Friday, February 02, 2007

A matter of metrics

Earlier this week, a colleague at a school library contacted me asking about marketing metrics - what's out there, how to select them, etc. It occurred to me that this might be a common question among librarians, so I'm throwing out this offer:

E-mail me or add a comment to this post about your marketing assessment challenges and questions. I'll do some digging into your inquiries and see what relevant marketing metrics could be of use to you and how you can employ them.

I'm just getting my feet wet in this area, but I'm very interested about learning more and have some experience, both practical and academic, that I can offer. Hopefully, it'll be useful for you too! If I don't hear from anyone within a week or two, I'll go ahead and start a series of posts featuring different marketing metrics.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As a career marketer in both Silicon Valley enterprise, as well as Wall Street, and one who only came to libraries of late, I note little that would qualify as marketing in libraries.

We grind out literature that serves only the existing customer base, yet we perhaps serve 20% of the potential customer base.

This is firmly recognized in the business world, and major effort is applied to attracting new customers, the 80% not now served.

In the business world marketing routinely reports to the CEO because it is deemed very important function. Yet, in the library world marketing is at a low level within the organization, almost an afterthought. Until the library directors of the world recognize, understand, and support a true marketing function, little will happen in the way of change.

Jill said...

Hi, Anonymous!

I want to address your important points in an upcoming post. Keep your eyes peeled for it and thanks for sharing your opinion!