email marketing | PC Sweeney

I recently wrote about dropping everything but email and FB for your online strategy but I thought I should also mention some thoughts on everything else. I’m absolutely still advocating for your library to focus its use on just those two things, but of course there’s a bit more to it then that.

Name Registration
While you should focus your library’s resources on these two platforms, you should most definitely claim your library’s name across as many as you can. This is mostly because we may one day find a use for things like G+ and you don’t want someone else to have your name claimed. It’s also almost always free to sign up for a social media platform and at the very least capture your library’s username so why not do it. There are sites like http://www.knowem.com that will do the work for you if you want.

The other reason you should capture your library’s name is a bit more sinister. As Jason Griffey pointed out when Dale Askey was being sued by Edward Mellon Press, the law firm that was performing the lawsuit starting buying up any version of the URLs that could be associated with his name. This is just part of the due diligence of lawsuits in information age. We have also seen political campaigns buy their opposition’s URLs and claim usernames on social media as part of their counter campaign. This is not something that you want the opposition to your library or library campaign to do. Might as well get them while you can!

Using All the Others
Am I saying that you should NEVER touch another social media platform? Well, no. Not exactly. My post was about the most effective platforms for advocating for your library whether you’re in a campaign or just want to tell people about your library. There are ways to use other social media platforms that you might find useful. Here are some of the ways that I’ve seen social media platforms be used in a meaningful way by librarians-

Pinterest– You can find great Arts and Crafts, DIY program ideas
Meetup– Find local groups of people interested in specific topics that you can promote programs too
Twitter– Online reference. You can search by location and for people asking questions and then answer them. Think of it like digital roaming reference
Flickr– For the love of GOD!!! Please stop using clipart. You can find really good creative commons pictures for your signage and displays and ads.
Goodreads– I have seen some libraries do excellent reader’s advisory or organize book clubs
Instagram– It is so quick and easy to connect your Instagram account to many of your social media accounts if you want to share pictures across them. Why not?
LinkedIn– For your own career or to find quality and experienced presenters in your community on a variety of topics
Tumblr– It is a newer and younger growing community and I think it’s still best for librarians to use it for themselves as a kind of professional portfolio more than anything else at this point. But we’ll see what happens.
Second Life– LOL!! Just kidding.

PLAY!
Whatever you do, you can still play with all the others. There’s no real harm in it after all. You might find something fun and exciting to use them for and you’ll be learning some new skills and how to critically apply new tools to your library.

I recently gave a webinar on social media and I thought I would write a bit about it even though I’m pretty tired of talking about social media. But, I think there is something new to say here. The talk stemmed from noticing that so many library campaign committees and librarians running their organizations social media have fallen into the trap of trying to identify the next big platform to use. They’ve joined everything from Snapchat to Pinterest to Facebook in search of some kind of social media nirvana that will solve whatever problem they are trying to solve. I don’t think this is a good use of our time or resources so instead of asking you to join and use more social media platforms, I’m going to ask you to ignore all the social media static and only focus on what we know works (for now). We are going to step away from focusing on being as social as possible, to being as effective as possible.

We have seen libraries ineffectually chasing social media as fast as that social media comes and goes. If you remember the clamor to get on to MySpace, Second Life, Friendster, etc… and then next big rush to get onto Pinterest, Goodreads, and G+ you’ll also remember how fast some of those faded away. This is basically the fishing net method of social media marketing. Libraries are throwing the biggest net possible and hoping that they catch something they want and throwing the rest back instead of using the bait that works to get exactly what they want.

All of this is largely because we are looking at using these tools backwards. For example, our organizations get on Twitter and then try to figure out their Twitter strategy. But this doesn’t work because there is no such thing as a Twitter strategy. Twitter is a tool to help you achieve a strategy. What is more effective is to ask what the library’s goal is in building a relationship with the community, then figure out how to measure it, then figure out which tools satisfy your requirements and use those. Remember that for an election or advocacy standpoint, our goal is to get our message out to as many people as possible as effectively as possible.

With that in mind, I’m going to argue that the only two online tools that you really need right now to win a library election or advocate for your library are Facebook and Email. These two platforms can be used effectively in conjunction to build the relationships that your campaign is looking for in a more focused and streamlined fashion. These are two complimentary tools with enough depth, scope, and longevity to take the time to invest resources in and they connect with each other in a way that supports both.

The most important thing I learned in political advocacy is that its all a numbers game. As of 2013, the only two online tools with a high enough usage to be advantageous are, in fact, Facebook and email. According to a Pew Study, around 85% of Americans have email and around 74% of Americans have Facebook. The next highest user percentage rates are less than 25% of the American Public with Linkedin at just 22%, Pinterest at 21%, and Twitter at 18%. What this means, is that if you capture every Twitter user in your area and win them over with your message and they are all registered voters and they all go out to vote, you’ll still lose the election because that is just 18% of the public. Yet, 58% of Americans report that one of the first things they do in the morning is check their email. So, where do you want to be?

A much better strategy would be to go with the tools that you know have enough market saturation to get your message out in a high enough volume to really help you get your message out. Those are email and Facebook. There are some strategic differences in how these two platforms work and how people engage with them, but that will be a post for a later day.