Library Revolution

I heard such a great story on NPR this evening as I raced to pick my son up at daycare. It seems that the long-standing rule against encores at the Metropolitan Opera was broken Monday night when the Met general manager, Peter Gelb, responded to the audience’s reaction to Juan Diego Florez’s incredible performance of the aria “Ah, Mes Amis” by greenlighting the first encore in 14 years.

For years, the practice of performing an encore at the Met has been forbidden. As Gelb said in the interview I heard today,

“In the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s, there was wording in the program books admonishing the audience with words saying ‘positively no encores allowed,’ kind of like no-smoking signs.”

But the audience went wild on Monday night after Florez’s rendition of the aria, and Gelb wanted to give them what they wanted- even if in doing so he had to break the rules.

“For me, and for the audience at the Met,” Gelb says, “it’s very important that opera be a theatrically satisfying and thrilling experience, and if the audience has a great time with a singer singing an aria like this, with an incredible run of nine high C’s, and they want to hear more of it, why not?”

Way to listen to customer feedback and act on it! Way to break down a barrier to customer satisfaction!

I think we should think of this in our libraries… what are our audiences clamoring for? What rules could we re-examine, re-write, or downright break in order to give our customers what they want?

Oh, and be sure to take a few minutes to listen to the encore - I can totally see why the crowd went wild!

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Thank you, Kathy Dempsey, for this excellent post outlining the meaning of the word “marketing” and several other related terms, including advertising, branding, advocacy, and public relations.

I often hear librarians using these word interchangeably, or mixing them up a bit. I especially hear librarians talking about “marketing” when what they really mean is “advertising,” and then getting frustrated and throwing in the towel when it comes to marketing efforts when they are faced with the costs associated with advertising. But advertising is only one small part of a larger marketing strategy.

Before getting bogged down by one particular element, perhaps libraries worried about marketing should spend a little more time developing a more large-scale and tong-term marketing strategy and using that strategy as a basis for a plan to use techniques such as advertising, promotion, branding, etc. to achive your marketing goals.

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Good luck to Smithtown Library…. I’m rooting for you!

Great video, BTW.

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Via Library Bytes (among others) I came across this article on the “economy of free.”

The long and short of it is that businesses are figuring out that in a technology-driven world, “Just because products are free doesn’t mean that someone, somewhere, isn’t making huge gobs of money.” And they’re starting to capitalize on this notion. Read the article - it outlines an emerging business model that turns the rules of traditional buyer/seller models upside-down.

What does this all mean for libraries, who have long depended on their unique position as a provider of “free” services?

As I’ve said before, free might not be enough of a selling point for libraries any more. Our services are “free” to our users? So what? So are a lot of other services and products. “Free” is just not that special any more… especially when what we are “selling” is access to information.

So what do we have that is special?  Or what can we do in the future to fit the changing needs of our communities? When price is out of the equation, what is it that we offer that makes choosing our services the logical choice for our customers? What other values can we appeal to? And how do we communicate this with our communities so that potential users are aware of the benefits we have to offer them? How do we convince them to choose libraries?

I can’t wait to pick up FREE, Chris Anderson’s forthcoming follow up to The Long Tail. This may be one of the biggest issues libraries will need to deal with as we struggle to define ourselves in the economy emerging around us.

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Via Library Techie: Check out this cool feature on CNN.com where children’s books are reviewed by children.

(I had forgotten about how CNN does this… it’s how I originally found one of my son’s favorite books, Scaredy Squirrel. This epic saga was reviewed by 6 year old Andrew Oglesby back in June of 2006. The rest, ,at least at my house, is history. Or legend.)

I love the suggestion that libraries could do something like this on their Web pages. It seems like a natural thing to do…

I can just imagine what my son, Robert, would say if asked to review some of his favorite books:

Goodnight Moon - “bunny. BUNNY!!! Shhhhhh!!! mouse mouse mouse up up clock clock mouse. Shhh. Bunny.”

Truck Duck - “DuckDuck QUACK! Truck. Car. Bug…EEEEEWWWWW! DUCK! Bobo. Monkey EEE EEE EEE. Duck!”

Yummy Yucky - “EEEEWWWWW! mommy… mommy… cookie!!!! cookie!!!! EEEEWWW! cheese. pizza. Meeeow! Bug. Sock stinky sock. EEEEWWWW!!!”

Give him a break. He’s only two.

But really, wouldn’t it be cool to share some of what the kids visiting your library have to say about the books they’ve read?

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I came across this article from Business Week a few weeks ago, and have been meaning to post about it for a while now. The gist of the article isn’t anything new. It talks about the shift away from “traditional one-way messages to consumers” in favor of a more conversational, word of mouth based approach. Like I said, nothing new.

What I like about the article, however, is both its simplicity in outlining the trend in a very understandable way and the idea that this is some kind of “technology-enabled shift back to pre-industrial market behavior.”

“…while most of today’s adults are well acclimated to this “industrial marketing” approach, it does not reflect the historical norm of human behavior. For thousands of years before communications became industrialized, people chose a bakery or blacksmith based on word-of-mouth recommendations, reputation, and social networks. Selection of a vendor might reflect social class, neighborhood, recommendation, or personal relationship… So today, as a new set of community technologies develop on the Internet, we should not be surprised to discover that the sociology of how we buy isn’t new at all. In fact, it is as old as civilization. Today’s markets will come to resemble these pre-industrial markets, with some major exceptions. Our pre-industrial ancestors were constrained by time and distance in developing opinions about vendors. But in the post-industrial world, reputation, relationships, and recommendations can come at any time from anywhere to affect a purchase decision.”

An interesting idea. Put it that way, and maybe the whole idea of ‘letting go of the message’ a little seems less scary.

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Read this blog post about the “Death of the Library.”

Can’t say that I agree… but it’s always good to read opposing viewpoints, especially when they may reflect what a good portion of the “non-library” population is thinking.

How can libraries use the knowledge that these arguments are floating around and becoming widespread among our potential users in a constructive way?

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For years, I have heard library professionals lament how much libraries “suck at marketing.” And I can’t disagree with that. We need to do a much better job in this area, which is, of course, much easier said than done.

It occurs to me, though, that one of the major obstacles that we may be facing is a widespread confusion among library professionals about the difference between marketing and advertising. Whenever I have a conversation about marketing with a librarian, it always ends up being a discussion of advertising.

Here’s the thing, though. Advertising is a component of marketing, but it is far from the whole enchilada. To quote a concise summary of the topic,

“The best way to distinguish between advertising and marketing is to think of marketing as a pie, inside that pie you have slices of advertising, market research, media planning, public relations, product pricing, distribution, customer support, sales strategy, and community involvement. Advertising only equals one piece of the pie in the strategy.”

Library marketing is not solely about advertising. It is also is not only about branding. Or PR. Or “Outreach.” Or social networking. Those are only parts of what should be an overall strategy for communicating with our customers and using that communication cycle to reach our ultimate organizational goals.

If we’re really going to get serious about library marketing, we need to forget advertising for a minute and think of the bigger picture.

What is your library’s marketing strategy?

Graphic via

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From the “things I wanted to blog when I first read them but never quite got around to it until now” file.

As my son, Robert, approaches his second birthday, I can’t get over how incredible it is to watch his development. Not only is it fascinating to watch him learn to put words, concepts, and actions together, it is also amazing to see the ways in which his experiences are shaping him in ways that would never have been possible when I was a child. In short, it’s really cool to watch a true “digital native” develop.

He is just now learning that a mouse (”Mowwwwws”) can also mean a small furry creature that causes Mommy to call the exterminator. He thinks Mommy’s laptop is cool… until he touches the screen and nothing happens (unlike his cousin’s Nintendo DS.) Lame. Anything long and skinny (yarn, the dog leash, a belt) is a cord and must be plugged in somewhere. Cameras must be handed to him each time a picture is taken so that he can see the “Bay-beeeee.” Cameras are not held up to the eye, but are used at arm’s length. I have received text messages from my son… mostly reading “44444444″. Elmo lives in the TV and can be brought up at any time. He also vacations in the computer, where specific songs can be viewed at will. His cousin’s Webkinz live next to the computer. You can call Pop-Pop from anywhere at any time. A glimpse of ear buds causes wild dancing.

Robert is an avid “EYEbrarrrr” user already, looking forward to visits to the place where books, “PUZZZ-ulllls” and computer games “clik! clik! beeeeep!” are available for his use. My hope is that his attachment will grow in the next few years of his life (although I hope he outgrows the tantrums as we leave…)

Anyway, to get to the point…

A while back Marketing Prof’s Daily Fix listed a number of things that marketers can learn from a 10-year old. To summarize, marketers should consider the upcoming generation and observe their values and how they operate a little. The basic findings:

1- Kids know a lot more about what’s happening online that you may think.

2- Kids do social networking naturally.

3- Being boring is the cardinal sin.

4- Kids like multi-media experiences.

5- Kids ignore online ads.

6 - Do not underestimate young people.

7 - Kids rock.

Maybe I just don’t have that much experience with kids. But I thought this was a great post… and I can really see this beginning to be the case with my little Digital Native. (The article even describes an incident where the 10-year old in question does a little tech trouble shooting to solve his Runescape problem!)

So let me throw something out there for discussion. I was told by a Children’s librarian a few months ago that while Adult services have been changed dramatically by technological advancements and social networking, Children’s services have basically not changed, and she didn’t see the central goals and missions of Children’s librarianship changing much in the near future. This was a very excellent, experienced and well-respected librarian who I admire very much. But I had to wonder about this…

Maybe this post is a little random, but it’s a question that interest me as a parent and as a librarian…

What do folks think?

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A wonderful colleague of mine said something very interesting (and very true!) over lunch a few weeks ago: “Librarians like to provide services for the people that they know.” She said this with a sigh, going on to point out that this is all fine and good, but that sometimes it leads us to neglect services for other segments of the population we serve just because they’re not already coming in the door.

Please read David Lee King’s excellent post about the dilemma this puts us in.

In one sentence: “Stop ignoring your library’s rapidly-growing digital community.”

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