Give your patron engagement skills a Swift Kick in the...

well, you know what! An advisor-friend of mine turned me on to this outstanding blog produced by an education company called Swift Kick. The company actually has two blogs, but the one of most interest to us is one called Swift Kick Technology: Increasing Engagement in Education through Technology, Community, Leadership and Training. The content is Web 2.0-centric, and any librarian seeking to engage patrons through online communities and/or technology in general could greatly benefit from reading this blog. Consider some of the most recent posts:

• On Their Terms: A Student's Take On Professionals On Facebook
• Facebook as a Forum of Action
• Announcing Events [in Facebook] Without Clogging The Drain: Recommendations for Student Affairs Professionals

Lest you think that this blog is all Facebook all the time, there are posts on video game learning, personal blogging, and collaborative learning.

These readings will hopefully ignite (or, as in my case, reignite) your enthusiasm for participating in social networking sites for library marketing and relationship-building (which are pretty much the same thing anyway).

New blog of note on social networking and library services

The new blog Friends: Social Networking Sites for Engaged Library Services promises to be a robust source of information on all things Web 2.0-ish. According to the inaugural post, Friends...:

"will include announcements and general news about online social networking sites and services within organizations, with a focus on their use by libraries and librarians. It will also include citations to significant articles, books, presentations, and other publications, and, when available, link to the full-text of these items."

The blog is produced by Gerry McKiernan, Science and Technology Librarian at Iowa State University Library. (Gerry: It would be nice and friendly to have a little more information about who you are made available on the blog. The only identifying info I found was on your post to a listserv). Good luck! It's off to a terrific start and I'm excited to follow it.

Update: Another social networking find from Library Garden here.

It's nice to share

Sharing is not only a good marketing strategy, it's good blogging practice too! I've been adjusting to using Google Reader as my aggregator of choice and I'm loving it. One nice bonus is that the Reader makes it very easy to share what I'm reading with others. Now on my blog you can see what I'm reading on the sidebar, or you can subscribe to the feed. I'm glad to do this because I often read so much that I want to discuss with all of you but I can't always find the time. This way, at least you know I'm thinking about it! Since I'm still getting used to marking things to share it's a fairly short list now, but it'll grow. The real trick is keeping up with it all! Hope it helps.

(By the way, if you're sharing your cool finds through Google Reader, let Library Stuff know about it).

It's here! It's here!

The new collaborative blog project I alluded to last week is now up and running! I'm hopeful it will be a terrific complement to the marketing content on this blog since the topic is design. Designing Better Libraries addresses methods and strategies for developing meaningful user experiences. The opening post sums it up nicely:

"That's what Designing Better Libraries is all about; adapting new ways of thinking and acting that will promote the development and implementation of ideas, strategies and services that will create a better library experience for the users."

You can also learn more about DBL Philosophy here.

I'll be contributing to this blog with colleagues I have loads of respect for, including Steven Bell, Brian Mathews, John Shank, Jeff Trzeciak, and Michael J. Giarlo. For the next week or so, you can expect introductions from all of us, including descriptions of the topic areas we're going to be focusing on.

What does design have to do with marketing? I know I'm preaching to the choir when I say that marketing isn't all just making posters and putting on events. There's a lot of strategy and research that goes into developing meaningful services and coherent experiences for patrons. Design, as we're talking about it, is a methodology for addressing patron needs. For my part, I'm going to be discussing creativity and innovation (and I'm pretty sure marketing will come up too!). I'm extremely excited to be involved in this project because it gives me a chance to explore these topics and identify techniques that will help librarians come up with unique, differentiated services that precisely target patrons' needs and wants, which is what marketers are always shooting for. Other DBL authors will delve into topics like instructional design, technology, and multimedia, to name some.

I hope you'll find it useful and that you'll share your own thoughts on the DBL blog. Of course, I'll still be blogging away here on LM and tying in what I learn about creativity and innovation in the marketing context as well. Enjoy!

In case you noticed

In case you noticed, my posting has been a little more sporadic than usual. That's because I'm working on getting a collaborative blog project off the ground that I think you'll really enjoy. It will be a nice complement to the topics presented in this blog. I hope to be able to tell you more about it early next week. 'Til then, you'll just have to wait in suspense. ;-)

Neat blog find

About.com highlights a MBOW (Marketing Blog of the Week) called CopyBlogger written by a marketer/writer. Here's and excerpt from the blog description: "Good blogging and good copywriting share many of the same attributes — plain spoken words designed to focus on the needs of the reader by using stories, education and a clear demonstration of benefit and value. In an overly-crowded marketplace, good copywriting allows you to catch people’s attention, and smart blogging allows you to capitalize on that attention by building trust, sales and profits." The blog is intended for those who want to beef up their persuasive writing skills for the Web, particularly for blogs. Couldn't we all stand to work out our writing muscles?