Emily's Notebook

Below are my notes for a talk I gave at the Innovative User’s Group meeting last week in Chicago. This talk was given as part of the Public Library Luncheon panel. Please keep in mind that these are notes, and that they refer to other things specifically talked about by other panelists and presenters at the conference. Some of the notes refer to answers given by luncheon attendees.

Social Media Engagement Through Listening

Innovative User’s Group Meeting 2012, Public Library Luncheon

Is anyone here involved either directly or indirectly in their library’s Social Media initiatives? Anyone involved in drafting their library’s Social Media Strategy? (You do all have one, right? That’s a talk for another day!)

When discussing library social media initiatives, the usual question is: what do you push out? What kind of content do you create to present to your users?

In my experience, there are five basic answers I usually get to this question:

• Announcements of library events and programs
• Book reviews, new materials, recommendations
• Facts, trivia, etc. with links back to library content
• Articles, interesting topics
• Replies to messages directed at the library account.

But this isn’t the question today.

Today we want to ask: Who do you follow?

Who do you respond to?

The real value of social media is in:

• The conversations they enable.
• The relationships they help us build.
• The ideas they help us as develop as a community.
• The cycle of communication, action, and feedback they can help us sustain.

If the real value of social media lies in the conversations they enable, then our goals must include encouraging interaction and engagement. Which means listening to what people are saying and responding to them… because conversations really don’t start until someone responds.

What is it to start a conversation? We often think it’s about throwing a topic out there, but not really.

Think about real life networking – go to a cocktail party, and the “conversation starter” is usually thought of as the person who walks up to someone and throws out a topic. “Wow, those little root beer floats were terrific!”

But the conversation itself really doesn’t start until someone takes the bait and chimes in with a good response, creating a two-way stream of communication. “Yes, but did you try the tiny beignets?”

So when it comes to social media, how do you as a library make the conversation happen?

Being not only the person throwing out the topic, but the person who responds and really gets a dialog started. The person who chimes in and says, I have an idea on what you just said.

Imagine someone standing in the middle of your library shouting, “I wonder how hard it would be to build a wine cellar in my basement?”

You would (after giving them a very strange look) go over to them and try to give them a suggestion on how to find out this information. That’s what we do we figure out what people are looking for and help them find it.

Believe it or not, there are tons of people from your community doing just this via social media. They are tweeting, sharing, pinning, posting questions you can help them with… even if the questions are not presented directly or even in the form of a question.

(But that’s OK – isn’t that what the Reference Interview is about? Listening to our patrons and figuring out what it is they are really looking for regardless of how the problem is stated?)

Which gets us back to who you are following, who you are listening to, and who you are responding to.

Who can we follow?

Local organizations, businesses, community leaders

How can we facilitate listening? Listening as an act of customer service

Devoting time to listening, using tools wisely

In what ways can we engage with people to make the conversations happen in a way that fits our overall Social Media Strategy and feeds back in a constructive way into the goals and mission of our institution and the profession?

One good, practical thing to think about is how we can use the tools John just alluded to in the Encore Social development to further our efforts in this vein.

When I was listening to Alan’s presentation on this yesterday, my mind was filled with ideas on how our libraries might use these tools to reach out to their patrons.

The idea of libraries creating various public pages to recommend and push content is the immediate and most obvious thought.

But the whole following component potentially gives us another tool we can use to connect and converse with our most active library users.

And the possibilities for integrating this into a Sierra dashboard – or some other staff dashboard interface if you’re not quite up to Sierra yet. I know I’m looking forward to collaborating with my colleagues here in this room and elsewhere to find creative ways to further our goals using these tools.

So, since my time is running very short, I want to leave you with this:

Above all, we are in a customer service profession. And I can’t think of anything more central to good customer service than listening to and responding to the needs of your customer base. Without doing that, businesses, institutions, and entire professions die.

So in implementing a social media strategy, please don’t forget how fundamental listening and responding in a meaningful way can be.

By all means, push out your announcements. Link to your content.  Throw out topics for thought and discussion. But don’t forget to listen.

I spend a lot of time visiting different libraries, and I’ll never cease to be amazed by just how different they can be from one another. I’m not even talking about museum libraries differing form college libraries and publics. I’m not thinking about libraries from far flung regions of the globe or anything as extreme as that. Even libraries that are outwardly similar in mission, service population, and financial support can be vastly different when it comes to the internal operations of the institutions themselves.

As I celebrate this week my seventh anniversary working with 54 geographically close public libraries, I think of how often it comes as a shock to library staff when I mention to them the vast differences between workflows, policies and culture that exist between them and their neighbor libraries.

“They do WHAT????”

But it’s a huge learning experience to observe what similar institutions are doing differently. Some of the most productive user meetings I’ve run with our consortium members have been ones where they just discuss what they do in their libraries to solve particular problems that arise for all of them. It’s amazing to see the breadth of responses that can come from addressing something like the problem of getting parents to sign their children in when they come to a program or making sure all of the pages know how to shelve the travel books.

With this all in mind, I wonder if it wouldn’t be fun (and really eye opening) to put together some kind of “Exchange Student” program for library staff.  If it’s an area like mine where a number of libraries are in close proximity, and may already have good relationships with one another, I can’t think that it would be too hard to organize.

I suppose I’d try to get a number of libraries to agree to participate, and then volunteers from within the participating libraries. Each participant would be matched with an employee from another participating library based on job similarities and scheduling. The pairs could then be scheduled to switch places for a day during a regional “Staff Exchange” week. Each participant would have to work in their’ counterpart’s department (under the supervision of a designated person in the host library), doing as much as they can of the other person’s job. At the end of the week, it might be nice to wrap things up with a get together of all participants to discuss their observations and things they’ve learned.

This is just a rough draft… Any other ideas? Elements for planning this and really making it work? Stuff that you think might make this idea fall flat on its face? I might just try it, so give me some input.

PS

I don’t know why something like this couldn’t be done within institutions as well, maybe swapping staff between departments in a university setting, or within large libraries…

“We use social media in our library to post program announcements, publish lists of our new books, write book reviews, and tell the community what’s going on at the library!”

YAY! Good for you! You’ve passed Social Media for Libraries 101!

You passed, but I’ll give you a B at most.

To get an A, think about the following for a few minutes:

• Who are you following?
• How does your library interact with the community via SM?
• What conversations are you engaged in?
• What local issues are being discussed online… and how is the library playing a role in addressing these issues?
• How are you connecting with local leaders and influencers?
• What kind of relationships are you developing within your community via social networks?
• Are your library’s services impacted by the ideas, issues, and conversations you’re engaging in with our community online?

Libraries love to talk a good game about being at the heart of their communities, but how true can that be if their use of social media is limited to something roughly equivalent to a digital bulletin board? There are conversations going on around us, people expressing opinions, building relationships, tackling issues. There are new dimensions of engagement growing all around us, continually making our communities more complex.

My advice?  Talk less. Listen more. Participate with the community rather than expecting the community to participate with you.  Absorbing the local Zeitgeist percolating around the library is essential to maintaining a central role in the community.

It will take more time and a higher level of engagement on the part of the library staff, that’s true. It’s harder to engage in thoughtful conversation than it is to post little updates that don’t take into account the overall context of what’s going on in the community right now at this moment. There are policy and perhaps legal issues to tackle, as well as stakeholders to convince.

But if we don’t tackle these challenges and make out social media participation meaningful within the context of larger conversations, how relevant are we within our communities after all?