Community engagement tools and tips

Learning from the best and the brightest at Internet Librarian Conference!! OMG - David Lee King!!!

FYI: Here's the link to a vast majority of the conference presentations available for download... www.infotoday.com/il2013/presentations.asp  Username/Password: IL2013

Also follow tons of tweets and links to many other presentations: #il2013 and/or #internetlibrarian

Here's the notes from my pre-conference workshop...More will follow as I obtain free internet access :-)

David Lee King. Digital Services Director, Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library

• Digital media lab
• Social Media focus teams

 

Ruby Leon. University  Nevada-Reno

Discovering types of communities you serve. They can be:

• Mission defined
• job defined
  • Social media
  • Colleagues 
• Task defined
• Happenstance. City energy.  Untapped communities. Economic shifts.  
  • I.E. burning man in Reno. Infusion of artists. Sociology changes, engage outside of job, she went in the community to discover more about the people and synergies around this event.  She started the Burning Inquiry event- lectures
  Get outside your silo. See the webs that exist.  Be observant around town to discover new opportunities for engagement.
  Digital communities- notice where you see businesses and other groups posting social media slogans. That's where you need to make a social media presence to
  Programs lead to engagement opps
  • • Podcamp @ Topeka 
    • Hacker spaces

Effective engagement tips for social media-Have Cohesive plan

Creating business/sponsorship partnerships.  Talk to the development/legal department  regarding things you shouldn't promise in exchange for partnership.

Centralized selection engagement tips. Blogging, ebook of the day

Signs of success and engagement. 

• People seeking you out to partner with

Define your community

GIS studies with market segmention studies

Raising the profile

1. PR campaign 

• Ruby Leon suggested - Create Good themed bumperstickers

Discovering communities activity breakout

• Meetup.com
• Engagement programs--Speed dating with authors,  date a book. Blind date with a book.
• Check out the expert. Didn't work @ KDL.  Don't know why.
• Think about what are the activities/things these people we are trying to connect with are doing.  Program at a laundrymat? 
• Brewery partnership Any pushback from community?  Book and beer pairings you should try this weekend Facebook post
• 20-30s
  • Family gaming
  • Story times/early literacy with their children

Listening techniques

• Follow Social media trends
  • Respond to misinformation
  • Raise awareness of opportunities
  • Listen to Community issues
    • Get outside your silo. See the webs that exist!
  • Social media analytics. How do you find them?  Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, Yelp
    • Think about what are the implications of action-need in the community
      • Make sure someone on staff has an account and monitors traffic. Set up a team to monitor on a daily basis various social media accounts.
      • Twitter advanced search   Search.twitter.com. Topsy.com?
        • Seach for name of library or "books" or other theme words. Or leave keyword blank to see that people are generally posting about. Also in Places field input zipcodes
        • Set up a daily paper in twitter
      • Socialmention.com. Search engine for social media accounts. Twitter, flickr, youtube. Analytics- sentiment (positive, negative)  top keywords, top users, top hashtags 
      • Hootsuite. Your posts, schedule future posts
      • Alerts.google.com
  • Organizations need to be responsive and encourage entire system to respond to what you hear while listening to your community
    • Complaint-discover it-refer it to the correct person in your organization-respond to it---be responsive to what you hear and act upon it. Develop responses to what you hear or define who needs to respond to what you hear.  
      • Decide a voice for your posts, ie ruby's college has a snarky, funny voice. 
        • How--Ask your marketing people, look at who your audience is and develop voice for that..ie. business casual, conversational! Tumblr, younger 20s, edgy, snark voice?
    • Homeless community
      • How to create an Email account, one on one computer tech
      • Library cards, flexible policies for address requirements.

Building communities

Social  media. Ask your patrons where they want to see you, Ie Facebook, four square, Pinterest, reddit, yelp, Instagram, Twitter, 

How to start a social media team- 

• Create a small 4-5people team per media site. 
• set goals; 
• define your focus-ie for Facebook
  • readers advisory(what's on your bedside table), 
  • current events, 
  • library events; 
• Create a posting schedule- make it a real work requirement -if you don't do it you get hand slapped.  Digital postings are considered an extra branch- David Lee King is the branch director.  
• Hold regular meetings.  
  • Delve into analytics. 
  • Explore what worked and what failed!  Compare posts with photos, vs not; time of day; 
• May need to invest some marketing money.  
  • Facebook ads got them over 6,000 followers in very short amount of time.  spent$2,000, rational-not buying friends but buying good ad space.

Facebook tips and tricks. 

• Mix of fun posts (which character are you going to bed with tonight) and real stuff. Fun stuff gets interaction which ends up having Facebook post more library related stuff on that person's page.  
• If using multiple accounts, ie KDL has page for each branch, our KatieL mascot, and main branch--Make sure to repost other branch stuff.  Multiple pages are a good thing..meet all communities where their needs are.  
• Create a Facebook group account for the employees to plan posting schedule and discussion for how to answer difficult questions.

Ruby Leon's suggestion--If concerned about people creating ads without permission, Hootsuite can have multiple people posting without being able to create ads.  Just change password if you no longer want to allow an employee to post.

Facebook just created a best practices guide for engagement

Google "Best practices Facebook engagement." To find it

 Suggestions for picture composition. Don't post a lot of text.  Have a call to action or next step (people like to respond) ie fill in the blank, "here's pic of new reference desk we are considering-what do you think?" creates focus group engagement.  Use the Facebook scheduling option (little clock icon on bottom left of post) to make sure your posts are spread out and varied.

In person engagement tips and tricks-Ruby

Curiosity committee-get people out of offices and into community

--I'd love to talk to you, would love to go out for coffee and meet with you and talk about what I can do for you.  Liaison needs, figure out your style to engage with people!  Make a goal for yourself how often you meet/engage with your community/s.  Engage with think tanks groups within your community too.  Learn how to become a liaison - Listen and prod, figure out how to move groups along.  Research data support.  Facilitate meetups of your communities.  Have your think tank groups create user guides/tutorials for digital materials.  

Group activities.  Pick a community group..Id group, how discover them where they are, listening, create an action plan

Davidleeking.com

Measurement tools for engagement

• Facebook insights -export data button on insights page shows unfollows per day and more extra stuff.  Look at this with your team to decide best practices for posts.

Best practice recommendation...Post once a day at least

• Bit.ly used for links because it keeps statistics. How many people actually clicked on your Facebook/twitter post
• Hootsuite uses owly to provide statistics
• Twitter ads. Twitter activity mentions, follows, recent tweets. Click analytics button for interests, location, gender of your followers
• YouTube has analytics too

Thanks for the retweet discussion...King belives it helps with engagement

Urbana library fiasco mention. Board of trustees is getting feedback from engaged social community to try and heal from it.  Telluride library also recently had problem.  Damage control - public healing...admit hey guys we goofed..after talking to your lawyers!

Blogs- not vibrant, but good for more permanent easy to find info in light of difficult to seach social media platforms like Facebook.