Our local chamber hosted a Breakfast Forum this morning focusing on social media. Enjoying a lovely view from the Derryfield, we chit chatted with the others at the table. Shooting for common ground a baby-faced real estate broker commented on how much he loves his Kindle and answered some of the librarians’ questions about it. Pretty unanimously, the librarians responded with reasons why they could never be interested in this. They didn’t sneer. They weren’t rude. But what message does this send to the people at the table? I worried it was along the lines of ‘librarians are not interested in new things nor do they have open minds.’ Nothing shuts down a conversation faster than judging what someone else is clearly passionate about. How often do we do this to our patrons?
I wish, above all else, the response from my colleagues had been more along the lines of, ‘gosh, that sounds really neat, maybe we should start lending them at the Library.’ Even if we don’t mean it! Here the message is more like ‘we are open-minded and here to serve a public, you are the public and if you’re interested it deserves our attention.’ It turned out to be apropos for the following hour of presentations.
I did not bring my computer, for once, but wished I had for live-blogging purposes. I did manage to capture some great snippets analog-style:
George Wallace, Discovery Communications Group (Quotes are his, other is my annotation)
If you are not in this space in six months your competition is going to own it.
And despite what we like to think Libraries DO have competition, a lot of it. We have to be proactive about maintaining our important role in our communities.
We are all biologically predisposed to connect with each other.
Libraries are built around connecting people with each other. We are the beating hearts of our communities. It’s natural that we would also be this for an online community.
Strategy:
What are your clients?
What are they interested in?
What do you want to hear from them?
What do you want to talk to them about?
What value can you offer?
[I missed a couple and can't find the slides - will update if I get more info.]
These sound suspiciously like writing my online library policy (still to be written). The more I think about this the more LIKE businesses I realized we are. Also, are businesses an under-served user base?
Your website is a hub.
YES, it’s a place to gather all your divergent web presences. Think of it as ‘home,’ you still go out to meet people at the Facebook club or bowl at the Twitter bar, but then you bring those relationships and experiences home and they become part of your identity there.
People trust friends over companies
It’s true and libraries are beautifully positioned to be both. We can leverage our resources and staff to provide the coverage of a large organization, but we can be personal like a friend. THIS is why it’s so important to speak in your own, personal voice on the internet and not as The Institution. Too many libraries think blogging their press releases is blogging. No. If you talk like that you netizens id you as a business and you lose credibility with them.
Leslie Poston, co-author Twitter for Dummies
You MUST respond.
Inviting comments, as in a form on a blog or a wall in Facebook, and then not responding too the comments folks make is a little like picking up the phone and not saying hello. Or worse, saying hello and then hanging up. It’s just bad manners. The days are the static web are dead. You must commit to interacting with your patrons online.
Be human. People want to hear from YOU.
In my Library that usually means what you are reading, but I often write about technology or the latest cool knitting book or whatever I’m interested in. People respond better to other people - don’t you?
Tweets should be a ratio of 9:1. Nine personal and one business.
This could, of course, apply to all social media. I think the same should be true with a blog.
You do not have to follow people back.
Despite our desire to collect friends and reach as many people as possible, libraries are here to serve a geographic community. My unofficial following policy for the Library is that if you list Manchester, NH as your location or it’s clear from your profanity-free tweets that you’re associated with Manchester, I will follow you. I bend it for the greater Manchester area or even as far as all of NH. But I really want to see my ‘followers list’ as a collection of Manchester-based twitterati.
My final take away from this info-packed hour came during the Q&A session and resonates on a number of levels:
It’s the easiest thing in the world to think of reasons NOT to do something.