In case you haven't heard, PLCMC won

Congrats to the PLCMC for winning the 2008 Scholastic Library Publishing National Library Week Grant. PLCMC will partner with the New York Public library in utilizing the "Join the circle of knowledge @ your library" theme. You can read the full winning application here (Word doc). Their proposal includes a lot of community partnerships, a rock concert, and a joint blog with NYPL.

Some of the things that I like is that the campaign will help support some important local partners, including the animal shelter. Also, community members get to share the knowledge of their community via "knowledge boards" placed throughout the town. PLCMC: Do you have plans for how to preserve or share these insights? Perhaps you could stream quotes on your Web site?...Just a thought.

This news brings to mind an article I just read in Adweek about a study that found marketing events can raise purchase intent by as much as 52%. Here's an excerpt from the article:

"The special value of events, sponsorships and trade shows has to be considered," said Raymond Pettit, co-author and svp at MarketShare Partners in Los Angeles. "There are many connection points you can build at an event, whether it is emotional, aspirational or awareness building. It goes beyond just counting audience attendance."

So, research would suggest that sponsoring fun activities like those proposed by PLCMC might not just be good PR moves; they could also have a significant positive impact on the numbers of library users. If your marketing plan doesn't incorporate some form of outreach, you may want to give it a try.

Getting to the point with MarketingProfs

If you haven't explored them yet, MarketingProfs now offers a plethora of tidbit-sized chunks of information in its free (registration required) Get to the Po!nt newsletters. The thematic newsletters are really neat, covering topics such as:

• Customer Behavior (must-read for sure!)
  
• E-mail Marketing
• Marketing Inspiration (love this!)
• Small Business

These other topics are forthcoming, but you can subscribe to them today:

• B2B Marketing
• Marketing Optimization
• New Media (social networks, mobile devices, video, audio, etc.)

These newsletters are great ways to get just enough marketing information in your area of interest without overwhelming you or flooding your Inbox (most appear to come out every 3-4 days).

Bonus tip: Why not start your own mini newsletter for your colleagues? An e-mail once a week that briefly covers THE most important trend/news item/report/... you think people need to know would help keep staff up-to-date, and may even deliver the jolt of inspiration needed to come up with great ideas.

Using library books as direct marketing vehicles - huh?!

This article from the UK's Guardian entitled, "Libraries to be 'new channel' for direct marketing" describes how some libraries have agreed to allow advertisements to be placed next to the due date slips in the books they circulate. To clarify, these ads don't come from the libraries themselves, but from private businesses. Here's what a director at the direct marketing company had to say about this tactic:

'"The inserts are put in the book at the first page as you're handed the book to check it out," he explained. "They're going to be inserted right next to the panel with the return date on it, which means that everyone will look at them at least once."

"We're looking at somewhere between 500,000 and 300,000 a month at the moment," he said, adding that if 300,000 slots were sold a month the participating libraries could hope to see income of around £10,000."

There are hopes to take this idea nationwide, though not everyone is happy with it, as noted in the article.

I'm not a fan of this approach at all, and I'm a marketing enthusiast! The proponents suggest that this kind of advertising promises big revenues, which may be true, but at what cost? One of our most substantial assets, in my opinion, is our brand - a brand that is based on more than books. Our brand also represents trustworthiness and unbiased information services, which these external ads undermine. No matter how much we need additional funds, we should never relinquish our competitive advantages for short-term gains, particularly when doing so could damage those advantages in the long-term.

This direct marketing approach hasn't reached the U.S. yet, but it's not a stretch to say that it could do so in the future. We've already had similar debates over corporate sponsorships and 3rd party entities like coffee shops occupying our buildings. But this crosses a line, in my opinion. I'm interested to know how this might strike you UK readers out there.

Twitter time?

Marketing Profs set the stage for a debate over the marketing merits of microblogging, available in podcast form: MarketingProfs Podcast: Is Twitter a Valuable Tool, or Waste of Time?

Disclaimer: I haven't listened to the podcasts yet, but will try to later today and add any 2 cents I may have. However, I would argue that we have a responsibility to seriously play with all of these Web 2.0 tools, whether or not we choose to implement them for library marketing purposes.

Making the unfun fun: A marketing lesson

This news from Florida Radiology Imaging should give any librarian a boost of inspiration. The creative people at FRI held a brainstorming session in which they devised a way to persuade women to get those pesky but important mammograms done. Their solution? Throw a party! FRI now offers Midnight Mammogram & Manicure sessions where women can invite up to 13 of their friends for an evening of wine, food, pampering, and mammogramming. According to a local news article,

"The idea came about as employees at Florida Radiology Imaging brainstormed for ways to celebrate Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October.

"You have heard of women going to Botox parties. Well, we decided this is way more important than that," said Melody Huffman, marketing director for the radiology group. "I have friends myself, moms who work and are so involved with school -- the last thing they do is take care of themselves. But you can always get a girlfriend to go to dinner. So we're trying to make it easy and fun to come out and take care of your health."'

The service, scheduled to run through October, is now booked through November, and then who knows? Their event site even features e-mail invitations, easily allowing women to spread the word.

Ok, librarians. We have our challenge! If a medical facility can make mammograms fun and actually motivate people to want to have them done, then making libraries fun and rewarding to use should be a snap, right? This is another EXCELLENT example of Triumphs in Marketing. Notice that this had little or nothing to do with promotion, and everything to do with rethinking services so that they appeal to women's needs and preferences. Also notice that this program is the result of a brainstorming session. Brainstorming is not fluff - it can have real and significant consequences and is a technique we should make more good use of. Kudos, FRI.

Cultural institutions tackle memory loss

Good morning, campers! It's the wee hours of the morning (at least for me). I'm at RIC ready to fly to Green Bay, WI to give a talk on drawing in new users for the Wisconsin Library Association - how fun! Ever on the lookout for great marketing inspiration, I had to whip up this post after reading a great story in USA Today. An article called, "Alzheimer's program is one from the art" describes how Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art offers special programming to persons with dementia and their caregivers. The program is called Meet Me at MoMA. According to the article, the specially-designed tours have been shown to aid recall and open people up who might otherwise be too nervous to express themselves.

Not only is this program inspirational, it's brilliant marketing. Great marketing serves important needs. In this case, museums are addressing a significant health issue and nurturing people's well-being, while providing caregivers with a well-deserved respite. Wow! This example is sure to be featured in my talk as a creative example of how we librarians could segment our market and fill unmet needs, even in our overcrowded marketplace. What a wonderful way to draw in non-users and benefit the community at the same time.

I hope to blog a bit from the conference and share any marketing-related goodies with you.

Persuasion through education

The "Small Biz" section of BusinessWeek offers an article called, "Education-Based Marketing Sells" and it is definitely worth a read. In my reference desk experiences, I've often witnessed how teaching patrons about a technique or tool they didn't know they were missing can endear them to the library. It's during those so-called teachable moments that librarians can prove to patrons that they have something to offer that's relevant to their specific personal needs. Education is powerful marketing stuff, as the BusinessWeek article author, Christine Comaford-Lynch describes. She says,

"Sales is about building rapport, not breaking it. When you sell or pitch, you're often breaking rapport because the prospect may be skeptical—no one wants to be "sold." When you educate, you are building rapport. Your credibility is increased significantly when you begin meetings with data that is of value to the prospect. Launch all your meetings by teaching your prospect something or by offering data that establishes that you've done your homework." [Emphasis mine.]

[Ok, so this article is laden with overly-businessy terms. Here's a translation that should help:

• Sales = Service
• Sell / Pitch = Promote
• Prospect = Patron/Customer/User/Client/Whatever Term is Popular These Days
• Meetings = Meetings or Classes or Service Transacations
  
• Data = Information]
  

These are great points that go along with another marketing principle that I strongly believe in: Never underestimate your patrons! I never approach service encounters assuming that patrons are unmotivated to learn something new or potentially challenging because if I do so, they'll easily pick up on my low expectations and become disengaged. If, however, I begin every interaction as a teachable moment, I demonstrate my expectation that they should be actively involved and also that I have confidence they can learn unfamiliar material. Not everyone will be enthusiastic about getting a lesson when they ask a seemingly-straightforward question, but I can always adjust my strategy after testing their reactions.

In fact, most people appreciate it when I point out a helpful advanced search tip or other extra tidbit of information. I suspect that some of this desire for educational opportunities relates to the trend that TrendWatching calls Status Skills. TrendWatching defines Status Skills as:

"In economies that increasingly depend on (and thus value) creative thinking and acting, well-known status symbols tied to owning and consuming goods and services will find worthy competition from 'STATUS SKILLS': those skills that consumers are mastering to make the most of those same goods and services, bringing them status by being good at something, and the story telling that comes with it."

In short, education is empowering. By empowering our patrons through education, we gain their trust, respect, and repeat use. The question, then, that librarian-marketers should keep in mind as we interact with patrons in classes, presentations, meetings, and on the desk is: What can we teach patrons in this moment that will give them an edge in their projects? In doing so, we give ourselves an edge over the competition too.

Marketing: It's more familiar than you think

Not to toot my own horn, but the kind people at the Readex Report featured an article I wrote for its Fall 2007 newsletter on the similarities between marketing and teaching called, "Worlds Apart? The Relationship Between Teaching and Marketing and What It Means to Academic Librarians." The point of the piece is to demonstrate that librarians are conducting activities that resemble marketing practices in their instructional roles, at that these commonalities ought to encourage librarians to embrace marketing as a familiar friend. This piece expands on a blog post I wrote with the same theme. I hope the article will help to win over reluctant colleagues who may not understand how marketing works in a non-profit context. I welcome your thoughts on this, as always!

My "big move" into my first home is this Saturday, so I'm hoping that I'll have more time to blog once I get settled (there's so much great marketing stuff to write about and so little time!). That is, if I can break away from painting the walls...

Learn to see what's not there for marketing success

I mentioned that I've been doing a bit of research and writing on the topic of differentiation. I also referenced advice from the book Zag that suggests looking for the "white spaces" or underserved/ignored markets. Now I want to share with you an outstanding article I read that identifies 6 ways in which marketers can find those "white spaces" by looking at familiar information in a new light. In doing so, organizations can find competitive advantages and new opportunities to apply their services.

The article is called "Creating New Market Space" by Kim and Mauborgne. The authors examined the marketing strategies of successful firms like Home Depot and Cisco Systems and found 6 common innovative tactics for finding what's not there. I highly recommend grabbing a copy of the article, but here is a brief outline of the main findings:

1. Look across substitute industries - Customers make trade-offs when selecting products and services. By looking across substitute industries and why customers choose option A over option B in certain circumstances, they can find new market space. The authors point to the example set by Home Depot, the company that noticed customers had 2 options for home improvement. They could either hire a contractor or buy the tools to do the job themselves. Home Depot blended these options by giving customers the knowledge, training, and sales expertise to improve their skills. As the authors put it,

"By delivering the decisive advantages of both substitute industries - and eliminating or reducing everything else - Home Depot has transformed enormous latent demand for home improvement into real demand."

2. Look across strategic groups within industries - Strategic groups in an industry as defined in the piece are groups of companies that act on a similar strategy. The authors state that these groups are usually based on price and performance. The idea here is to figure out why customers trade up or down across these groups and, like in the previous tactic, offer a unique mix of their advantages.

3. Look across the chain of buyers - This strategy involves challenging the notion of who the target customer is. To do so, it's important to know who actually uses the service versus who purchases it, and who influences these decisions. The authors state,

"By questioning conventional definitions of who can and should be the target customer, companies can often see fundamentally new ways to create value."

This point reminds me of a recent brainstorming session I led for a regional meeting of my local chapter of ACRL. One savvy participant came up with the idea of reaching out to university staff as an overlooked patron base. I admit I usually forget about this important audience, but it could be a new niche just waiting to be carved out.

4. Look across complementary product and service offerings - This is one area where I think librarians could find a lot of missed opportunities! With this strategy, marketers identify the total solution customers seek by consuming a service. The authors point to a couple of illustrative examples. For instance, they state that finding a babysitter is a hindrance to attending movies in a theater, and so theaters should concern themselves with addressing this need as it affects demand for their service. Similarly, they point to Borders and Barnes & Noble - companies that realized customers want more than just to purchase books. They want a complete book-buying experience.

5. Look across functional or emotional appeal to buyers - In this approach, marketers attempt to turn functional products into emotional ones and vice versa. The authors point to Starbucks as an example of a company that turned a functional product, coffee, into an emotional experience, which in turn stimulated much more demand. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Body Shop stripped away the emotional aspects of its cosmetics such as packaging and advertising, leaving only its functional, all-natural products behind.

6. Looking across time - Fortunately, this tactic doesn't require a crystal ball or any special foresight. It only requires the ability to hone in on significant, clear (observable) trends that are irreversible. Moreover, marketers must be able to envision how the trend in question will change how they will deliver value to their customers tomorrow.

Seeing what's invisible and how you might fill in those gaps is a talent librarians can benefit from as they define and differentiate themselves from the many alternatives patrons have at their disposal. While challenging, this is not an impossible task. As this article demonstrated, there are concrete strategies for finding your unique niche in the marketplace, which will sustain libraries and create real value for patrons as no one else can.

Beyond "telling and selling"

If you want an insightful summary of what modern marketing is about and where it's headed, you have to read this Forbes article about Proctor & Gamble's marketing chief, Jim Stengel, and his approach to marketing, which is all about building relationships with customers. Stengel summarizes the P&G approach this way:

'"We need to think beyond consuming ... and to really directly understand the role and the meaning the brand has in their lives," Stengel told The Associated Press in an interview. "If you're always asking that question, 'How can I be more relevant, how can I have a deeper meaning, how can I build this relationship between brand and consumer to a higher level' your marketing gets better, you innovate.'

In its effort to be more relevant, P&G marketers are immersing themselves in customers' day-to-day lives to find out where they fit and what people really need. Their on-the-ground investigations yielded amazing insights into women's lives, for example, and inspired innovations like decorative tissue boxes, Tide "To Go" stain removal sticks, and cleaning wipes that dispense like tissues. They even found that bunco's renewed popularity among women offered some unique sponsorship opportunities.

In modern marketing, the name of the game is dialogue, and to engage in conversations with customers, you have to be able to speak their language by understanding who they are beyond the surface level - a lesson P&G learned and that librarians should act on as well.

The art of conversation is a marketing competency

There's a must-read article at BusinessWeek called, It's the Conversation Economy, Stupid. In it, author David Armano of the popular blog Logic+Emotion discusses how marketers must now become conversation architects to be effective in today's economy. It's one of those pieces that should make us rethink how we do our jobs. I wrote about it on KnowThis, so I won't repeat the summary here, but I would encourage you think about one of Armano's main points:

"Conversation architects move marketing beyond the idea of one-way messaging. Traditional marketing efforts were founded on this tried-and-true format and are still prevalent within the industry. Consider the example of a typical creative brief template, which usually says something like, "What are we trying to communicate?" Can you see the old-world residue in the word "communicate"? It lacks the dimensions of experiencing something and having an ongoing two-way dialogue. "What are we trying to communicate?" implies a one-way conversation. Maybe we should ask ourselves: "How can we facilitate?"'

I can't think of a better charge for librarians who are in the business of helping people succeed. In this way of thinking, we allow patrons' goals to become our goals, rather than letting our idea of what we want to accomplish dictate how patrons should interact with us. Makes sense to me.

Playing catch-up with MarketingProfs

MarketingProfs consistently provides some of the best and most practical how-to marketing articles out there. Unfortunately, I've been less consistent in passing along the highlights to you. The following are the MarketingProfs articles I recommend putting on your to-read list:

Marketing via Stories: The Selling Power of Narrative in a Conceptual Age
The author emphasize the importance of story telling to stand out from other marketing communications. She notes that stories provide context, common ground, brand intersections, increased relevance, and future chapters. Interestingly, she advises that marketers look for stories before they need customers' attention. I would have liked to hear more about this...

Twelve Tips for Conducting Effective Surveys
There's nothing earth-shattering here, but those of you who are new to survey methods will find this brief checklist useful.

Starbucks at the Crossroads: Disruption Junction
Insightful summary of how and why Starbucks became derailed from its core values. The author discusses disruption and how SBUX left itself vulnerable to the next disruptive innovation. It's a cautionary tale of what can happen when an organization loses its focus. (Note: Paul at Idea Sandbox has been writing great posts that suggest solutions to SBUX's problems).

Two Ways to Engage Prospects Online
Read this! And also read the LifeHack article it mentions to learn more about how to use the right social media for the right jobs - it's definitely an article to save!

How to Market on YouTube
Many librarians are dipping into the YouTube waters, and this article features lots of examples that are a great source of ideas on how to get started, even with a modest budget.

Eight Ideas for Revitalizing Your Blog
Sound advice.

Segmentation in a Web 2.0 World - And Beyond
Fascinating! The author argues in favor of more refined and detailed segmentation given today's social technology stating, "Giving a user control to tell you what matters to them will be the key in the future. Over the next 10 years, this will be the key source of marketing power-getting to the point where we can derive ways and means to let the customer tells us who they are, what matters to them, what features they want, what things they need solved, and how we can best be of service."

Creativity at Work: Why It's Important and What it Takes
Creativity is a crucial competency of the librarian-marketer. This article is a good introduction to what it's all about.

I hope this summary helps you keep up with the excellent writings from MarketingProfs by highlighting the stuff that's most useful to librarians. I'll keep pointing them out for your convenience in my Shared Items.

A marketing metrics primer

Since I'll continue to address marketing metrics here on LM, it's important to have an understanding of when and how to use metrics, generally speaking. To that end, there is a concise summary of the characteristics of helpful metrics in the MarketingProfs article, Five Fundamentals for Useful Marketing Metrics (free registration required). The author argues that metrics should focus on these 5 areas:

1. Essential metrics criteria
2. Customer-acquisition metrics
3. Product "wow" metrics
4. Customer-retention metrics
5. Strategic accountability

It's important (and a bit of a relief!) to acknowledge that you can't and shouldn't measure everything. We need to be selective about what we measure in the context of our goals and go from there. This article helps focus metrics on only the most significant aspects of our work. We should keep this in mind as we continue discussing marketing metrics. Happy measuring!

Mobile marketing grab bag

For many reasons I won't bore you with, I'm still working on my series on mobile marketing. In part, this is due to the ever-changing nature of the medium. Everyday, there seems to be some new development to consider, which means I change my views on this topic often. In preparation for the series, I'm presenting some of the recent news on mobile marketing, and I encourage you to take a look at the articles that interest you. These lay a pretty good foundation, which I'll build on in the series:

• Mobile Marketing: Back to the Basics, ClickZ
  A good, brief description of what mobile marketing is.


• Mobile Marketing: A Balancing Act, DestinationCRM

  "A new report finds that as advertisers' interest in mobile marketing increases, carriers must find a way to increase mobile advertising while keeping customer trust."

• On Advertising: Mobile phones are new frontier in advertising, International Herald Tribune
  

  "Now, with the next iteration of the Internet, the mobile Web, spreading around the world, publishers and other content providers are trying to keep up, lest they get in late on another advertising bonanza."

  For more on mobile advertising, see Mobile ads: The next Internet gold rush?, InfoWorld


• Social Networking the Mobile Way, E-Commerce Times

  "The real momentum and industry hype didn't start building until mid-2006. It was around that time that MySpace, a unit of News Corp., launched a mobile portal to its gigantic online community through Helio, a wireless service geared toward a younger crowd that's willing to spend more than the typical cell user."

  You may also want to look at any of the articles in E-Commerce's M-Commerce section.

I have some evolving ideas about what libraries can do with this medium, but the bottom line is that we need to pay attention to the mobile world and find our place in it. Hopefully, the upcoming series help spark some discussion on possible approaches.

Customers and customer service

Sybil of the Quality Service Marketin blog writes about her take on a Maritz white paper called "Delight or Defection: The Pivotal Role of People Inside the Customer Experience" (PDF). In it, Maritz argues that companies need a better way of understanding "people issues" to properly motivate people on the front lines, which in turn increases customer retention and differentiates the service. As the executive summary states,

"By putting "people problems" at the strategic forefront, companies can turn customer experience initiatives from frustrating flops into manageable and scalable programs – programs that, if executed correctly, create a major competitive advantage in today’s less differentiated reality."

Sybil will offer more analysis of this approach in a later post, but give the piece a read in the meantime.

To round out your weekend reading, stop by the MarketingProfs Book Club Group Review. (You can learn more about Group Reviews here and the Book Club here). The book of choice this time around is Citizen Marketers. You can join in on the conversation by signing up, or you can just browse through the discussions on social media and related topics. Either way, it's pretty interesting. I have to admit, I didn't get around to reading the book in time to participate in the Book Club, but I do want to give it a try at least once. The next book will announced mid-February. MarketingProfs is being secretive about the title for now, but promise that it will be about branding and innovation (two of my favorite topics!).