Marketing

market day by sunstarrr

This is a tricky one. For the first time I felt I needed some inspiration from fellow Cam23 bloggers before I started. Having looked at some of the other blogs I found not only ideas but also that I am not so far behind with my blogging as others.

I think that social media offers lots of new ways to reach library users but it can be difficult to decide on the best ones to use. Facebook and Twitter are two of the most popular forms of social communication at the moment but it wasn't so long ago that Friends Reunited was the one people talked about. There will always be something new which is both the good and bad side of progress. How many people change mobile phones regularly because the technology that was new and exciting a year ago is now out-of-date and obsolete.

Okay, now I've got that off my chest, I would just like to state for the record that I am not opposed to social media, just it's overuse for trivialities. Anything that gets the library out there must be a good thing. The Librarian recently posted a survey to our undergraduates on the relevant Camtools sites asking them what they thought of the library service and some of them replied that they couldn't possibly comment as they'd never heard of us. Part of the problem may have been that the survey referred to us by our library name and not by the Department name but it was still disappointing. The Librarian has decided to include a question next year asking people how we can best communicate with them. This may lead in the future to the creation of a library Facebook page.

As for the adoption of a tool or strategy to promote the Library, I would choose Twitter, which we already have. It's very popular and needs only short notices so it's very quick and easy to maintain.

Twitter

"Winston Churchill 30 December 1941" By Yousef Karsh

To misquote Winston Churchill "Never in the field of human knowledge has so much been written by so many about so little." An accurate description of Twitter I feel. You can find everything on here from the useful (Haddon Library website and photocopying down) to the irrelevant (Phillip Schofield arrived home late on Monday night) to the downright bizarre (Jonathan Ross tweets that he must sing to one of his dogs). As Miss Crail blogs, do we need to know that someone is about to make a cup of tea?

Some people have thousands of followers and in turn follow thousands of others so with tweets of their own + reading other tweets + replies they must spend all day on Twitter. I have trouble keeping up with the blogs I'm following, let alone anything else.

I found it easy to set up an account, fortunately nobody shares my obscure name. The good thing about Twitter is it forces you to be concise, with a 140 character maximum you can't afford to ramble on and on.

I can see how this would be a useful way to keep in touch with library users but like all social forms of communication, be it Twitter, Facebook or blogging it only works if the audience wants to see it.