Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

There have been quite a few library technology stories since my last roundup in late February. Here are 30 stories/articles/blog posts that you won’t want to miss!! And please list any other recent library tech stories in the comments.

Social Media

1. 3 Ways College Libraries Are Exploring Pinterest
2. 5 Educational YouTube Channels for Librarians
3. 10 Resources for Using Pinterest in Your Library
4. NYPL’s Movie Trailer-Style Library Video
5. 20 Great Ways Libraries Are Using Pinterest

Mobile

6. 10 Kindle Cases That Look Like Books
7. Libraries Loaning iPads
8. Reinvent the Book Club: How To Host Your Own Audiobook Gathering

e-Books

9. Evaluating e-Books in Law Libraries
10. Ebooks 101: DRM (Digital Rights Management)
11. Should Libraries Get Out of the eBook Business?

QR Codes

12. QR Codes Extend Library Programming
13. What are some uses for QR codes in public and academic libraries?
14. QR Code Quest Scavenger Hunt- Part Deux!

Library Marketing

15. 21 Resources for Library Marketing with Social Media
16. Stop Branding Your Library!!
17. How to Use Webinars to Create Great Relationships with Library Patrons
18. Create Your Own Library Social Media Monitoring Dashboard

Preservation

19. Archiving Cell Phone Text Messages
20. Pinterest and the New Meaning of Curation

ERM

21. Implementing an ERM System in Your Library
22. Managing Electronic Resources

Misc

23. Ten Things I Didn’t Learn in Library School
24. 20 Everyday Ways To Escape The Library Echo Chamber
25. Alternative Uses for the Pesky eBook Budget
26. Poll Results: What Technologies will impact libraries in 2-5 years?
27. Card Sorting from A–Z iLibrarian Series
28. 7 Stellar Library Conference Presentations
29. 7 Things You Should Know About™ the Evolution of the Textbook
30. Vintage Photos of Librarians

Darren Steele, Strategic Director of Mindspace, and co-author of the gamification book, “I’ll Eat this Cricket for a Cricket Badge.” blogs at Mashable and offers 4 Tips For Gamifying Your Marketing Plan. This useful post discusses each of these recommendations:

• 1. Decide on the Right Opacity
• 2. Break Up Information Into Smaller Pieces
• 3. Do Something With Likes and Followers
• 4. Match Incentives With Engagement

Debbie Hemley at the Social Media Examiner offers 26 Tips for Success With Location-Based Marketing. These excellent recommendations for leveraging social, local, and mobile into your marketing strategy form an A-Z guide for location-based marketing. Here are the first five tips discussed:

• #1: Analytics
• #2: Blog
• #3: Coupons and Location-Based Mobile Apps
• #4: Directories
• #5: Engagement

Henneke at Copyblogger asks: “Would you like to create content that people will remember, tweet, and plus?” And he provides advice for how to do just that in 58 Ways to Create Persuasive Content Your Audience Will Love. His recommendations are divided into the following sections:

• How to streamline your content creation
• How to write headlines that convert
• How to write content your readers will remember
• How to become a more persuasive writer
• How to enchant your audience
• How to self-edit so you don’t look dumb
• The harsh reality of becoming a very good writer

Lisa Peyton at the Social Media Examiner discusses 5 Top Google+ Tools and Apps for Marketing Pros. This quick primer outlines five categories of tools and apps you can employ to greatly enhance your Google+ marketing efforts. Here are the sections discussed:

• #1: Google+ Widgets
• #2: Google+ Statistics
• #3: Google+ Directories
• #4: Browser Extensions
• #5: Management Platforms

Debbie Hemley at the Social Media Examiner offers a guide to 26 Elements of a Gamification Marketing Strategy. According to Gartner, more than 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application by 2014. If you’re considering incorporating this new and popular trend into your marketing strategy, you’ll want to check out this post. Here are the first five elements discussed:

• #1: Achievers (Bartle’s Types)
• #2: Badges as a Reward
• #3: Challenges
• #4: Demographics
• #5: Explorers (Bartle’s Type)

I’ve been looking into various social media monitoring tools which are available but haven’t found one that completely fits the bill for our library so I decided to create one from scratch. I wanted something free, so I first looked into aggregated search tools such as SocialMention and IceRocket, which are great for searching a lot of different types of social media sites, but not all of them. And the biggest drawback of these tools is that they don’t let you combine searches and/or use boolean operators in your searches. So, for example, my library is The New York Law Institute, but we couldn’t get that name on Twitter so we’re the NYLawInstitute on that social network. We also often use the acronym NYLI so I’d want that included in searches as well, especially of the blogosphere.

So I decided to use a free start page which allows you to create private pages as I wanted to limit viewing to staff. I chose Protopage since I’m a big fan of their start pages. I used their Widgets tool to quickly add RSS Feeds of searches I did on various sites and ended up with a great dashboard that is going to let us watch and participate in conversations that are happening across the Web.

Create Your Own Social Media Monitoring Dashboard

1. Go to Protopage.com and sign up for a free start page.
2. Select the “Add Widgets” option at the top and see the section to “Add a News Feed Directly” and/or “Add a Twitter Feed” that pops up on the left.



3. Start by adding the Twitter Feed by typing in a search term for your library and dragging the widget to your dashboard. If your library uses an acronym or other name, also create a widget for that term.
4. Go to your preferred social media and social search sites and enter your library’s name. Run the search and then grab the RSS feed and create a widget on your start page. Here’s a list of suggested sites to start with and where to find the RSS feed for each.

Websites to Search and Monitor

• Google Blog Search – You’ll want to keep track of what people are saying about your library in blog posts so this site is essential to search. Once you’ve run a successful search for your organization, scroll all the way down to the bottom and you’ll see the RSS feed linked there.



• IceRocket Blog Search – Google’s Blog Search will not include posts from what it determines as “Homepages” in the RSS feed for their search, many of which I’ve noticed were actually blogs such as this one. In order to get results from those sites as well, you’ll want to run an IceRocket Blog Search. The RSS feed is located on the bottom left sidebar of the results page for a blog search.
• Google Alerts – It seems the only way to get an RSS Feed of a Google Search is to create a Google Alert for a search term and then select the delivery method as “Feed”. This will then give you the link to the RSS Feed which you can use to create a widget on your start page. This will only give you the most recent results.
• Bing Search – You can easily grab an RSS Feed for a Bing Web search for your library by conducting it in Internet Explorer and then selecting the orange RSS Feed icon that’s built into the top toolbar.
• WordPress.com Search – If you want to be really thorough, you can also do a search of all WP blogs here. The RSS feed is located on the right sidebar of the search results page.
• Social Mention – This is an excellent aggregated search of about 75 different social media channels. You can run a search here and then grab an RSS feed which is made available on the top right of the search results page.
• FriendFeed - FriendFeed lets users aggregate their content from many different social channels and they offer a public search of everyone’s posts. You can conduct a search for your library’s name and then grab the RSS feed by scrolling all the way down the search results page.
• MonitorThis - This search engine searches 25 different search engines across the Web for results and aggregates them on one page. The don’t offer an RSS Feed, however if you can run the search in IE and then select the orange RSS Feed icon that’s built into the top toolbar.
• BoardReader - This search tool monitors 50,000 forums and message boards for who’s saying what. They don’t offer an RSS Feed, so you’ll want to run the search in IE and then select the orange RSS Feed icon that’s built into the top toolbar.



• Facebook Search – You can now search what everyone is saying in their updates, not just your friends, by selecting the “Public Posts” filter on the left sidebar of Facebook search. You do need to be logged into Facebook to access FB Search, however, so you may want to create a “Bookmarks” widget linking to this and other similar sites that you need to be logged into, with specific instructions.



• LinkedIn – You can search what people are saying in their updates about your library on the popular professional network LinkedIn, by logging in and selecting the “Updates” search filter.

PC Sweeney advises everyone to Stop Branding Your Library!! in his latest post. He provides six thought-provoking arguments for why we shouldn’t spend so much time trying to market our organizations. Here are the points discussed:

• 1) What is the goal with branding?
• 2) How many people go to multiple libraries in the system?
• 3) Part of a consortium?
• 4) Critical mass of libraries with the same brand or at least using the same card?
• 5) Same services available?
• 6) Looking the same

Cindy King at the Social Media Examiner offers 9 Social Media Marketing Tips From the Pros. If you’re wondering how you can better leverage social platforms on behalf of your organization you won’t want to miss this post. Here are the top five recommendations:

• #1: Draw Attention to Your Custom Tabs in the New Facebook Timelines
• #2: Add the LinkedIn Company Follow Button to Your Site
• #3: Use Bufferapp to Manage Your Social Media Marketing
• #4: Get YouTube Subscribers Just by Asking
• #5: Create a Facebook Plan You Can Stick With

Stephanie Sammons at the Social Media Examiner offers 4 Tips for Creating Your LinkedIn Company Page. The LinkedIn professional social network has 150 million members worldwide and is adding 10 new members every 5 seconds. This quick tutorial will help you make the most of LinkedIn’s popularity. Here are the four recommendations discussed:

• #1: Maximize the Overview Tab on your LinkedIn Company Page
• #2: Create Interesting LinkedIn Company Page Updates
• #3: Encourage and Showcase Your Products or Services
• #4: Use LinkedIn Ads

You may also want to check out 5 Tips for Using the New LinkedIn Company Pages.

There are so many good (and free!) marketing opportunities on social media channels. Here are some articles and blog posts which offer advice for making the most of these.

Pinterest

1. 5 Ways to Use Pinterest in Your Library
2. 5 More Ways to Use Pinterest in Your Library
3. Pinterest: A New Social Media Opportunity for Libraries
4. 56 Ways to Market Your Business on Pinterest

Facebook

5. How Facebook Can Help Market Your Library
6. 7 Ways Universities Are Using Facebook as a Marketing Tool
7. 4 Ways to Increase Your Facebook Page Visibility
8. 11 Inspiring Nonprofit Facebook Timelines

Social Media Marketing

9. 9 Tips for Integrating Social Media on Your Website
10. 10 Ways Non-Profits Can Benefit From Social Media
11. The 7 Essential Elements of Effective Social Media Marketing
12. 5 Ways to Brand Your New YouTube Profile
13. 9 Ways to Integrate Email and Social Media Marketing
14. 5 Tips for Using the New LinkedIn Company Pages
15. 6 Best Practices for Universities Embracing Social Media
16. 10 Tips and Tricks for Better Google+ Brand Pages

Events Marketing

17. 10 Tips for Promoting Your Events With the New LinkedIn Events Tool
18. 15 Ways to Bring Social Media to Events

Mobile Social Marketing

19. 9 Resources for Marketing on Mobile Social Networks
20. Mobile Marketing With QR Codes and MS Tags
21. 7 Things You Need to Do Now for Social Media and Mobile Marketing

If you’re wondering how to make the most of your organization’s Facebook profile now that the timeline has been introduced, you’ll want to check out 11 Inspiring Nonprofit Facebook Timelines at Nonprofit Tech 2.0.

If you’re looking to defend the ROI of social media efforts in your organization, you’ll want to check out Phil Mershon’s 5 Social Media Marketing Trends: New Research at the Social Media Examiner. This is an excellent article chock-full of stats and infographics to support these five claims:

• #1: The Benefits Derived from Social Media are Increasing
• #2: More Businesses are Investing in Social Media
• #3: Measuring ROI is One of the Top Challenges Faced by Marketers
• #4: Marketing Agencies View the Value of Social Media Marketing Differently
• #5: An Integrated Social Media Plan Leads to Greater Financial Results

Debbie Hemley at the Social Media Examiner offers 26 Tips for Using Pinterest for Business. The Pinterest social bookmarking site has become wildly popular over the past year and businesses and organizations have begun to strategize about the best ways to leverage the social network. Here are the first five recommendations:

• #1: Add a Pinterest “Follow” and/or “Pin It” Button
• #2: Brands and Pinterest
• #3: Crowdsource
• #4: Do Follow Links
• #5: Etiquette

Jeff Korhan at the Social Media Examiner writes a quick guide to Mobile Marketing With QR Codes and MS Tags. More than 50% of all local web searches take place with mobile devices, so it’s more important than ever to have a smart mobile strategy.