Facebook manners and you

A neatly instructional little film.

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.

A bit of a facer

Inevitably, I've put the Library Service onto Facebook.

Actually, I did it ages ago so as to put the blocks on anybody wanting to pass themselves off as us. I've gone more active with it recently because there are a few ideas I want to explore. And also, if I'm being honest, because I got sick of hearing "so and so is on Facebook."

To my mind, there's no point in spending any effort in being on Facebook (or anything else for that mind) if you're not doing much with it. If your Facebook profile is just going to be a copy of your website you might as well just post the link to the website. (To be fair, that's exactly what some people have done and for that reason.) So if I was going to bother with it I needed to have something to do that warranted its use. Luckily I did:

• A couple of colleagues are doing projects which could usefully use the informal interactivity of Web 2.0 to get input and ideas from anyone who wants to take an interest. Setting up pages for a couple of projects would give them the opportunity to experiment. Because projects have finite boundaries it makes it easier to get a sensible impact analysis. Truthfully, we're not expecting a huge impact: we're not publicising any of this work as one of the things we want to know is how much interest they generate by themselves. The primary purpose of the exercise is to give Alison and Ray the opportunity to test the environment.
  
  If you want to have a look at what they're doing on Facebook:


• Alison's page is Black History Month in Rochdale's Libraries,


• Ray's page is Quest Seekers in Rochdale's Libraries.


• There's not currently an Events Calendar on the web site. We can, and do, publicise events on our news and events pages but a calendar is always a useful publicity tool. This is being worked on at the moment by the council's Web Team. In the mean time I thought it would be useful to use the Events tool to tide us over.


• I want to explore the possibilities for using Web 2.0 tools, including Facebook, for viral marketing of the service and our services. I have a couple of ideas for this.

One of the questions for us to ponder is: who to have for friends. On principle we're working on the basis that anyone who wants to be a friend can be our friend. Ah, but what about the 'friend suggestions?' Personally, I wouldn't be going about asking people to be a friend. That's just the way I am: shy and reserved and not willing to be intrusive. Other, more sociable, colleagues definitely would and gently remind me that I'm the one always moaning about the "traditional" public library marketing ploy: "everybody knows about it, we put a notice up in the library." We're still finding our way, we'll see how it goes.