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...

An internal marketing recap and the next chat!

Before I continue my posts on the values of gaming in libraries, I want to relate the feedback I received on our last chat about internal marketing. As you may remember, I asked internal marketing expert Sybil Stershic to review our chat and comment on the issues that sprouted up. She generously did so and now I'd like to share her insights with you.

One participant mentioned that her library is working on a logo redesign, and she was concerned that there was little staff buy-in since the process did not involve their input. My inclination is to encourage staff involvement in the planning stages, but I acknowledge that doing so may put too many cooks in the kitchen and stall projects. In her e-mail to me, Sybil noted that staff input does not necessarily mean getting full staff consensus. Rather, at minimum, staff should be told of the process and rationale for the design. They should also be the first to see it. As Sybil summed up,

Bottom line: employees should be considered an organization’s "first audience."

I thought this was a great tip and one that is simple to implement.

Another concern raised was that there exists an aversion to risk, or "culture of fear" as I put it, that precludes good ideas from being implemented and devalues experimentation as a part of the daily routine. We discussed that some staff feel like it's a waste of time to try out new technologies that don't seem immediately beneficial, for example. Sybil brought up a number of ideas that apply to this problem. First, she noted that internal marketing involves aspects of "attitude management" and "communications management." Attitude management means getting staff to buy into the organization's mission and goals, while communications management means giving staff the information and tools to do their jobs. Sybil pointed out that management needs to address each of these areas and be attentive to staff perceptions and concerns about technologies and other aspects of service. She mentioned a report from the Marketing Science Institute called, "Paradoxes of Technology: Consumer Cognizance, Emotions, and Coping Strategies." The study sounds like a good primer for managers about how technology can be a source of excitement as well as anxiety for their staff. It's easy to overlook the fact that staff perceptions count as much as patrons' perceptions. If they perceive a technology as irrelevant even if it isn't, they won't be inclined to investigate it further, which could ultimately hurt library services. Sybil also suggested that better communication is needed to clarify policies so staff feel comfortable taking some risks.

Finally, Sybil recommended treating staff like any other target market by doing some market research to identify how to best engage them. She states,

As for what helps motivate staff or what's holding them back from learning or moving forward, just ask them. I'm a big believer in internal surveys (whether formal or informal)...ask your staff: What barriers are in the way to [fill-in-the blank here]? And what suggestions do you have to get around these roadblocks? (Of course, the quality of answers will depend on the organization's culture, particularly in how open communications are, how well management listens and responds, etc.)

What a terrific point! Sometimes we forget that the simplest way to solve a problem is to first have a clear understanding of what it is.

My hearty thanks to Sybil for taking the time to share her years of experience in this area!

I'd like to build on some of the topics that came up in the last chat and develop them further in our next one. To that end, let's chat about transforming cultures of fear into cultures of creativity. How can libraries improve their ability to innovate and how can they also support their patrons' own creative pursuits? I'm to conduct the next chat a little bit differently. Instead of having a set time for the chat, I'm going to leave the chat open for an entire day. Just stop by the chat room, leave your comments and suggestions, and the next person can build on your ideas or just leave their own. I envision it as a sort of day-long brainstorming session. (You can also feel free to chat with anyone who happens to be in the room). By the end of the day, I hope to have a monster list of ideas. I'll review them and pull out the themes and most intriguing ideas, which I'll share in a blog post. Sound good? If you're game, here's how it'll work:

• Go to the Library Marketing Exchange on Thursday, August 16th (anytime).


• Introduce yourself and where you work (optional).
  
• Leave your answer to the question, How can libraries improve their ability to innovate and how can they also support their patrons' own creative pursuits? I'm interested in your creativity tips and how you can inspire a creative culture in libraries.
  
• Build on previous responses or leave ideas that are entirely your own. Chat with anyone who may be in the room.


• That's it! I'll summarize the responses in a LM blog post.

I'm hoping this approach will allow more people to participate and be involved in the conversation. I'll be poking in throughout to day to deposit my 2 cents. Hope to find you there!

[By the way, please feel free to suggest a theme for an upcoming chat! I'd love to get your ideas.]

Thanks for the chat! Here's the summary...

Thanks to everyone who turned out for the chat last Tuesday. I thought there was some good discussion and some promising ideas came out of the talk. However, I do understand that the chat room format can get a little unwieldy, and we lost a person or two I really wanted to follow-up with ("Kate:" If you're out there, feel free to get in touch with me to follow-up on the question you had!). I want to summarize what we talked about and point out the major issues we identified when marketing to internal staff.

A major point of discussion was the observation that many staff are reluctant to try new technologies because doing so is seen as waste of time, a source of stress, and a distraction from serving patrons. Participants offered up a number of ideas to get staff into a "play" mode where they can experiment and make some discoveries that may ultimately help patrons. Some of the librarians in the chat room mentioned that they have no funds to pay for incentives, so our ideas focused on other means of motivation. Here are some of the highlights:

• Have a bragging wall
• Sponsor competitions with other libraries
• Get people together to talk about what they learn
• Put people in teams
• Let managers and staff know what the ROI is (Return On Investment) for their time (it's not a waste of time to try new things!)
• Partner with patrons who are familiar with social technologies so that they can teach staff (someone suggested that this could count as volunteer hours)
• Have an "open mic night" where patrons can share their tech knowledge with staff
• Integrate "play" into daily routines

"Kate" and I were the only two academic librarians in the bunch (I think), and she brought up a really good point but left the room before we could get into it more (darn!). She said that in her library, time and the learning curve do hinder experimentation with social technologies, but more of an impediment is the desire to move slowly because no one is sure how to proceed with these trials. There is no policy in place and people are a bit nervous to enter uncharted waters. Kate's observation stands out to me because in the past couple of weeks I've been hearing similar comments in a number of different contexts, which makes me think we have a pervasive problem on our hands when it comes to marketing: a culture of fear. I want to think on this some more and get Sybil's take on this before I write more (I'm being cautious - ha!), but essentially I hear from librarians that they are afraid to move ahead with ideas because they stop themselves by thinking of all the ways things won't work instead of considering their potential and reserving judgment. In part, I think the lack of clear policies or at least parameters can increase uncertainty and therefore fear. This problem is definitely not unique to libraries, but that doesn't make it any less problematic. For internal marketing to work, people need to feel free to fulfill their brand promises and confident that they'll be backed up by higher-ups.

Finally, our conversation didn't stop at tech talk. Some participants talked about branding projects their libraries are working on. The general consensus was that it's important to involve staff during the planning process, and that it could be more difficult to rally staff support when they are simply offered a finished logo they had no say in. One person mentioned that in a former position, the library redesigned its Web page, involving staff in the prototype stages. To top it off, staff were given nifty t-shirts with the Web address, which they donned enthusiastically. I know that having too many cooks in the kitchen has the potential to stall projects, but involvement could be structured so that it's productive. Today, I was just thinking that even something as simple as letting staff vote on one of a few prototype logo designs could give them an investment in the project that would pay off during implementation.

Feel free to read the full transcript of the talk and contact me with questions or other ideas. Also, I'm going to contact my internal marketing guru, Sybil, to get her take on our exchange.

Thanks again for showing up! I'll post a new chat time and topic soon.

Let's chat

How does today 7-8pm EST sound?

Tonight's Library Marketing Exchange chat is all about internal marketing, or, marketing to your most important audience (staff). For some background, see my previous post.

As a special added bonus, Sybil Stershic, THE expert in internal marketing as far as I'm concerned, has graciously offered to respond to any issues and/or questions that come up as a result of the chat, which I'll communicate with her and share her answers in a special post.

Hope you'll be there! (It would just be sad if I were talking to myself...).

Chat room date changed due to reality check

After digging out from two big projects that were due today, I poked my head out and checked in with reality. What did I discover? I realized that I scheduled our LM Exchange chat for tomorrow at 7pm. While this may work for some of you die-hards in the crowd, I figure most of you will be getting ready to enjoy the July 4th holiday. So, I'm moving the chat to next Tuesday 7/10, 7-8pm EST.

The topic this time is going to be internal marketing. Many people forget that getting your marketing plan down on paper is only half the battle. The other half is getting buy-in from the people who matter most: your staff. Doing so is not always an easy feat, to say the least. While the value of library marketing may be self-evident to us, it can be viewed by others as a (gasp!) waste of time. I'd like to discuss ways in which we can do better at making marketing a total organization effort. Here are some ideas I have about possible talking points (please do bring your own):

• Staff recognition programs and other incentives.
• Creating an open, collaborative marketing planning process.
• Innovative approaches to staff training (Sybil Stershic had a terrific post on this topic recently).
  
• Improving communications and information sharing
• Writing internal marketing plans

To get you thinking, take a look at these two short pieces and just imagine different wordings and examples to fit the library environment: The Power of Internal Marketing and Making Internal Marketing Work.

Hope to "see" you next Tuesday in the chat room!

Everything I need to know about marketing I learned from teaching

I was reminded recently that the bad reputation marketing has among librarians is still alive and well. I heard some colleagues talking about confusing library terminology when someone said something to the effect of, "Yeah. That phrase is just a marketing thing anyway." As a marketing cheerleader, I was understandably a little taken aback by this comment. Not because I was surprised, but because I realized just how entrenched the idea of marketing-as-meaningless-fluff still is within library circles. Why on earth would librarians concede that confusing jargon and marketing are synonymous when the whole point of marketing is to make services and communications more understandable?

This incident led me to think about more ways in which we marketing fans can do a better job of convincing our colleagues of its merits. One way to do this is to compare marketing to something more familiar and friendly - teaching. This comparison is not a stretch; it's something I've thought about for some time. Think about it. When preparing for a library instruction session, you engage in a number of actions that roughly mirror marketing activities:

1. Teaching: Set objectives based on the outcomes you want to achieve. Marketing: Ditto.


2. Teaching: Understand your students and the tailor your lesson plan to their unique learning styles, needs, and experience levels. Marketing: Understand your target market and segment them into groups to tailor your offering to them based on their needs. Create a marketing plan to fill those needs.


3. Teaching: Make a complex topic or task easy to understand. Marketing: Make the benefits of a complex product or service easy to understand.


4. Teaching: Encourage student-teacher and student-student interaction for a richer learning experience. Marketing: Encourage marketer-customer and customer-customer interaction for a richer service experience.


5. Teaching: Empower students by giving them the tools to succeed. Marketing: Empower customers by giving them the tools to succeed.

I could go on for pages with even more similarities but that wouldn't make for a good blog post. ;-) It's no coincidence that marketing theory borrows heavily from learning theory. What we're actually doing as we market library services is teaching our patrons about what we have to offer, why it's valuable, and how to take advantage of it.

As I was surfing around, I found a post from the famous Kathy Sierra who addressed the marketing/teaching topic in a post called Marketing should be education, education should be marketing that's well worth reading. Perhaps we can win over reluctant colleagues by drawing out the similarities between things we're already doing, like teaching, and things we should be doing, like marketing.

Davenport Public Library gets an M+ for marketing cooperation

It takes a library to market its services, a fact that's not lost on librarian Angela Campbell, Public Relations & Programming Coordinator at the Davenport (IA) Public Library. Angela formed an interdepartmental marketing team called MarketingPlus (M+ for short). The group meets once a month to brainstorm on PR issues and plan events. On a PR listserv, Angela noted that having representation from many departments and administration helps to keep everyone on the same page and to generate innovative ideas for improvements. I contacted Angela and asked her to describe in greater detail how M+ came to be, how it operates, and what projects it tackles. The following is the description she gave me in full. If you have any questions about this approach, Angela provides her contact information. I'm very grateful to her for taking the time to share her efforts! I hope M+ will spark some further thinking on internal marketing approaches. From Angela:

"Public relations and programming efforts at the Davenport Public Library used to be spread across many departments and people. The Youth Services Department did their thing; Reference did their thing; and Special Collections did their thing. There was no cohesiveness to the Library's publicity and programming efforts. Due to the retirement of a few key staff in 2004, Library administration re-evaluated some of the job descriptions and also began working on building plans for two new neighborhood libraries that would open in 2006 and 2009. The focus of the two new neighborhood libraries would be to offer leisure reading materials, homework help, and excellent programming; with the goal of becoming the neighborhoods' community center. Because of this change in focus, administration decided it was time to centralize PR and programming efforts; thus creating the PR Department in January of 2005.

I had worked in the Reference Department ever since I graduated from graduate school in 1997. I have a MLIS and a BA in Corporate Communication. When the PR/Programming Coordinator position was announced, I was up for the challenge to be a one-person PR machine.

First task – updating all internal and external forms and publications. Before I was hired the Library had an "old school" graphic artist who did excellent work – but did it all by hand. Nothing was digitized. I did a major inventory of all our forms and publications. Each department went through their "department-specific" items and either threw them away; told me to keep them the same; or made notes for updating. I ended up digitizing all of these items by redoing them on Microsoft Publisher; I then pdf'd the items and indexed them in a joint folder on our computer network, so that they were accessible to anyone at any building. Finally, I reprinted everything with our new logo; contact information; and a standardized look, to aid in our branding efforts.

Second task – the MarketingPlus Committee. The internal MarketingPlus Committee (M+) used to lack direction and focus. I was on this committee while working in the Reference Department, and I speak from experience that it was one of those meetings I dreaded going to. They used to be weekly, and last for hours. One of my personal goals in this new position was to reach out to supervisors and have them assign an interested staff person from each department. I wanted committee members who wanted to be on the committee. I thought everyone would want to help – who doesn't want to market the library? I was wrong. It was actually hard to get people to volunteer because of past practice and perception. It took almost two years to create a reliable core committee. We now have representatives from each of the following departments: reference, special collections, youth services, customer services/circulation, administration, branch(es), and public relations. As the PR/Programming Coordinator, I head the committee, which meets the third Thursday of every month at 2:15 p.m. at the Main Library. The consistency of the meetings is important because of the scheduling issues and the diversity of the committee-members. The meetings last no longer than 3:30; and we have a proactive agenda that everyone can contribute to via the computer network. The meeting agenda lists the topic; the person responsible; the projected outcome; and a due date. Even though it is a highly structured meeting, it's also a lot of fun (especially the sharing of treats)! The departmental diversity of the members really adds to the brainstorming sessions, and the communication channels have really opened up. M+ Committee members are encouraged to share their experiences during their department meetings, not only to help create staff buy-in, but to communicate what is going on at both Libraries. For example, at one meeting, a staff person from the Customer Service Department told us that the staff was unhappy about all the handouts laying around on the service desk. Was there any way to combine these into one master handout? From that initial discussion, and after many revisions, the PR Department came up with a monthly 11 x 17 calendar format that would be easy to read, have the same amount of info (if not more!) as the flyers, and become less of a time-commitment to the PR Staff. This never would have happened if it weren't for the M+ meetings. Patrons and staff both benefited from this wonderful idea. Another example of the M+ productivity came during the planning of the Summer Reading Program. Our frontline folks expressed concern over the size of the program's finishing prize - that there was not enough room to keep the prizes behind the Customer Service desks. Because of concern, the Youth Services and PR staff found smaller (and even better!) prizes to offer to our patrons. Again, this would have never happened if it weren't for the M+ Committee, and is a good example of how important it is to communicate with all departments on a regular basis.

Third task – Get some help! It took only a few months for the Library to realize that even though I was doing a great job, I needed some help. Administration decided it was time to hire on another PR professional. My full-time assistant was hired in June of 2005, and we've been a two-person department ever since. Because we are responsible for all media communications, internal communications, graphic arts, most partnerships, special events, and ongoing adult programming, we’ve divided up our tasks by our strengths. My assistant (who has a BA in journalism) works on all written publicity – writing press releases, posting the releases to online community calendars, and compiling the releases onto a monthly calendar we hand out in the Library. She is also responsible for distributing printed items to staff and the public. I am responsible for portraying the programs and events graphically, on posters and handouts. I also edit two bi-monthly newsletters Main Entries (a general Library newsletter); and Booktalking, a bi-monthly readers’ advisory newsletter. I'm also responsible for media relations and placing stories; building partnerships; looking for grant opportunities; and coordinating the rest of the Library's programming efforts, including Reference computer classes, Youth Services programs, Special Collections' programs, and large "all-ages" special events that we do on an annual basis. Finally, when our budget allows for advertising, I look for the best deals in our local media outlets that can get us the most reach and frequency for the least amount of money.

We are never bored! Last year our Library offered more than 300 programs between the two buildings, with more than 15,000 people attending the programs. My goal is to continue getting the word out so our statistics continue to increase. This includes library use statistics, walk-in statistics and programming statistics.

If you have any questions about implementing a PR Department from the ground up, please don't hesitate to email me at: acampbell@davenportlibrary.com; or call at 563-888-3371."

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!).