Marketing ideas

From ml2sig

Getting the word out about library events, resources, collections, etc. can be hard!

The old way of marketing was to create a specific message and disseminate it in a very controlled way. Marketing with 2.0 technologies requires that you let go of this old model.

[edit] Email Lists & Groups

E-Publicity (Library Electronic Resources News) (e-publicity@listserver.itd.umich.edu) - Join this list here. There is no description of what this list is intended to be, but most recent emails have been about sharing new electronic resources.

[edit] Blogs & Journals

Good blog on library marketing: Library Marketing: Thinking Outside the Book (also by Atom Feed).

Interesting blog post about the long tail and getting die hard fans: [1] - there might be some lessons here for the library

Strategies for Promoting Social Scholarship at the Digital Scholarship Blog

Marketing Library Services Journal: Mirlyn Record & webpage

[edit] Tracking & Metrics

Because of this new marketing model, it can be difficult to track web activity and metrics about the effectiveness of your promotion. Here are a few ways to keep an eye on what people are saying and their reactions to your project.

Use Google blog search to find out what blogs are talking about you or your project. You can also set up an alert/feed subscription for your search to be notified anytime something new fits your search. For example, here is a search results page for the most recent mentions of "MLibrary2.0" in the blogosphere: [2]. This can be used to track mentions of your name, your department, a particular collection or project, etc.

Flickr has a built-in stats that lets you see activity on your account (go to "You" > "Your Stats") that will show you which images were viewed most, where your viewers came from, etc. You can also see recent activity on your account (go to "You" > "Recent Activity") to who has recently commented on or favorited your images. You can also subscribe to your recent activity with email alerts or RSS to be notified immediately when you get new comments on your images.

Google Analytics: set up an account and add tracking code to your blog or webpage. This will allow you to see tons of information about where your users are coming from (geographically and which websites), how long they spent on your site, if they are new or returning visitors, if they came from a search engine (and what terms they searched to find you), etc. The Library Systems department uses Google Analytics on all webpages that use the gateway template so they should be able to provide access to that data as well.

Del.icio.us can be used to track how many people bookmark your site in del.icio.us. For example, here is the page that tracks this ML2SIG wiki.

Technorati: tracks blogs and provides rankings based on how many other blogs link to the blog and how many comments are posted in reaction to a blog post. For example, here is the listing for Paul Courant's blog [3].

facebook: there are different ways of tracking activity on facebook.
- If you sent an event announcement, you are able to see who accepted/declined
- Groups will have members and discussions
- You can also look to see if there are groups created by others. You don't need to join these groups, just finding that they exist can tell you a lot. Try searching groups for "ugli" or "grad library" and you'll find a few: "Honestly, I Have Never Seen a Group Study Room Open at the Ugli," "Stop F***ing Talking at the Ugli (3rd and 4th floors)," "Ugli Late Niters," "Why the F*** doesn't the UGLi have vending machines?!"