which aims to help you create a website that offers such a positive digital experience that your visitors will not only return, but will share links to your site with all their friends, family and co-workers.
TK: What is “experience design?”
DK: Experience design is the practice of designing, well, lots of things – products, services, events, and environments – but with the customer’s experience fully in mind. A good example of experience design in action is a visit to two restaurants, McDonalds and Hard Rock Cafe. At McDonald’s, you get a sandwich, and the normal fast-food experience – rather bland (some would argue, just like the sandwich).
But when you visit the Hard Rock Cafe, the “experience” you have while at the restaurant is geared toward a theme – that of rock music. Everything, including the food and drink you order, the decor of the place, t-shirts you can buy, even the background music playing, is themed to provide you with a “rock and roll” experience that you can’t help but notice.
Hard Rock Cafe has designed an experience around rock and roll – only part of the total experience involves the actual food.
TK: How does that relate to my website?
DK: Websites are rapidly changing from electronic brochures about an organization or business to an actual destination, where real-life, real-time transactions take place. Take my bank, for instance. At my bank’s website, I can balance my checkbook, pay bills, and transfer money. I can do actual, real-world things at the website.
Organizations are starting to improve the experience their customers have while at the site in order to better serve their customers.
TK: What will our readers learn from your book?
DK: My book will quickly get you up-to-speed about what digital experience design is, and different approaches to take with your website in regards to digital experience. I also provide ideas to help jump-start your thinking about what your customers experience while at your website, and ways to help improve those experiences.
* original article online at TK Magazine, used by permission
A couple months ago, I stayed at a hotel in Wisconsin with this sign … seems pretty useful, huh?
) … and comment there! I’m curious to see what happens.
