Marketing your library - 1 restroom enquiry at a time

Loving being on holiday; I'm almost caught up with my blog reading now!

Just read this geat article by Diane Zabel and Lorraine J. Oellack, guest columnists on rusq.org

Its about the importance of customer service and recognizing that every single interaction - even if its just showing the way to the restroom - is an opportunity to market your library:

"If you are tired of hearing “where’s the restroom?” then maybe it’s time to rethink your choice of jobs or how you perform it. Simply put, either stop working at a public help desk or take the challenge to rejuvenate your patron interactions and become a positive face for your library."

Marketing Libraries

Alison Wallbutton writes a great blog called Market Intelligence : news and views about marketing, consumers and trends relevant to libraries and librarians.

Her most recent post features the research project by Melissa Clarkson about special libraries and marketing, but is of relevance to public libraries to.

I'm not going to write anything here - coz I have nothing perceptive to add - but do check out Alison's blog. She writes about an aspect of librarianship that we are increasingly involved in and there aint much around!

What the web stretegist should know about Twitter

Great link on the Web4lib digest this morning, linking to this post on on Jeremiah Owyang's blog Social Media, Web Marketing.

Provides a really good introduction to Twitter, plus loads of related links to other posts about using Twitter to market your business or service. Heres an excerpt:

"The savvy Twitter user realizes that the effective communications aren’t just ‘pushing’ content to readers, but they will also dialogue and converse with others by replying to them. I use this tool as a global chat room, responding to others, building relationships, and listening in. Like blogging, the rule of anti-marketing marketing is required for success, engage your community. Unlike traditional forms of advertising and marketing, Twitter is “opt-in” meaning that users will ‘follow’ a twitter account, abuse will result in a user unsubscribing. "