Start a Revolution: Stop Acting Like A Library by Ben Bizzle

I love this book, and I recommend it to anyone interested in library marketing in general, using paid advertising, or using social media in library marketing.

One of its chief virtues are that it's short. It's an account of the work Ben Bizzle and his colleagues did at his library, Craigshead County Jonesboro Public Library in Jonesboro, Arkansas.  It's written in such a way that it's easy to understand and easy for someone to imagine duplicating at their own library.

It's also an immensely practical book and I think that's just what is needed.  It addresses tough questions like how to use Facebook in our current environment; how to convince decision makers; how to marshal the resources you can access to do this work.  He talks about the ROI of advertising and what might be described as cost per impression.

I have long been looking for a thoughtful discussion of the use of social media in libraries and advice on how to get engagement on Facebook.  

Bizzle's discussion of the importance of social media, how his library used Facebook, his strategy for buying ads on Facebook and how they helped his library successfully promote a new service, He talks about convincing decision makers who are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with social media.  There are guest essays here, by Ned Potter and Josh Tate (a useful discussion of Pinterest).  I also like that he talks about the importance of utilizing traditional media.  

What I treasure about this book, besides its specific-to-libraries discussion of social media, is his discussion strategy for overcoming the drop in reach for Facebook fan/business pages, and how he overcame that with his advertising strategy.  That chapter is quite detailed, and you can use this section like a recipe, following along and repeating his actions. I would have loved to have known about his work when I was struggling with my Facebook page, and I believe this can be very helpful to others.

He advocates that folks who are working on library Facebook pages follow his discussion closely.  

I also love that his library used a billboard campaign, and he explains how you can, too.  You perhaps have already heard of the most famous of the billboards:  "Spoiler alert:  Dumbledore dies on p. 596."  (I hope you've already finished the Harry Potter books.)

And don't be put off by the title:  Ben Bizzle isn't really advocating that you stop acting like a library. Instead, he's urging you to get serious about informing your public about how cool the groovy stuff at your library is, through both paid advertising, social media, and more conventional forms of publicity.

The Zen of Social Media Marketing by Shama Kabani

I love this book.  It has a lot of virtues:  it offers pithy rules for social media marketing; it's brief and concise; well-written, so easy to read; and it offers a sophisticated understanding of social media marketing.  (Perhaps it's not an in-depth examination of social media, but I've been on Twitter for five years and my understanding of its virtues and importance changed immediately when I read her chapter on Twitter.com).

This book answers the question:  why should we be doing social media marketing?  The first answer is that that is where our patrons are.

Social Media Marketing as SEO

Kabani asserts that social media marketing is the new SEO:  social media is what you use to drive traffic to your website.  Shen mentions, in passing, that websites are as important to every entity today as having a phone and a listing in the phone book used to be.

Since SEO is not a term I use every day or even anything that I thought was relevant to libraries, it's taking me a little while to absorb this.

Since library websites have many uses, such as a place where you can place a hold on an item, check the status of items in your account, consult the catalog, and perhaps most importantly, access online databases that are only accessible from the web, it seems to me that part of the answer for libraries about why we should be using social media marketing is to drive traffic to our websites.  While we're doing that, we can also be educating online users about all of our library products, especially our new ones.

In Chapter One, Kabani points out that good social media creates ambassadors for the brand.  This may be hard to understand but engaging with users creates an area in which they can endorse your organization, your brand, or a product or service.  That's very valuable.  Because it's a commonplace that we will turn for advice to someone we trust because they are close to us before we will turn to an expert (or the vast quantity of useful information available to us at the library!).  Creating ambassadors for the brand, and positive feelings and comments, is another reason for a library to be on social media.
                                                                          
Quality Control

One of the themes of the book is that, while you utilize an effective publicity strategy on social media, you need to also stick to the knitting:  make sure that you product is top-notch.  It's high quality and high value that is, in some cases, the key to success.

For instance, in Kabani's discussion of Groupon, Living Social, and other group buying sites, she points out that if you create a coupon to attract new customers, be sure to have a plan in place that includes high-quality service performance and customer service.  Encourage your coupon customers to follow up on social media with comments about your product or service.  BUT - be sure that the experience that your prospective customer has when they use a coupon is likely to merit a good review.  If you think that staff are not ready for the highest levels of scrutiny, it might be wise to review some important customer service principles.  To make the most of the opportunity afforded by the group buying coupon, a business leader must prepare to staff to cross-sell or upsell, without being too aggressive.

This book focuses on using blogs, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin to market your business.  There's also a chapter on Google+, which I suspect is not on the radar of many libraries.  Part of its appeal to businesses is that your Google+ page will appear with search results.

I think that blogs, especially when they're part of your website (as she recommends), have the potential to be very useful to libraries.  That's because, as this book points out, providing information that is useful to your patrons (in the case of a library), your consumers (people who read your content on social media and hopefully, are positively influenced by it), and finally your customers (people who actually consume your products and services).

One way I would love to take advantage of social media is to use it to help answer the reader's question, "What do I read next?" whether that's a question about which book is next in a series, what's hot right now, or what's a strong recommendation for a good book to read.

Social Media Policy

There was a time when a lot of libraries were concerned with this issue.  I assume that most libraries that want to have a social media policy now have one.

Shama Kabani makes several interesting points about crafting a social media policy.  One is that one size does not fit all, and it would be ideal for a social media policy fit your organization.  Another is that it is not necessary to make social media rules punitive or draconian.  She emphasizes commen sense, and points out that at Zappos, employees are encouraged to participate in social media and are trusted to present the company in a positive light.  She points out that as of the writing of her book, Zappos has not had any problems with social media comments posted by colleagues.  This reminds me that again, having a healthy company culture can do wonders in preventing these kinds of problems.

I think something that's implied is that when and if you adopt a social media policy, you spend some time talking with staff about their role in social media.  Kabani talks about the important positive role that employees have in engaging audiences outside the orgnanization.


Some More Pithy Rules

"If content is king, video is the king of the bigger country."

"Many executives between the ages of 45 and 65 are digital aliens.  They were not brought up in the digital age and feel overwhelmed and sometimes fearful of the new technologies."


"Bottom line:  Don't mistake the medium for the message:  that's not what it is.  
Find a way to be of service -- and to be part of something bigger than your business." (p.61, Ch. 5)

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell is a fascinating book and has some application to marketing in general and library marketing in particular.

Very briefly, it's about "micro-slicing" -- the way that we take in information, usually visual information, and make a gut-level decision about it in less than a few seconds.

What we call our instinct is more accurately termed the lessons we've learned that are filed away in our subconscious.  Sometimes we have access to them and sometimes we don't:  an example is the tennis expert who can't tell you why it is that he knows a tennis player is going to serve a fault even before he's hit the ball.  People who have the most access, generally, are experts.  Blink is about those split-second decisions:  their genius and their limitations.

For marketers, Gladwell has a lot of lessons.  Context matters:  a better-tasting product may sell less if it's packaging is off-putting.

Surveyers take note:  Experts can tell you why a product is superior or inferior or pleasing or not.  Non-experts can't tell you that:  they can really only tell you if they like it.  If you press them, they will struggle to come up with reasons for their decisions that may be false .. and they may change their choice to align with the false criteria they made up to justify their original choice.

Furthermore, Gladwell shows us that we'll sell more jam if we have 3 flavors than if we have 32.  Jam .. and many other products .. are an appealing product that we often buy on impulse.  Impulse drives us to make the purchase.  If we have to spend too much time trying to figure out which flavor we want to buy, the impulse will buy and it will actually be easier for us not to buy.

So .. decision-making work can kill the sale.

Gladwell also interviews a hugely successful car salesman who reports that his philosophy is not to pre-judge his potential customers.  As a result he gets more business and enthusiastic customers who give him lots of referrals -- ensuring that he'll go right on being the most successful car salesman.  This is important:  pre-judging is a huge part of the car sales business.  But this guy doesn't do that and he's hugely successful.

Not pre-judging our customers can help us, ultimately, get more business.  We have to make judgments of some kind in order to function, but that, ideally, should be tempered with an attempt at keeping an open mind that can help us discover and meet the needs of our customers.

Buzzmarketing

I've just read Buzzmarketing.  It's a lively, fun to read book.  Can't be too shabby - its promotional website claims it's been chosen as part of the curriculum by two business schools at prestigious universities.

Many of the ideas were new to me, and I was sincerely surprised by some of them. Hughes presents six rules for buzzmarketing, that is, marketing that is so interesting that it causes people to talk about it.

That's important, he says, because the amount of advertising we're subjected to each day causes us to increasingly tune it out.  And, buzzmarketing, also known as "word of mouth" marketing, is ten times more effective than paid advertising.  I don't recall if he offers to document that claim, but I find I do believe that it's mostly true.

After all, I know I often prefer to ask someone I know for advice or a recommendation rather than do even the simplest research.  I'd rather ask someone where the nearest drugstore is than look up drugstores in the yellow pages.

Back to the rules.  One of the rules he names if you wish to inspire buzz, you might break a taboo.  The example I remember most of taboo breaking that led to Buzz is several of Britney Spears' decisions -- to bare her navel in a music video, to perform with a snake.

I want to implement buzzmarketing, but I'm having a hard time figuring out what would be comparable -- and still consistent with a public library's overall aims and image -- in the library world.