Does your library have a social media strategy, or are you, like us, flying by the seat of your pants?

There’s something to be said for experimentation, but eventually your organization will reach a point where you’ll have to decide whether to commit to social media as part of your public service mandate, or to drop it like so many other “emerging technologies” that have gone before (social bookmarking, anyone?). MPOW has decided to bank on social media, and I’ve been given the responsibility of coming up with a guiding policy. Here are a few questions I’ve asked myself along the way that may help you create your own policies:

1. Who are you? There’s a concept in the business world called the “elevator pitch” in which you have to pitch your idea or brand in the time it takes to go from one floor to another in an elevator. When thinking of social media, you’ll need to be able to give your pitch in 140 characters or less.
2. What’s your point? Are you trying to build awareness of the library’s services and collections? Are you trying to build loyalty or improve the public perception of the library? This next suggestion will be hard but I’m going to make it anyway — choose one, and stick with it for awhile. Don’t spread your message too thin, and focus your efforts. Targeted messaging is easier to measure.
3. What does your audience think of you? What kind of relationship do you have with them? Do you practice customer-centered service, or do you still make decisions without talking to the people? Find out what your audience thinks of you by holding focus groups, conducting surveys via social media (twtpoll is a great tool), and asking people to tell you about their experience with the library.
4. What face will you present to the public? Will you be authoritative and aloof? Professional but personable? Human or robot? Or perhaps you’ll strive for a balance between these choices? Either way, be consistent. If your library has a website style guide, include a section on social media messaging that covers tone of voice, language use, and authority. If you don’t have a website style guide, what are you waiting for? Stop reading this and go write one!
5. How will you measure success? This may be the most important question of all, because unless and until you know what sort of return you’re getting from these efforts, you might as well be shouting in the dark. Up until now, we’ve mostly relied on page views and follower counts to tell us how well we’re doing, but going forward I think we’ll be rolling out targeted metrics that are aligned with specific library publicity and fundraising campaigns. We’ll also be poring over analytics data to help us measure patron success and failure rates on our website, and will be trying to tease out the story of how well our engagement methods are working for us. Exactly what we’ll measure and how we’ll measure it is still rolling around in my brain. Watch this space for more details.

You may notice that I haven’t mentioned tools at all. There’s a good reason for this — remember MySpace? Mm-hmm, exactly. Audiences shift. Web users adopt and abandon tools regularly, and as such, information organizations should focus on strategy, not tactics. We often get so hung up on a particular tool that we’re reluctant to abandon it when it’s no longer working for us. Stop the madness. Be willing to follow your audience when they leave Facebook or Twitter for The Next Big Thing. Read sites like Mashable and Guacira Naves’ The Online Strategy House, and keep abreast of the changing landscape so your organization won’t be caught by surprise when the shift happens. With your goal in sight, the plan of action will take care of itself. Answering these questions can help shape your goal.

So, am I off the mark with this? What other areas should I consider when developing a strategic plan for social media? Leave feedback in the comments.

Earlier this morning, I saw a tweet from Jennifer (@typealibrarian) where she announced the new logo for her library’s Twitter page. What I saw there made me smile.

If you’re not a library type, you might not see anything all that unusual about this page, but as a public librarian, seeing a library that chooses to put an actual name and a face to their public library is — to my mind — a very rare occurrence indeed. By putting a name and a face to the library as a whole, the library is saying to the community that they are interested in building a more personal relationship with the community they serve.

Furthermore, in making this move, they’ve introduced a level of accountability to the exchanges they make with their (online) patrons. Once you attach a name and a face to your organization, you provide your public with an easily-identifiable channel for interaction. It’s a customer service tactic that we’ve seen from companies before, take Zappos for example, but it’s not something we typically do in public libraries. Academic libraries seem to be more open when it comes to attaching names/faces to library services.

Even at my own library, which is considered a leader in social media among City of Vancouver divisions, we use a generic all-in-one account for Twitter. We have several people who post on the library’s behalf, and we made the decision that people it was more important for people to connect to the organization than to any one individual. But seeing what the Columbus Metropolitan library is doing is making me rethink that strategy.

It is important for libraries to make a connection to the communities they serve; I don’t think anyone can safely argue against that position in this day and age. But being out in front of the public, being willing to give up some degree of privacy in exchange for helping people build a more personal connection with the library as a whole seems to me to be a worthwhile trade.

Well done, Columbus Metropolitan Library.

An update to a previous post: Vancouver Public Library has just launched a Foursquare promotion. Even though the idea came from a customer, it’s my first time doing a promotion for the library since I started working here, and I’m pretty excited about it.

Are Wordle clouds passe? I hope not, because they’re one of my favourite information visualizations. This is a sample of the topics that have been discussed on my library’s Twitter feed in the last couple of days.

What kinds of items do you post to your library’s Twitter feed?

This week I’ll be conducting two training sessions for library staff that demonstrate how we use Twitter and other social media tools to interact with library customers. While I’ve trained staff before both at the library and in other organizations where I’ve worked, this presentation has proven to be one of the most difficult ones I’ve ever put together.

The subject matter isn’t especially difficult, and as you’ll see when you look at the slideshow or view a sample handout, I didn’t go into any great detail about Twitter or social media as a whole. I found I wasn’t able to go into great detail because even though I know a lot about Twitter and other methods of social communication, I use them so often that I take them for granted. Because these tools are so commonplace in my life, I struggled with coming up with definitions and an explanation for why I use these tools on a daily basis, and why I’ve focused so much of my professional time on making sure our library has a well-established social media presence.

It felt a bit like being in a relationship with a person that nobody liked or understood, and having to defend your relationship to a room full of disapproving family and friends. I’m hoping for a positive outcome on Tuesday and Thursday when I deliver the lecture.

I used ScreenSteps to create the PDF handout. I’ve written about ScreenSteps before, and other than some pretty restrictive formatting limitations, I haven’t found a better tool for creating training documentation.

From Dave Burrows, someone who follows MPOW on Twitter, comes this (awesome) idea about how libraries might use Foursquare, a location-based social network:

I did think of a way the Vancouver Public Library could encourage people to check in a little more than they already do (and thus, hopefully, be reading a book or two more than they normally do).

It’s simple and easy.

Throw up a sign/whiteboard somewhere in the branches that says, for example, “The Mayor of the Central Branch, Dave B., recommends The World According to Garp by John Irving”

Now obviously it could get a little tiring if they had to change these every time someone new became Mayor which is why I would suggest setting a cut-off time. Whoever is mayor as of closing on Sunday night would have their recommendation up for the week.

I have to say I absolutely love this idea, and it’s one I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. I think we’re doing an OK job with Twitter, but beyond that I don’t feel as if we’re really connecting with library patrons on most of our social networking services. Sure, they get our updates, and we occasionally reply back in 140 characters or less, but honestly, there’s really no incentive for people to keep promoting the library on our behalf (unless they’re just library fans and want to be thought of as well-read).

But we – meaning the powers that be and myself – are talking about this now, and are taking a serious look at possibly putting together an incentive for Foursquare users. I can’t say exactly what, when, or if we’ll be able to put an incentive in place, but watch this space. As soon as I know something, you’ll be the first to know.

I don’t think MPOW is alone in debating how much we should moderate customer-generated content. We recently developed a website for teen library users, and one of the features we wanted to be most prominent was the ability to allow teens who registered for the site to contribute reviews, blog posts, and other entries, with the hope that this would inspire teens to contribute and become part of the community. We’re still wrestling with this idea, primarily because we haven’t quite been able to resolve our desire to collect user generated content with our need for secure servers.

The University of British Columbia has developed a site that allows students, potential students, faculty and staff to speak their mind about what kinds of problems they want the University to solve. Called A Place of Mind, the site is very well done, easy to navigate, and allows visitors to add their opinions; users need only provide their name and email address to contribute. Have a look at the content that is currently featured in the Shoutbox:

spambots in the shoutbox

If your library is considering letting users add content to your website – whether that content takes the shape of comments, a shout box, or blog posts, I think it is essential that your organization appoint a community manager to monitor the discussions on the site. Otherwise, you might end up with spammers in your shoutbox.

EDIT: You might also want to make sure you have content in your Twitter feed if you’re going to publicize it on the front page of your site.