At the end of day 2 here in Cleveland I’m sitting in a hotel with a cold that could go down in the record books.  Yeah, the world’s smallest violin… I know.  Trust me, its a bummer.  Despite my condition, yesterday’s tour of Cleveland Public Library (pics) was excellent, and today was an even better day than the first at this CPLA marketing seminar.  Because I’m feeling rather awful, I’m going to postpone most commentary until tomorrow, but I’ll say a couple of brief things about what this class was and what it wasn’t.  Scroll back through my tweets from today to follow the liveblogging if you care to.

I mentioned at the end of my post yesterday that I was concerned by the lack of discussion about he social web as a marketing and PR tool in this forum.  It was only midway through the day today that I realized the fault in my gripe: this was not really the scope of the course.  The CPLA marketing seminar, rather than focusing on the specifics of tools used for communicating a message, focused on the way in which you can develop and use a marketing plan to move your library forward.  It was a lesson on how to effectively move a marketing plan through your library’s administration in order to accomplish specific goals.  It was not a class describing the particulars of the various communication tools: television, email, direct mail, websites, or the social web.

I’m reminded of the way I felt when I was a freshman in art school; how I stepped to an introductory drawing class feeling confident I had all the best, clever-est ideas of how to make a sweet multimedia artwork that would blow away all this charcoal drawing based still-life nonsense we were assigned.  One of the concepts we talked about today at marketing ‘class’ was that you need to consider your audience and ‘use the right medium for the message’.  For example, if you are marketing a program, product, or service to senior citizens, text messaging might not be the right choice.  Likewise, direct mail may never get to a college student immersed in their inbox.  My introductory drawing teacher made these elaborate constructions for still-lifes that were pretty interesting works of art in and of themselves, and I couldn’t see beyond that and learn how to use the charcoal as the tool that it is.  I wanted to skip that boring step, skip the learning, the planning, the rigor invovled in the training of how to draw and just slap together a heartfelt, timely piece of angsty art.  If I hadn’t wised up and gotten with the program, I would have left school minus one of the media needed for conveying a specific kind of message.

It strikes me that we run that same risk when thoughtlessly championing social media as a marketing tool for libraries.  It is so cool, so nifty, so timely, so seductive, and lets face it: we, the librarians, we freakin’ LOVE it.  This is not to say that libraries shouldn’t tweet, be on flickr, facebook, and everything else- they should- but this is really only one channel reaching one kind of audience, and frankly I think we may be fixated and obsesessed with it as some kind of savior, some kind of revolutionary communication force.

More details of the seminar coming soon…