Guerilla marketing opportunities

I couldn't resist having a go at this.

Aside from being a bit of fun this is also an opportunity to flag up the potential for unofficial, subversive advertising these days. There are so many ways for us to fall victim to stereotyping and lazy journalism (I am sick to the back teeth of our customers being referred to as "bookworms") we should make a point of getting the positives out there when we can.

I was bearing this in mind with our Facebook account:

• We can be seen to be pushing good news items out to our "friends." Not only about our library service (which we should be doing anyway) but also things that might be useful to our customers and potential customers.
• We can be friendly. We can like other people's good news. We can play Scrabble with our friends (one of our librarians is mad keen on Scrabble - she seems to have a couple of hundred games on the go at any one moment - and doesn't mind doing this in her own time for the fun of it). We can wish our friends a happy birthday.
• I used one of the gift maker apps to build a "Presents from Rochdale Library Service" app. The gifts included the obvious things like "a best seller" and "some children's picture books," but I made sure it included items like "an under-fives' story time" and even "a smile." New friends were welcomed with "a smile." Cheesey, I know, but it seemed to go down well and the statistics showed that quite a few people were sending our gifts to each other. Sadly, the gift maker app I used became defunct just before Christmas and my app has gone the way of all things. It was fun while it lasted.