Tool-time for marketers

Lots of marketing tools, tips and training opportunities have been cropping up this week.  Here’s some I’ve stumbled upon:

OPAL is hosting some webinars that look promising for librarian-marketers.  If you work with older adults at your library, you may want to peek in on Library Services for Older Adults: Preview of the White House Conference on Aging.  It takes place on Thursday, November 17, 2005 beginning at 3:00 p.m. Eastern.  If promotion through podcasting is your cup of tea, get in on Podcasting:  An Introduction on Thursday, December 8, 2005 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern.  Added bonus:  they’re free!

Another tool you may find useful comes from Emerald by way of its new Librarian Toolkit, which contains posters, presentations, suggested e-mails and step-by-step guides to name a few items.  [The Toolkit was noted by Chris Olson on the AcademicPR listserv – thanks for sharing!].

KnowThis.com has come out with its latest piece of its Principles of Marketing Tutorial:  Distribution Decisions.  While not all of this will be relevant for us, distribution is an absolutely crucial piece of the marketing mix and an important one to be familiar with.  You may want to pay particular attention to the Marketing Issues in Channels segment.  In my unbiased opinion (ha!), I think that RSS is a very attractive distribution channel for us librarians, and it just so happens that MarketingProfs.com has been featuring a lot of articles on this topic including The Full Circle of RSS, Your 7-Step RSS Marketing Plan and What is RSS and Why Should You Care? (free registration required for this one).

Take a minute (please) to read over a recent Church of the Customer blog post called, Corporate evangelism vs. customer evangelism.  The post outlines the differences between these two kinds of evangelism and describes the “customer loyalty ladder.”  I’m excited by the idea of making the most of our patron-evangelists in spreading the word about how great our services are.  The key to accomplishing this, according to the authors:  a welll-defined cause.  Another post from COC refers to a series of posts from BeConnected that give pointers for creating spread-worthy e-mail newsletters – Good stuff!

That’s it for now! Choose your marketing tools wisely! ;)