LIS 9763

There are two intertwined elements relevant to marketing, evaluation and social software that stood out to me this week while doing the readings. Firstly, social software offers a wide variety of services we can offer users to meet their needs so long as we are cognizant of this “meeting their needs” goal and market and evaluate our initiatives accordingly. Secondly, social software provides us with an array of marketing and evaluation tools we can use to help us ensure we are indeed meeting this goal in all of the services we offer, virtually and in real life.

    The one thing that really stood out for me this week is branding. It was only mentioned briefly in the readings this week, but I think it’s important and would like to talk about it a little bit. While I do not know anything about the authors who wrote the readings, or the libraries they work in, it seems like there is a disconnect between the online and the real world library efforts. They seem to be kept distinct, and even though the online work serves to promote the library, there is nothing really connecting it to the physical space.

Overall, I found this week’s readings to be very helpful. Throughout the term, we’ve read and talked a lot about the different types of social software tools can benefit libraries. But this doesn’t mean that libraries should just go ahead and create accounts in every social software tool currently known to man. We need to have a PLAN. This is something that I think many libraries (and other non-profits) often forget. Before spending the time to create profiles and upload content, librarians need to sit down and clearly define what it is they want t

One thing I caught on with many of the readings, particularly Karin Coombs and Michael Sauers is that part of the marketing we need to do isn’t just towards our user base: we need to market any web 2.0 technology we wish to implement to our staff, and in a way I can’t help but think this may be harder to do than market to our users.

There are a couple themes that emerged in the weekly readings.  The first is that social media can be dangerous because it is deregulated. The second is that social media increases the workload of the librarian. The third is that advertising & publicity are not “dirty words.” The fourth is the idea of branding, individual or institutional. And the fifth and final is the perception of social media as a traditionally “geeky” pursuit.

Web 2.0 applications allow for new ways of marketing. However, unlike traditional forms of marketing, it has a greater possibility of hitting large, geographically-scattered people rather than focusing on your target market.

Just letting you all know that I'm going to take my second blog holiday this week.
Talk to you again next week!