PLA Blog

Karen Hyman, Executive Director of the South Jersey Regional Library Cooperative, always has something interesting to say, and the humor in her delivery is just downright entertaining. After her fabulous presentation at the Smartest Card symposium at Midwinter, her presentation on telling a story to market, defend, or just talk about your library was not only a logical next step, but also fit in with the marketing theme of the preconference.

Her basic message was so simple, yet so brilliant. Tell stories because they’re memorable, they tell something about your organization, and they work. Don’t give them a laundry list of facts. They don’t care about numbers, you lost them at the first statistic. What trustee boards, town budget meeting attendees, potential funders, and even just patrons want to know why the library matters, and why to care.

Karen has a four-step process for stories:

- Creating the story.
- Framing the story.
- Creating opportunities to tell.
- Telling it. [And, telling it well.]

But how does one create a story?

- Decide what do you want to say
- Find examples for your story
- “Make the story about them,” and why the story matters to them
- “Make something happen”

When you deliver your story, Karen says you should portray the feeling that “It’s Christmas, and we’re all drinking Budweiser, and we all love each other.” It’s also the feeling that your listeners should have. Focus on the human interest part of what you’re getting across, and only sprinkle the story, your “elevator pitch”, with numbers as necessary. Be brief, speak to your audience to let them know why they should care, thank them for the opportunity, and don’t forget to tell them what you came for and ask for it (more money, more staff, the opportunity to make the community shine again, etc.).

An example of word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing that tells a story
At Hartford Public Library, everyone on staff is an advocate. Everyone on staff chooses a group or groups, or is assigned to a group or groups, and they talk the talk about their library, and they love it. But remember, your staff needs to love talking about the library to do something like this, you can’t just tell people they have to love being an advocate for the library in the groups they frequent. [So, really, make your library a place your staff will love to talk about!]

Using the local landscape to tell a story
If you look at the Ocean County Library web site, you can see that it tells a story. The Customer Quotes & Fun section, which is currently being rebuilt, normally lists a story from a patron about how much they love the library, and how the library has helped them. This library is able to collect this information, and understanding the community, share the information with the community, through simple stories.

Getting started now
- Add survey pop-ups at the end of in-house automated services, like Internet use time-outs, or when a patron closes a browser. It’s amazing the kind of content you’ll get.

- Have “Can we quote you?” sheets at every desk, and if someone says something you can use as a story, ask them if they or you can jot it down.

- At Reading Public Library, where I work, we have “Moments of Truth”, where we jot down an experience we had with a patron where we felt like it really made a difference. The quotes are added to staff newsletters, and often requested by city hall as ammunition and support material in favor of the library.

- Follow many of the tips given by Peggy and Linda on WOM marketing.

Gathering stories is an ongoing process, and it helps your library prepare to counter the bad experience stories.

What do you do with the people who aren’t comfortable talking in front of people? The story might be a good way to start to acclimate them to talking about the library, since good stories are the kinds people want to tell over and over again to everyone.

Don’t be that person who stands before a group and reads from a single-spaced sheet of paper full of boring numbers that no one cares about. Don’t wait until you need to defend your library to have a clear message. Have something ready to tell the world why you rock, and why you need what you need when you need it, because you’re worth it. Besides, everyone loves a good story.

Smartest Card: Talking the Talk
Originally uploaded by AndreaMercado.

Peggy Barber and Linda Wallace, founders of the Library Communication Strategies, Inc. consulting firm, gave an excellent presentation on the beauty and brilliance of word-of-marketing for libraries.

When Peggy asked the crowd a few questions to start (there were about 66 people in attendence):

How many people in the room have done media interviews for their library?
10 people or so.

How many people in the room have made presentations to groups?
Way more, about 25 or so.

How many people in the room talk to other people in the library?
*Everyone*.

The point? Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing is for everyone, because we all talk to people. And Peggy said, “If we get our acts together, we will truly rock the library world as we know it”. Call it advocacy, marketing, whatever, this is a “team sport, and we just can’t be passive anymore”. We compete with other agencies who want library money, Tivo, Xboxes, you name it. So we all need to talk the talk as a unified force, the entire staff, all the time, even off the job.

When asked how many people had training in marketing in library school, only 2 raised their hands, and that’s “two more than usual”. So really, the Smartest Card program really is innovative and encouraging, but schools really need to step up and teach marketing of services, too.

WOM is actually becoming more important and influential in our society. While the benefits of this type of marketing may be obvious, especially since it’s been so successful for the likes of Amazon, The Body Shop, and Ebay (they started out with WOM at the beginning, with paid advertising coming much later), Peggy and Linda outlined the main upsides:

• WE CAN AFFORD IT. Who can’t pay to talk to people to chat about libraries in line at the grocery store? At some point, someone actually recommended that ALA “spend the entire ALA endowment on ads” to get libraries back in the forefront and thought of as just as essential as a hospital, or a fire station, or the police. Libraries aren’t just a civil good, libraries are a civil necessity.
• WOM marketing is active, not passive, not reactive. You ask people to spread your word, don’t just tell them about it and walk away. As libraries, we’re not getting paid to do it, we’re not trying to hustle a commission, and, well, if we do it well enough, other people will catch on, too. Using WOM marketing, we can work together virally to combat the bain of the spread of the “bad experience story” with the awesomeness of sharing a good experience story.
• WOM is viral. Tell your patrons that the most wonderful thing they could do, other than offering their time and their money, is to offer their recommendation. “If you like this service, tell your friends!” should be something every library worker says to every patron who has a wonderful comment to share with the library, and every handout and evaluation form for classes should include a note that says, “Did you enjoy this class? Tell your friends!”

WOM Marketing must haves from the experts, Peggy and Linda:

1. A good product… GREAT customer service!
2. A clear and memorable message
3. A prepared and committed sales force
4. People willing to testify
5. A plan

Also remember that you should always have an “elevator pitch”, a 3-minute schpiel about your library that you could present in the time you might be in an elevator. Then, be prepared to give you pitch no matter where you are, whether or not you’re on the clock.

Linda had an excellent story about being tagged by TSA agents in the airport. While her things were being examined quite carefully, she had opportunity to ask one of the agents, “Do you have a library card?” And the agent was very proud and excited to pull out his library card, and to have the other agents show her their library cards, too. Just an example of how a library card, how library services, can come up in everyday conversation, helping WOM marketing work for libraries.

WOM marketing has worked for some of the most successful businesses of recent commercial history. Use WOM marketin at your library, and show Microsoft that their slogan “Your Success, Our Passion” should have been stolen from librarians.

George Needham, the neat freak
Originally uploaded by AndreaMercado.

George Needham talked to the Smartest Card crowd on Friday, Jun 24 about how environmental scanning – examining and evaluating your current culture and methods, and those of the competition – is key to forming a marketing plan. George also reported extensively on OCLC the report titled “2003 OCLC Environmental Scan: Pattern Recognition“, an environmental scan of the library landscape. Google is part of the competition and currently may be giving us a run for our money, but environmental scan can help us learn from them, to figure out what we should be doing to compete, and even win.

Here of the OCLC environmental scan of libraries that he shared:

Social
Librarians have been doing what campus builders do with sidewalks. But information consumers have shown us that there’s a huge difference between how we do things on the Internet, and how consumers do them. Instead of paving the paths that have been tread by Internet pedestrians, we need to start making those sidewalks for users. As it is now, by the time libraries and librarians have those sidewalks down, users made new paths already, and learned how to pave them themselves.

Information has followed Moore’s Law, and the way that consumers handle information has followed Moore’s Law. Consumers don’t care about our rules. The serendipity of walking into library and browsing shelves has been replaced by RSS feeds and blogs, because these info delivery systems give the same serendipity.

Economic
Redefinition of the public good has impacted libraries in the wallet. Tax changes like those in CA a few years back and now in OH, can change what kind of money a library can get, and it can happen anywhere, so libraries need to be prepared for turbulence in even in the smoothest economic atmosphere.

Technology
Flickr. del.icio.us. Furl. The key to these online services is that they allow people to bring their own structure to information (see Social above where “consumers don’t care about our rules”). Libraries need to be able to roll with these punches. Especially because the distance between “I can’t believe you have this” and “I can’t believe you don’t have this” has gotten to be much shorter.

There’s also a crazy dynamic between digital rights management (DRM) issues, “socking down user rights to data and applications, even when they really don’t exist”, in parallel to the open source movement, where the rights are as open as humanly possible.

Research and Learning
The “proliferation of e-learning” is changing how libraries can contribute to life-long learning. Now, community “continuing education” is an even bigger part of the role of a public library, or at least it should be. Some are even looking to libraries to become the DSpaces of the community, not only depositories of local history content, but aggregations of locally created content.

Libraries
In performing this portion of the scan, OCLC talked to librarians, users, trustees, to get a sense of what was going on in libraries today.

Whoah, nelly, the staffing issue, and the “graying of the profession”. Average age of library staff at the Library of Congress is 58, and so many of them have such institutional memory value, they can’t be replaced. Non-librarians are being hired to perform functions that are non-traditional to libraries library, especially technology.

The library is becoming “The Third Place” that was the buzz phrase of the conference this year. Not home, not work, it’s the place “to reinvent yourself”, an “intellectual center, community center”. Public libraries are ahead of academic libraries in this respect; think of how so many acadmic libraries are creating “the information commons”, or redesigning their libraries to create the same effect.

The definitions of the collection are changing, and how we fit into the change in relation to those collections. And collaboration is becoming strategy instead of just cool a thing to do.

So the big questions become:

How do we fit in the self-serve world?
As librarians, our job is not to present “old things in new and more frustrating ways” using technology, it’s an opportunity to improve upon the old way, to reinvent with technology. Self service is not taking the librarian out the loop, it’s giving customer control, instead of telling them how to do it in a way that doesn’t make sense to them. George recommended that “The Toll of the New Machine”, a Fast Company article by Charles Fishman, be required reading for every library worker, especially to drive home the concept that automation is really about changing roles, not eliminating them.

Disaggregation- what do we do now if our job is to aggregate?
There are fewer intermediaries between information and the user of that information with the rise of blogs and RSS feeds — including librarians. We need to help people understand, on their terms, how to use this information and these tools as they find them, not dictate what to use and how to use it. Libraries can really step up into the role of teaching how to judge authority and usefulness in a more found-information world. The idea is to not make our patrons jump through hoops to find what they need, and once they find it, not make them jump through hoops to get it.

Why is collaboration so important?
Collaboration is an intagible asset. Even companies that were once rivals are now working together in development projects. That’s how insanely prolific collaboration has become. And librarians are finally learning that collaboration works.

Patrons are really becoming natural collaborators, since so much of the technology interaction today is really about how people are *socializing*. Email, blogs, communities, wikis, RSS feeds, IM. Tivo is watcher’s advisory. I actually know someone who told me, “It took my Tivo only 2 days to figure out I was gay,” as a crack about how well his Tivo knows what kinds of stuff he likes to watch. As librarians, we need to do it, too, for our patrons, and internally for ourselves, in order to learn how to do it.

Besides, it’s just so much easier to get everything done, and to find everything, if it’s all connected.

Wanna do your own scan?
In order to do an environmental scan, you need to know your community, be willing to stick your neck out and ask the tough questions, and get with the changing landscape program. Basic steps from his presentation include:

“- Develop a list of the key influences

Identify your leading power players

Develop a list of questions to ask them

Ask them

Compare the answers and connect the dots

Share the results and adjust as needed”

There are books, articles, and sites out there that can help you develop an environmental scan for your library landscape, and examples of environmental scans out there to look at (like the OCLC report). These can help you understand your library and your patrons better, and in turn help you successfully market your services to your community.