Experience Economy

Day 1 at Internet Librarian 2010

by David Lee King on October 26, 2010

I’m at Internet Librarian 2010 in Monterey, CA – wonderful conference full of librarian techie joy. Here are some of the highlights I picked up yesterday:

The keynote presentation was: Why Libraries Have a Future: Adding Value to your Community, presented by Patricia Martin, CEO Litlamp Communications & Author, Renaissance Generation: The Rise of the CUltural Consumer and What it Means to Your Business

Her book = what it looks like right before a renaissance.

Here’s what she means by that:

as soon as something is deemed less relevant, it starts getting shed… her goal is to help us figure out how to still be relevant (so libraries don’t get shed)

Interesting aside – capitalism is based on conformity (ie., 9 billion people eating the same hamburger)

Cool idea – Irene Au at Google – created a team that looked around the org, and proposes improvements to the user experience at parts of google. This can work for a library!

She asked users what the minimal user experience should be, then works to get those integrated.

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Managing Your Library’s Online Presence

Jennifer Koerber, Boston Public Library

think about voice. Be consistent in your voice online. use a styleguide with a team of authors.

pre-load some preferred tags, so when busy authors are ready to tag … they can pick some “good” ones.

fonts can give you a voice

banners – you can add these to websites, youtube, separate blogs, etc – it is a visual way to pull everything together visually

Logos – easy way to anchor your sites and services

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SuHui Ho – University of California

Managing today’s e-Library

it takes a village to build, staff, and manage an e-library.

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Colleen Brazil -Sno-Isle Libraries

Used Overdrive as example – said we should always continue the conversation about when patrons have a bad experience with a product we use – keep the dialogue open, communicate with vendor and patrons

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Freak Out, Geek Out, or Seek Out – recent presentations

by David Lee King on October 4, 2010

Freak Out, Geek Out, or Seek Out: Trends, Transformations & Change in Libraries

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I recently gave my Freak Out, Geek Out, or Seek Out presentation at Lawrence Public Library in Kansas, and at three fun events in Wisconsin. A couple of them were longer, 3-hour talks, and the other two were shorter – this Slideshare slidedeck is for the 3-hour version of the presentation.

All 4 were fun talks with lots of great discussion afterwards. Lawrence and Wisconsin – thanks!

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It’s the Experience that Matters – Notes from a ULC Webinar

by David Lee King on August 10, 2010

I attended an Urban Libraries Council webinar on the customer experience today – it was good! Here are some of my notes from the session.

Speaker – Melanie Huggins, Richland County Public Library

Stuff I found interesting…

Definitions:
User Experience (UX) – interaction between technology and humans
Customer Experience (CxP) – all aspects of a customer’s interaction with an organization, its product and services

Think about the whole interaction – the before, during, and after – that’s the customer experience.

6 laws of customer experience:

1. Every interaction creates a personal reaction
- An experience designed for everyone satisfies no one. You need to optimize for a specific set of customers (ie., use personas)

2. People are instinctively self-centered
- don’t sell things – help customers buy them
- don’t show your corporate underpants

3. Customer familiarity breeds alignment
- think of your company as a large production crew making the stars (front-line employees) shine on stage (during customer interactions) – nice thought!

4. Unengaged employees don’t create engaged customers

5. Employees do what is measured, incented, and celebrated
- me – ok. “encented” is a silly word.
- don’t just expect staff to do the right things. Instead, clearly define good behaviors.
- watch for mixed messages

6. You can’t fake it!
- it has to be top priority to be successful
- advertise to reinforce, not create, positioning (ie., job ads)

Definition of brand: a customer’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organization.

Good stuff!

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Supporting Your Community

by David Lee King on August 9, 2010

I just read You Don’t Sell to a Community. You Support a Community by Dan Blank (found via Chris Brogan’s Twitter feed). And hey – Dan must be ok – he used to work at Reed Business Info (ie., Library Journal, etc). So he gets us library types.

Here’s the gist of the post (make sure to read the whole thing): “As the business landscape rushes into social media – a more nuanced connection with people’s lives – this is something to be understood. The business funnel of marketing to a segmented group of people is not the same as building trust within a community – of supporting a community.”

Two other good quotes:

  • “You don’t sell to a community. You support a community. You provide for a community. You connect a community. You mediate a community. You balance a community. You sacrifice for a community.”
  • “it is hard to truly “build” a community. Communities exist already. A list of Twitter followers is not necessarily a community.”

So – how does this relate to libraries? We don’t sell stuff, do we? Sure we do. My library has a 3-person marketing team that creates newsletters, giant posters, and marketing & promotion campaigns (for starters. They do a lot of great work). Their business is making sure everyone in Shawnee County knows about us, checks out our stuff, and attends our events. That’s selling – selling our stuff and our services.

What do some libraries do soon after they set up their blogs, Facebook Pages, and Twitter feeds? They start selling! Many of us primarily use our online social communities as broadcast avenues. We throw billboards out into the middle of our digital community, hoping someone reads it, clicks the link, and attends the event (or checks out the book).

But I’m with Dan – that’s not the primary thing we should be doing in our online communities.

Think about it for a sec – when it comes to our analog community (ie., our buildings), we get that. We ROCK in that space. Who else (maybe besides a church) has an actual community that visits regularly, connects with the people who work there, and that’s not obviously selling stuff (like a grocery store)? That’s us! We’re not there to sell stuff – our stuff sells itself. In our analog spaces, we exist to support our communities, and we do it well.

So why, when we venture online, do we suddenly turn into snake oil salesmen? How come we have a hard time connecting via a text box, a camera, or a short video? We’ve had some form of these tools for a LONG TIME (ie., email for example). The rest of our community picked it up (look at national Facebook and email adoption rates) – why are we struggling here?

Want to fix this? Here’s a couple of things to try:

  • Take a look at your organization’s social media spaces (Facebook, Twitter, etc). Is it full of answering questions, or is it full of announcements? Think about balancing those out a bit.
  • Think of your social media spaces like a large gathering of people where you’ve been asked to represent your library. I’m guessing you wouldn’t bring your bullhorn, right? Instead, you might say “Hi – I’m from the library. What do you do?” … then you’d go from there. Treat your social media spaces the same way.
  • Give this quote from Dan some thought – “You don’t sell to a community. You support a community. You provide for a community. You connect a community. You mediate a community. You balance a community. You sacrifice for a community.” Are there ways you can do this online? Probably so.
  • In your library’s social media spaces, don’t be “The Library.” Be “David, the dude who works at the library.” Be a person, not a billboard.

More later.

Photo by cindiann

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Facebook from a Patron’s Perspective

by David Lee King on July 15, 2010

A day or two ago, we invited a couple of our patrons in for a focus group session on our website. The goal was to gather insights about our current website that can be incorporated into our redesign … but in the process, one patron in particular shared some eye-opening insights into how she uses Facebook.

This patron shared that she sits in front of a computer for 8 hours a day at work, and starts her morning out by opening up Google Reader, email, and Facebook as separate tabs on her web browser, and keeps them open all day long (while she’s working).

What does she do in Facebook? A lot. She follows co-workers, friends, and family there. The keeps up with the news and other organizations she’s interested in … through her Facebook news feed.

And the library? She primarily keeps up-to-date with the library through Facebook, too. Yes – through status updates and links within those status updates to interesting things.

OK. She was just one person who works in front of a computer all day. But I’m guessing she’s not alone – in the last three months, my library’s Facebook Page has added almost 900 fans.

Implications?

  • We need to not treat our Facebook Page as an afterthought. Some of our more savvy, active patrons are using Facebook as a primary source for library news.
  • We need to develop strategy and goals around our Facebook Pages (and any other social media tool our library incorporates).
  • We need to be actively sharing and conversing. Not just broadcasting press releases, but actually holding conversations with our patrons (just like we do in our physical spaces)

Are you seeing a similar thing with your customers? Your friends? How are you talking with patrons using a Facebook Page?

Photo by Paul Walsh

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How a Meme Gets Started

by David Lee King on July 9, 2010

It’s been fun today watching the #inatweet meme take off on Twitter. Which made me think it’d be fun to document it a bit – memes, trends, and interesting topics CAN originate from your organization (it’s certainly happened to my library before).

Here’s how the #inatweet meme started:

Justin Hoenke (@justinlibrarian) was talking to Joe Murphy (@libraryfuture) about Dropbox, a cool file sharing and storage service, and I chimed in too (’cause Dropbox really IS a cool tool). Justin asked Joe and I if “either of you point me in the direction of a good place to start for learning about Dropbox?” I just said “they have a video about themselves – I’d start there.”

Joe, however, tweeted this: “Dropbox in a tweet: Transfer/synch files across comps & mobile devices via web or software @JustinLibrarian @davidleeking.” And I replied back “@libraryfuture @JustinLibrarian good job! Hey, u cld start a meme – describe *** in a tweet!.” …

And of course Joe, master of all things social, actually DID it – “Let’s do it! @davidleeking Librarians- share an intro to a useful tech in a 1 Tweet blurb & use the #inatweet hashtag.” Then we both did a couple of retweets …

And now we have this:

  • #inatweet hashtag on Twitter is being used quite a bit today
  • 14 pages of tweets so far! That’s 200 tweets and counting
  • Way over 50 different services and tools … described in a tweet

Besides being pretty useful – short, to-the-point descriptions of services is always a good thing – think about this:

  • how can YOU start a hashtag meme, a local trend, or even a good discussion in your community’s favorite social media tool of choice?
  • What would you talk about?
  • could you keep it going, AND make it useful to your community?

We need to engage our communities, and something as simple as starting a conversation on a social media tool can be a way to do it. Think about it.

ps – make sure to add to the meme! Describe a service in a tweet, and add the #inatweet hashtag. It’s that simple!

Twitter bird by Marc Benton

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Designing Digital Experiences for Library Websites

by David Lee King on June 29, 2010

On Sunday, I had the privilege of presenting about digital experiences with John Blyberg, Bobbi Newman, and Toby Greenwalt. The room was packed, there were great questions afterwards … and I think it went well!

Here are the slides for my portion of the talk (and here’s a link to Toby’s too).

Designing Digital Experiences for Library Websites

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Visiting the DOK Library Concept Centre

by David Lee King on April 21, 2010

Larger YouTube version

I recently spoke at the UGame ULearn conference in Delft, Netherlands … and had some time to visit the DOK Library Concept Centre while I was there.

DOK is Delft’s local public library – but my, what a library! Cool building, forward-thinking staff, lovely setting … and lots of amazing technology, too. So I took some video!

This video highlights some of the neat projects DOK creates for their community. In each of them, you’ll notice a nice melding of technology, content, and community. Whether they’re working with a Microsoft Surface, creating a video, or setting up gaming in the kids area, they always include content and community connections.

I think the best example of this is highlighted towards the end of the video, when Erik Boekesteijn explains how their art gallery works with local schools to remotely display art in the classroom. Students can view a digitized version of the painting on a TV monitor setup in the classroom – they might see 20-30 works of art, have classroom discussions, etc. Then they take a trip to the library to see the actual painting.

Connecting community to content through technology – nicely done, DOK!

photo of DOK in the video by dmsmidt

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Designing the Digital Experience at UGame ULearn

by David Lee King on April 2, 2010

Yesterday, I presented Designing the Digital Experience at the UGame ULearn conference … here are my slides! And an fyi – I took notes for the other presentations, and I’ll be posting those in the next couple of days. So stay tuned!

Designing The Digital Experience

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Expressing your Organizational Personality Online

by David Lee King on March 25, 2010

Shmear - is your copy fun & informal?I love how some companies do that “informal language” thing – like Einstein Bros Bagels. Have you seen what they call their cream cheese? They call it “shmear.” Because you “shmear” it onto your bagel, right?

When businesses do that type of thing – use informal slang, or informal visuals in signage, or even when they always do certain things the same way – they are expressing their organizational personality.

What do I mean by organizational personality? Well – have you ever walked into a store, a business, even a restaurant … and felt the “vibe” of the place? Suddenly felt like you needed to whisper, for example? Or the atmosphere of the place felt light and lively, and immediately put a smile on your face?

Those businesses are most likely aware of that vibe … and have even planned for it. When they focus on creating certain types of consistent experiences, and on consistent touch points, they are expressing their organizational personality.

And once that personality is created, an organization can consistently express it everywhere – in a storefront, online, out of the office, even in print material.

Does your organization have a personality? You bet. Do you know what it is, and how to express it in different venues? Probably not, I’m guessing. Libraries are a great example of this. For many of us, the in-the-library personality is expressed as a fun, casual, maybe even sometimes inspirational one – smiles, helpful staff, colorful books, etc. That adds up to a light, informal, casual-but-hip organizational personality.

But when you visit the library’s website, you get a different personality entirely. Frequently, the website isn’t fun at all – instead, it’s all columns, formality, staid colors, and no friendly chatter at all. Very different personality from the in-the-library experience, isn’t it?

Give it some thought – figur out what your organization’s personality is, and how it’s being expressed. Then work on making that organizational personality consistent everywhere. It’ll add up to a better, more consistent experience for your customers.

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