Thing 19: Marketing

Effective marketing is an extremely difficult thing to do well. The four Ps - product, price, place and promotion – used to guide services towards the best mechanisms for reaching out to users. However, as the Cam 23 Things programme has shown, we all have the power to become creators of our own products now as well as consumers. As information professionals, we need to be able to find connections and context for our content, to engage in conversations with each other and with our users, if we are to succeed in advocating our services and raising the profile of our institutions.

Branding can play a large part in service marketing but essentially our users need to be able to do two things for our marketing campaigns to be effective: they need to be able to identify a definite and unified signifier for our service and what we do, and they need to know how to communicate with us. Emerging technologies give us many more channels through which to communicate and a diverse array of platforms in which to engage the user: Facebook, Twitter, library websites, blogs, virtual pin boards, VLEs. It is even more crucial now that we present a unified image for our service which signifies what we do and what we offer within this diverse plethora of communication platforms.

It is more important than ever that we engage in conversation with our users, something made possible by new technologies in the sense that conversations now become public and debates may emerge from within the heart of the library’s technological space. These conversations in context are to be encouraged and promoted. We hope to implement a library Twitter and Facebook presence as soon as practically convenient.

Yet in the midst of these new possibilities brought forth by emerging technologies, it is important to remember that older ways of marketing are perhaps not yet dead. Front-line staff recommendations, physical pin boards, recommendation boxes where requests are responded to and pinned up for all to view, leaflets and signage – these are important marketing and communication mechanisms that push out to our users all the added value services which we can provide for them from within the library and beyond.

We need to push a presence out into the virtual space, for example by including links to podcasts of information skills tutorials on our homepage or by pointing our users via a Twitter feed to a Youtube video introducing library staff and our diverse range of services, without forgetting that effective marketing often takes place directly in the physical library in user conversations with physical staff.

Oh, Oh, Oh - Zotero

My, my, my, Zotero. Anyone can see, this bibliographical management tool is really good for me, I’m no longer lost in a citation mire that no one can see.

On a serious note, Zotero is an imaginative and useful tool for capturing, storing and retrieving bibliographic references. It is visually appealing and highly useful to share references with others.

I am glad to have had the opportunity to find out more about this tool. Whilst I personally prefer the ease and simplicity of end note's web based reference management tool, Zotero’s advantage of collaborative sharing could make it more attractive to our users (or perhaps not!)

My end note web now also has a ‘cite whilst you write’ plug-in to rival the paid version of the software. The ease with which references are captured from various electronic databases and manual entries to produce a bibliography is extremely useful.

A knowledge of Zotero is useful knowledge gained and which will inform my answers to future queries regarding reference management methods. (At break of day when that reference went astray, I opened end note - bah bah baah...)

Linkedin

I feel a bit of a cheat with this Thing really, as I already have a Linkedin profile and use it regularly. The benefits are immense; it provides a strong professional network, an alternative to the more social networks. I particularly like the function to join groups and I have learnt a lot from the CILIP discussions.

Sometimes one gets the feeling that, once the network of professionals has been created, no one is really sure what is supposed to happen next. Some people share news articles with their network and others have linked their Twitter feed. As I have mentioned before, I quite like having some things in different places and feel no urge to group everything together.

I think the long term benefits of this tool are more useful than the short term gains; in the current climate, being part of a strong network of professionals with a visible online presence could well make a real difference.