QR and literacy campaigns

Project-Q in the Netherlands is a nice, simple example of the use of QR codes to support a literacy campaign. I know QR codes are old hat and ho-hum to some but as a cheap and easy way to add a few more strings to a bow they're pretty useful and I don't understand why we keep on not using them.

Creative barcodes

I would dearly love for us to have barcodes like these or these in our library books; not just for aesthetic reasons, they help confirm the brand values of the organisation involved.

Telling the story

We have good people working in our libraries, should we choose to use them. Not a day goes by without something really good happening for somebody in one, other or all of our libraries. There are things we can do better, to be sure, we're only human after all, but we mustn't ignore the good that we do. If we don't value that good, why should anybody else?

Most of our customers think that we are A Good Thing. This is a double-edged sword: are we really that good or are we just delighting the few at the expense of the many? Well... Place Surveys tell us that we are by far the most popular of the council's services. When you look at the overall results this is damning with faint praise but we must be doing something right even so, otherwise we wouldn't even be that popular. We know we have to change with the times and the different needs of different customers. In doing so we need to be careful to know which is baby and which is bathwater. Let's make sure that we recognise what we're doing right, learn from it and keep on doing it at least as well, if not better.

If the services we're providing are all that good (and they very often are), why do we keep it a secret? If it's worth doing it's worth letting people know that you can do it, do do it and could do it again. That isn't just publicising events and activities before the day, though that's important too. We need to make sure that once the job's done it isn't consigned to oblivion. It isn't done and dusted when the chairs are put away, there's work to be done.

Review the event. How did it go? Were the results as planned? Was the actual audience the intended audience? If not, what went right/wrong? What do you learn from the event? What can somebody else learn from the event? How? (Why re-invent the wheel?) Share the experience.

Share the news. Tell people it's happening. Tell people it happened. You did something. We do lots of somethings in libraries. How many people really know that? (Here's a clue, at a recent meeting of Chief Leisure Officers in one of the English regions the question "what do libraries do these days?" wasn't rhetorical).

Celebrate the event. We're crap at this. We need to be better.

Be realistic. We seem to think that if we don't get a football crowd turning up at the library it's a failure. Elsewhere in the world around us there are people doing events once, twice a year that were attended by a dozen people or so and feted as major achievements. Once or twice a year. We're doing that every other week in our libraries and accepting the label "declining." Footfall and visitor counts are important measures but tell but a fraction of the story. Having a load of stray bodies in the library for an event isn't necessarily a sustainable option. If those people have a miserable time of it because the venue was cramped or overcrowded or they are otherwise not delighted then that's worse than not having them visit in the first place: "the potential customer" becomes "the doesn't fancy come back here again." Delivering something brilliant for a sufficiency of visitors who want to come back to the library even when there's not an event going on is a result. Over a year twelve repeat customers visiting once a month is a better return than one hundred coming to the event and not coming back. The event is the hook to draw in the potential customers. Once they're in the library it's our job to persuade them to come back even when they're not an event going on. There's more chance of doing that when we're interacting with customers rather than just controlling crowds.

Tell the world. I've repeated myself. So should you. You had the event. it was a success (it was a great success). Let the world and his dog know it was a great success.

We do services as well as events. What applies to events applies to services. We're doing lots of really neat stuff on a day-to-day basis. So tell the world about this, too.

Did I say tell the world?

Telling the world isn't about just slapping a photo and a bit of copy somewhere and waiting for the world to find it. Any more than marketing an event is just putting a notice up in the library. Here's why not if you don't believe me.

Photos are good. A picture tells a thousand words. Summed up as "libraries do neat stuff."

We need to make sure that people bump into photos of people enjoying themselves in the library. And keep bumping into pictures of people enjoying themselves in the library in odd places that might not be "library" places. Picture of people enjoying themselves in the library? Perhaps the library is an enjoyable place to visit? Perhaps they'll come and visit the library to see what other neat stuff we do.

And we'll tell them.

And we'll tell them to tell their friends.

And we'll tell them about the neat stuff going on in our other libraries. And they can tell their friends that, too.

The important, the most important, thing is that we cannot assume that people will know what we do. And we cannot afford for the off-chance that they pop in to find out. There is no place for assumption and blind hope in a time of uncertainty. We need to tell people what we do. And keep on telling them.

If we wait to be asked they might not come and ask us. And they might just assume that we just stand around waiting to stamp out a few books, in between going "shhh!!!"

Signs of the times

Over the past few weeks I've had all sorts of ideas of stuff to post on here. Between work, commuting and the sunny weather... well, you know.

In the mean time, here's Manchester telling people that their new, temporary, City Library is now open on Deansgate.

Demonstrating the Return on Investment: God is watching, give him a good show

By any objective measure a large sum of money is invested in the public library service. We can make a good case for its not being enough, or the wrong kind of investment, but it's still a goodly sum.

The return on that investment can be relatively colossal, whether you measure the impacts in terms of literacy or well-being, supporting economic or community development. But we sort of take it for granted that people know that, don't we? While other services make damned sure that everyone who matters knows every single thing that they do (and every one of them dressed up to the nines as a major success) public libraries tend to pootle along, doing their thing until there's talk of cuts and closures, when suddenly all the positives are wheeled out. In many ways that's too late: to be sure, you may be able to stave off the major cuts in bad times but are you in a position to be able to capitalise on the good times?

• Libraries do a lot of stuff. In practice this is great, but it's difficult to sell "we do a lot of stuff" as a single message without looking and sounding incoherent. So let's not do that. Let's work with small, digestible lumps of news and information that make a single, sensible, positive point.
  


• Little and often is good. The individual message is: "this is something the library does/did and it is A Good Thing." The repeat message is "libraries do good things." Importantly, the message is sustained over time.
  


• "We're not doing anything we can make a fuss about." Bollocks. Take a look around you. Other people's high-profile media events: the festivals; the open days; the big-name events. How many people turned up? And how many people do you get to your events? Have a look round at your local context and be more realistic about what you're able to achieve. Then celebrate what you do achieve!
  


• "That's been and gone. What's the point in putting that on the web?" You've done something. It cost time and money to do it. Why? What did you get for it? More importantly, what did the public get for it? Tell them what you've spent their money on.
  


• "Yes, but it's history, isn't it? What's the point of telling people what we've done?" You and your staff aren't standing round waiting to "stamp out a few books" are you? That's precisely what a lot of people do think you do. Your overall message needs to be: "we do lots of stuff and here's just some of it!" You can't prove that you do lots of good stuff without having a good range readily available to demonstrate the point.
  


• "Yes, but that's just politicking or swank, isn't it?" NO!!!! This is an important part of your catalogue of services. Just as your library catalogue (remember that?) tells your customers what resources may be available for them to use, this collection of news and information items tells your customers and potential customers about the kinds of services and activities that you're delivering, or have delivered, in your libraries. And, importantly, it gives people with money and influence an idea of what you can do given the time and resources.
  


• Spread the word: don't rely on a single channel of communication. If you've got something good to say, say it in a few places. Take the message to your intended (or hoped-for) audience, don't sit back and expect them to hunt you down.

None of this is difficult and none of it is new. We just need to do it.

Ten tips for entrepreneurs

Another nugget of gold on The Travelin' Librarian site flagging up a post on the ReadWriteStart channel for first-time entrepreneurs and start-ups. In it, Kevin Rose, Digg's founder, provided ten tips for budding entrepreneurs - you can see the details here. None of it is rocket science, indeed at least a couple are self-evident truths until you take a step back and realise how often they aren't acted on in real life.

I'd argue that they apply significantly to developing a public library service.

1. "Just Build It: You don't need anyone's approval and in fact, you probably won't get it, so don't even try." -- you're working in a bureaucracy; in all probability you're working in one of the more conservative corners of that bureaucracy. Sometimes you've just got to let that genie out of the bottle.
   
2. "Iterate: Build, release and iterate. Make a list of the features you want to create over the next six months and get going" -- definitely!!! Don't imagine you've finished the work. Look at it, review it, ask yourself how it could be made better. If resources allow, do it. If resources don't allow, why did you do it in the first place? Development needs to be sustainable.
   
3. "Hire Your Boss: Make sure you hire people that you would want to work for, who challenge you and you can learn from." -- I think this is the single most challenging idea for an English public library service to take on board. The rigid, top-down hierarchical model of working didn't work all that well in the first place and has become a liability if library services are going to use all their available resources nimbly and effectively.
   
4. "Demand Excellence: Ensure staff are committed to and understand your vision" -- the second sentence is important. Excellence isn't something that is measured after the event, it is something that's signposted to before the event. You demand excellence by delivering vision.
   
5. "Raising Money: The higher your evaluation is, the more equity you have to work with. Beg, borrow and steal. Be creative about finding ways to cut costs." -- more pertinent now than ever! If you can get money, use it. They can't take it off you if you've spent it. Investigate new delivery channels to see if you can do the same or better cheaper (at least one example will be coming up in point 9).
   
6. "Hack the Press" -- make sure that you're getting your message out there. Not just to via "official" channels: chat up anyone and everyone who might be useful.
   
7. "Invest in Advisors" -- not necessarily consultants in the bureaucratic sense. Invest in people who know things that you may find useful. (Including your own staff!) The investment doesn't necessarily have to be in money or stocks: librarians around the world are sharing ideas, advice and news in all sorts of different forums, make sure you're tapping into them. And then make sure that you're also using the same model to tap into networks outside the library arena (be creative about it) - you will be amazed at just how often the answer to a problem is a devolved community knowledgebase with meeting and event management facilities and free internet access. Join in, be positive, be useful; the effort you invest this way can be paid back many times over later on.
   
8. "Connect With the Community" -- any public library service that isn't doing that already should be boarded up.
   
9. "Leverage Your User Base to Spread the Word" -- talk to your customers; tell them what you're doing; then get your customers to be your marketing tool. Time was, we only had word of mouth to work with (but when it works it works very well indeed). Now there are all sorts of new opportunities, many of which are free. Which ties in nicely with point 5. If it costs £x to print out a couple of hundred leaflets which may or may not be actually read could you not use the money one something more concrete that you could tell people about buckshee on Twitter, Facebook, etc.?
   
10. "Analyze Your Traffic: Pay attention to how people are using your site, and then learn and evolve" -- not just your web traffic (though that's important). How does/doesn't your online audience traffic relate to your library's visitors?

I know which ones I have and haven't been doing (and I'm not going to say here which they are!)

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.

Staff conference

We had a one-day staff conference on 21st October. As many people as possible got together at the Wheatsheaf Library for a programme of workshops, briefing sessions and keynote speeches about developments in the library service and the wider world. In retrospect there was just too much stuff to fit in but we only get to do it once a year and there's a huge pile of stuff to try to catch up with.

Alison and I were asked to do a workshop on Web 2.0. Given that most of our staff didn't know what the buzzword means the workshop was necessarily an introduction. We also needed to address the obvious and legitimate question: "so what?" If, at the end of the day, all you're doing is wasting your time playing with a new toy, you're wasting your time. Luckily we were helped by the fact that a couple of the briefing sessions were about public perceptions of council services and corporate communcations and marketing. A presentation and workshop asking people to think about perception, message and viral marketing fit in quite neatly.

I've uploaded the presentation to Slideshare.

Conference2009

View more presentations from Rochdale Library Service.

Here are the notes

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Introduction

We didn't want to have you sitting round computers for this workshop as:

• We don't have the time to "show you how to do" Web 2.0 services
• We don't want to anyway: we'd be spending most of our time
• explaining the mechanics of one or two of the hundreds of similar-but-not-quite services that there are out there; and
• complaining about the council's network connections;
• (or else complaining that corporate rules block staff access to some key sites).

We wanted to use this as an opportunity to explain to you the underlying principles that makes so-called "Web 2.0" different to "Web 1.0." The most important of which is:

Web 2.0 is about people sharing news with other human beings.

The important word there is SHARING

There are all sorts of services on the Internet that let you share "news," text, links, messages, pictures, music and/or videos.

• Many of them are free.
• Most of them can share "news" with other services.
• You aren't tied into using any particular one of them
• you can have more than one service on the go;
• if one service doesn't do the job you want to do you can try something else;
• the one you're using today won't necessarily be the one you use tomorrow, or next week, or next year.
• Most of them can "feed" other websites so that information there is automatically updated.
• Most of them can be "fed" by other websites so that they include automatically-updated information.

Web 2.0 is "The Social Web" - people are sharing stuff with other people.

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The Quiz of Quizzes: brand recognition and values

We showed you some pictures and asked you some questions:

• What is this?
• What one word do you associate with it?

It was important that we got the first answer that came into your head. We wanted to see whether or not you recognised the brands in question and we wanted your gut feeling of the value or quality of the brand. This last is often the difference between your thinking about buying something or not even looking twice.

What was the brand?	What were the key words?
a Rolls Royce	Luxury — Posh — Luxurious — Comfort — Wealth — Big — Money — Affluence — Tasteless — Style — Bourgeois — Weddings — Glamour
	Just out of interest: when was the last time you saw an advert. for a Rolls Royce?
a jar of Marmite	Horrible — Yuck — Toast — Hate — Runny — Awful — Distaste — Nasty — Sandwich — Strong — Healthy — Marmite
Marks & Spencer logo	Everything — Quality — Sell — Knickers — Clothes — Respectable — Pricey — Old — Grandma — Mmmm — Happy — Expensive — Underwear
pints of Guinness	Beer — Ireland — Drunk — Ugh! — Food — Creamy — Black — Expensive — Yummy — Drinking — Socialising — Pregnancy — Toilet — Bitter
Google logo	Internet — Search — Web — Ease — Knowledge — Information — Computers — Easy-to-use — Spam — Online — Links — Popular

Companies wanting to sell or promote a product or service put a lot of effort into brand recognition. They want you to know their product and they also want you to automatically think nice things about it.

• Advertising's a tried and trusted way of bringing the brand into public notice.
• They'll sponsor "something nice" — an event, a team, whatever — so that the brand gets a bit of reflected glory.
• Sponsorship is also a way of making people see or hear the brand name or logo.
• Word of mouth is the best advertising: if you can find some way of getting people to talk about your product or service you can start to reach more people than your adverts can.

If the word of mouth advertising is good enough for long enough you might not even have to bother advertising your brand!

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It pays to advertise?

OK, there's a bit of a cheat to this: film studios are very, very, very nervous of putting film clips, or even trailers, onto video-sharing sites and when people upload clips from the film the film companies will contact YouTube to get them removed eventually. So the number of visits for The Pirates of the Caribbean are artificially low. The number of visits to the Derren Brown clip is roughly the industry standard.