Archive for the ‘Best Practices’ Category

Cindy King at the Social Media Examiner recommends 17 Ways to Grow Your Blog From Top Bloggers. They asked the finalists of their Top 10 Social Media Blogs contest for their best tips on how to grow your list of blog subscribers. Here are her top five suggestions:

• #1: Be Active in Other Communities First
• #2: Write About What You Love
• #3: Write Insanely Great Content
• #4: Answer Questions for Your Audience
• #5: Offer Real Value

Sharlyn Lauby at Mashable creates a handy guide to How To: Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile’s New Skills Section. With more than 90 million users in 200 countries, who conducted nearly two billion people searches last year, LinkedIn has become a powerful professional networking tool. Check out these tips for how to organize and highlight your skills in this new section of the user profile.

• Think Like a Recruiter
• Don’t Fake It
• Target Your Strengths
• Market Your Expertise

Amy Porterfield at the Social Media Examiner talks with a group of social media gurus to recommend 8 Hot Social Media Tips From Eight Industry Experts. Here are the first four in this solid list of strategies:

• #1: Offer live events on Facebook
• #2: Help others who aren’t necessarily famous
• #3: Don’t over-focus on marketing
• #4: Research what your customers are saying

Amy-Mae Elliott suggests 8 Simple Ways to Improve Your YouTube Channel. If you’ve set up a YouTube channel to share videos on behalf of your organization you’ll want to check out these quick tips to making the most of your profile. Here are the first four recommendations:

1. Create a Custom Background Image
2. Select the Perfect Color Scheme
3. Make Your Best Video “Featured”
4. Make Sure All Your Thumbnails Look Good

Aaron Schmidt, Digital Initiatives Librarian for the District of Columbia Public Library, has a new User Experience column at Library Journal titled Resist That Redesign. This thought-provoking article recommends holding off on the grand redesign in favor of a slow evolution of your library’s website.

“Website redesign projects take a long time, often more than a year. During that time, a lack of visible progress can lower staff morale and leave users with a stagnant, unimproved site for months at a time. Likewise, maintaining a current site and building a new one divides efforts. By contrast, small iterative changes can boost staff morale with frequent, demonstrable (if small) victories. Think of it this way: if you make a dozen modest changes—one a month for a year—you could easily end up with a site that’s better by leaps and bounds than what you’d be able to design from scratch in the same interval.”

via Tame the Web

Josh Catone at Mashable has put together a list of 9 Web Apps for Gathering Customer Feedback, all of which could be valuable tools for soliciting patron feedback as well. Each of these applications can be used to collect input and suggestions about the library’s website, current and planned library services, library resources, and even use of library space.

One of the best ways for a blog to gain visibility and traffic is through links on other people’s websites or blogs. Tara Hornor at Slodive offers 9 Tips for Encouraging Others to Link to Your Blog. These are all valuable suggestions, here are the first five:

• Write Content that Will Benefit Others
• Post Original Content
• Address an Issue that Already Exists
• Know What Topics are “Hot”
• Post Interviews

Stephanie Sammons at the Social Media Examiner offers a quick guide to How to Use LinkedIn With Twitter for Better Networking. If you have profiles on both of these social media websites, you might already know that they are integrating through an application called Tweets which “can help you keep tabs on the Twitter updates from your LinkedIn connections”. This useful guide is broken down into the following sections:

• Add Your Twitter Account to Your LinkedIn Profile
• Install the LinkedIn Tweets Application
• How to Utilize the Tweets Application to Build Social Influence
• #1: Identify and follow all of your LinkedIn connections on Twitter within the Tweets application
• #2: Create a dynamic Twitter list of your LinkedIn connections
• #3: Look for engagement and promotional opportunities through LinkedIn Tweets

Chris Brogan, social media guru, has created an excellent Insider’s Guide to Social Media Etiquette. This helpful article is broken down into sections that provide tips to help you fully leverage the power of social media channels while observing proper etiquette.

• Social Media Etiquette: Your Appearance
• Social Media Etiquette: Friending
• Social Media Etiquette: Conversation
• Social Media Etiquette: Disclosure
• Social Media Etiquette: Promoting
• Social Media Etiquette: Content Production
• Social Media Etiquette: Sharing is Caring

Susan Gunelius at Entrepreneur.com rounds up the 10 Laws of Social Media Marketing.

“Leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging.”

Here are the ten laws, check out the article for their explanations.

1. The Law of Listening
2. The Law of Focus
3. The Law of Quality
4. The Law of Patience
5. The Law of Compounding
6. The Law of Influence
7. The Law of Value
8. The Law of Acknowledgment
9. The Law of Accessibility
10. The Law of Reciprocity

Leyl Master Black at Mashable provides a quick tutorial for How To: Create a Facebook Engagement Policy. How do you want your online community manager to engage your organization’s fans? “These engagement policies run the gamut from a brief checklist of best practices to a multi-page legal document with detailed instructions on how to handle issues.” Here are a few of the recommendations:

• Categorize Posts
• Establish Acceptable Response Times
• Develop Guidelines for Resolving Issues
• Create a Process for Handling Inquiries
• Set Clear Ground Rules For Fan Posts
• Set the Appropriate Tone

John Paul Titlow at ReadWriteBiz suggests 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Use QR Codes. All of these recommendations can be easily adapted for libraries such as:

1. Turn Foot Traffic Into Web Traffic
2. Build Up Social Media Followers
3. Business Cards
4. Print Advertising
5. Scavenger Hunts and Other Games

Cynthia Thomas, a partner at Translator, a digital experience agency, writes for UX Magazine about The Importance of Designing an Experience Culture. This is an excellent article addressing the idea of developing positive experiences for customers by (re)designing the organization’s internal culture. As libraries are continually working to develop great experiences for their patrons, much can be gleaned from this helpful article.

“There needs to be better evaluation of corporate culture and its influence on the actions and sentiments of its employees. Countless hours are spent setting up external communication policies, teams that listen to what customers are saying, and even entire departments dedicated to customer experience (CX). This outward focus on developing good experiences for customers often overshadows the need to live that philosophy inside a company’s own walls. A culture that does not internally live a focus on experience will find it impossible to externally execute the same.”

Steven Bell at Designing Better Libraries writes about the patron experience at the reference desk in A Reference Service User Experience – Tell Me More. This insightful post wraps up his panel presentation at the Reference Renaissance Conference, and responds to a librarian’s query about how to make the reference experience more inviting and fun.

“As I have stated in other writings and presentations on UX, many individuals do not like coming to the library or have a great fear of research which intimidates them. So they already come to us with low expectations of having a good experience. So anything we can do to make them more at ease, more relaxed, and more aware they have people who are there to help, already exceeds their expectations and contributes to a great and unexpected experience.

But if we just see ourselves as personnel who answer questions, check out books, maintain the stacks – and not as important components in delivering a well designed experience – then it won’t happen. This begins with a staff conversation to figure out what the experience is now – and what it could be and needs to be.”

Ryan Malone at the Social Media Examiner suggests 11 Ways to Improve Your Blog Posts With Interviews. This excellent article discusses ways to take an interview and turn it into eleven different types of blog posts. Here are just the top five:

• #1: Informational Post
• #2: The Numbered List
• #3: The Mini Case Study
• #4: Link or Resource Round-Ups
• #5: Expert Guide