What would the new year be without a bevy marketing predictions? No fun! That's what! Fortunately, Forbes.com writers pitched in with their predictions for 2006 with one writer offering forecasts in the areas of advertising and marketing (here). Some of the standouts for librarians are:
- Marketers as entertainers: Marketers will create movies, videos, concerts, you name it, to grab people's attention. I can believe this one. Just think about all the time we spend trying to plan entertaining programs, tutorials, blogs and podcasts!
- Marketers will expose their brands in entertaining ways. I blogged about this trend, Tryvertising, a while back. An example of this would be pushing kitchen appliances via a cooking class. There may be potential here for librarians to insert their services in unexpected places!
- Marketers will take advantage of social networking sites like MySpace.com to engineer word-of-mouth campaigns There's already a huge interest in social software amongst librarian-types. Aaron Schmidt had a nice post about this topic a while back along with some ways librarians can get going with these tools.
Libraries are more than just collections of books and other materials. Libraries are dynamic forces in their communities with the power to improve lives. Modern marketing demands that librarians look beyond their traditional roles ("outside the book") to find new ways to connect with people and further their success.
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