CPLA Marketing Seminar for Public Libraries, Day 1

Day 1 of 2 is completed here at Cleveland Public Library as Wayne Piper gave us a crash course in marketing for public libraries.

Before I get into any the specifics of today’s goings-on, I’d like to point to PLA’s Certified Public Library Administrator program in the context of the MLS and library education.  There’s always a lot of debate and discussion about the relevance and content in the MLS/MILS/LIS or whatever name is fashionable for the degree these days.  I was fortunate to have learned from a few exceptional teachers when I was in school at Pratt, and I was even more fortunate to be working in a large, maybe even labyrinthine library system at the same time.  Still, the school lacked a clearly defined track of required coursework for those aspiring to be public librarians.  I suspect they may have lost a few potentially gifted public librarians to other fields because of this.  While I benefited from exposure to the school’s curricular strengths in art librarianship, archives, and, for lack of a better umbrella term, ‘design thinking’, I know I would have immediately utilized many of the practical bits and pieces of knowledge I’ve gleaned from the strategic planning, statistics, and marketing CPLA classes I’ve attended.  Naturally, classes like the ones PLA offer are excellent templates for library administators to follow, but in a broader sense these concepts are essential building blocks for any student seriously considering getting into working in public libraries.

Moving on….

Today was really an intro to marketing for libraries.  We haven’t gone that deep yet; tomorrow we will make a marketing plan for the hypothetical Tree County Library.  We discussed the 4 P’s of marketing:

1. Products
2. Price
3. Placement
4. Promotion

Our group of librarians came from as far as Alaska and as near as Michigan, and it seemed like despite the geographic differences everyone was able to get on board with the basic ideas.  Here’s a few of my tweets from the day as conversation and debate roared through the room… forgive spelling issues, its the nature of the medium…

For me, and it seems for many of the people who were following the liveblogging today, it seems the most valuable piece of the day were the web resources provided for doing market research.  People at home, be sure to play with these sites a bit and see just how much you can learn about your community with only a few clicks… it is impressive.

1. Claritas (persevere and use the blue sidebar for the free info)
2. ZipSkinny
3. A nice piece from the Upper Hudson Library System
4. and This We Know, from @pandmans who was following the conversation at home.

I’m looking forward to developing a marketing plan for our imaginary Tree County Library tomorrow.  I’m also pretty intrigued that according to the handouts I have here, it appears we are going to do an entire marketing seminar without really addressing the idea of channelling user’s attention via social media.  Its funny, I talk about that social media strategy stuff all the time, but in an odd sort of way it feels really healthy to back up and look at some of the fundamental principles and methodologies that marketing, as a science, is based on.  Readers, what do you think?  Can you still have a marketing class without a social web component?  Is that OK with you?