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Three basic levels of online engagement
1) Social media as primarily a promotional tool –
one-sided
2) Online engagement: customer-focused communication
- have conversations with them on topics they’re interested in
- quality more important than the number of people you reach
- personalizes the organization, shows you care about what customers
have to say
3) Customers feel comfortable starting conversations
with you and others in your network
Have an online strategy and policy
Strategy = road map – where you’re going and how
you’re going to get there
Policy = rules of the road
Include: goals and measurements, strategy for
publicizing your online presence, an exit strategy (how do we handle it if we
decide to leave a social networking site?)
First, survey the online environment and your current
presence on social media (whether deliberate or inadvertent)
Metrics are more than followers; consider interactions
and responses
Think carefully about how many platforms you can
support (don’t overextend)
Who can post? Do you need a coordinator/moderator?
Make sure your branding is consistent across sites
Legal considerations
This is still a fuzzy area; talk to your lawyer
Look carefully at sites’ TOS documents
Finding your voice
Think of your library as a character/persona – what
would its personality be?
If you have many people posting, sign tweets with the
poster’s name?
“columns” on Facebook – a staff member posting
regularly on a given topic
Engaging customers online
Go to meetups and tweetups locally and talk up your
social media
Try to use Trending Topics hashtags on Twitter
Create and use your own hashtags
Surveys, questions, staff columns
- first person to answer correctly gets a prize (to be
picked up at an event IRL?)
- Make sure you’re being authentic (“question of the
week” fizzled out b/c it was too formulaic)
Being engaging = sharing personalized info – share
inside information (statistics?) – have exclusive content for followers
Hey girl, let’s jump on a meme
- Andy Woodward got Old Spice guy to talk about
libraries
- library created video of Old Spice guy
- failblog.org – Memebase category
Listening to the crowd – sometimes the conversation
isn’t happening in your feed/on your Facebook page/etc
- set up Google Alerts
Platforms
Look for what your patrons are using (and how it
correlates with demographics)
Initiate/develop partnerships w/community
organizations
Friend potential partners with your personal account,
and communicate with them that way
“Like” local organizations
Measuring success
Stop if you aren’t meeting objectives, or if it isn’t
interesting to you anymore
Look at other organizations to establish baselines
Online book club for teens done via Ning chat (Ning
also offers message boards) – but Ning is now paid service
“Where in the world is the bookmobile?”
* Library has laminated cutout of bookmobile; staff take
it on trips and post photos, asking patrons to guess where the bookmobile is
Pinterest
Create booklists (covers link to reviews?)
What’s next?
Facebook app letting people reserve and check out
books
One library shares “how to” videos from YouTube –
start creating them?
Giving patrons the opportunity to create content, or
finding content they’re creating and promoting it
Make your personal use of social media professional –
connect with other librarians etc. through your personal accounts
Q&A
What if you’re doing “everything right” (asking
questions, etc) and people still aren’t engaging/answering?
* Find a couple of people to engage regularly – it
breaks the ice – maybe even staff?
* Promote sites in person to make people feel a more
personalized connection to your social media
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