I had a genuinely fantastic time meeting new friends and discussing social media, libraries, branding, and mobile devices today at Gloucester County Library’s staff day retreat. Melissa Brisbin was kind enough to cover the breakouts on mobile devices, Brian at GCL took on the Facebook breakouts, and I did the breakouts on Pinterest. In between the breakouts, I had the privilege of discussing library branding and social media best practices with the kind, attentive, and patient staffers using the presentation linked below. We did it through Library Link NJ’s onsite presentation program, and I do not think it could have gone better. Special thanks so much to Ralph at GCL for his moderation, Anne at GCL for reaching out, and everyone else at GCL for their attention and care. Here’s the presentation for today’s talk, which discusses Social Media best practice, questions about organizational brand, mobile devices and adoption, the power of emotion in branding, the difference between visual branding and brand proper, and a lot more.
Hi, everyone! Tonight at 7pm at Princeton Public Library, I’ll be explaining the who, what, when, why, where, and how of food blogging. I’ll be talking about best practices, tools, reasoning, methods, and more. Please join us in the chilly technology center at PPL!
Libraries, the original co-working space by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
Libraries, the original co-working space by John LeMasney via lemasney.com
I have recently had some discussions with people considering co-working spaces and thought immediately of how many times I’ve used the library for this purpose. Thanks to Janie Hermann for the idea to make a quick graphic on it. Libraries have community, technology infrastructure, comfort, services, facilities and amenities. If you have a cafe there, extra points. 🙂
Today, I did one of my favorite consulting tasks: library technology assessment. I sat down as part of a team with the administrative and technology staff of a New Jersey library system to help them to find out where they’ve been, where they are, and where they want to go with technology in the next two years. It’s a fun discussion, especially after we get past the point of discovery and move to solutions.
We begin by asking about what it is that they hear is missing or insufficient from patrons. In this particular case, we learned that the public use computer systems needed updates and renewal, the printing and copying system was less than ideal, and that the web site needed to move from one engine to another. Noting those, we moved on to a structured list of discovery items, such as asking about the speed, price, and coverage of wireless access. We learned that the phone systems were sufficient and reliable, but that better methods of communication, such as those found in unified messaging systems and intranets might be a great addition to supplement phones.
We talked a lot about social networking and communication and how to use them more effectively to support and inform stakeholders of new systems, updates, and programming. We talked about internal development and training to support external development and training. We discussed a lot of things, discovered a lot of truths, and began to develop new plans for forward movement. We discovered a lot of points for discussion aligning with 20 points of technology assessment, with many short-term, intermediate, and long-term solutions. I often get a little charge out of explaining how easily the issues at the top of the list of patron feedback and needs are going to be met, how the awareness is the toughest part.
Many libraries have not had this discussion, and some have never had the discussion. Those who have are taking part in the conversation about the ways that libraries are changing, moving from being media distribution points to development centers, community life and work spaces, and collaborative, making, and incubator spaces.
Libraries that are thriving are meeting new and different needs than they were 5 years ago. They are creating comfortable, enabling, rich work spaces for people to grow in the ways that they wish to. People want to meet, develop themselves, organize, and extend themselves, and the best libraries today are helping them. Books and movies are a part of it, but just a part. Decreases in physical media circulation is being countered by an increase in foot traffic, participation in programming, increases in digital circulation, and increases in specialized meeting services, co-working, and knowledge sharing. I wonder what the conversation would be like with your library?
In this quick video (video is now working, sorry for anyone who tried earlier), I give an overview of the reasons why I love Android, and invite viewers to come and see me talk about it at Princeton Public Library on Tuesday, April 9th, 2013 at 7 pm in the Technology Center.
Carnegie library interior, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, 2004 by Rick Dikeman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Tonight, I’m getting the chance to talk to librarians about a topic that I think is incredibly important to discuss, but do not get the opportunity nearly enough: organizational branding.
You might be tempted to think that I’m just talking about visual branding, like the library’s logo, but I’m not. In fact, visual branding can only be truly successful in my opinion after you have done the more difficult work of discovering what you are, what you are trying to represent, and stakeholder perception. The aim of organizational branding efforts is to make these three ideas merge:
We are presenting a brand of some kind now (active or passive, intended or unintended) that we hope creates a positive, accurate perception by our stakeholders.
We have stakeholders that perceive our brand in some way, and we must discover what that perception is, even if it is not positive or correct.
We can do actions, enforce policies, and check stakeholder perceptions to align our brand with our intended perceptions, the very intent of branding.
We are doing these things to underline and reinforce what we are, and our patrons and other stakeholders understand and agree.
Brand assessment
The first part is to find out how you wish to be perceived. In other words, your brand is your function, your vision, your mission, your actions, your culture, and your perception. Do you know what these things are for your organization? What is your function? If you are a public library, is your function simply to get books and other media into the hands of patrons? Or is it to extend the education, abilities, and preparedness of humans getting ready to face the world? There is a chasm between these two ideas. What is the vision of your organization? How does your organization see the world? For example, the world might be dystopian, a cold and barren place in which everyone is watched and tracked, or the world might be an experiential delight, in which every interaction in the world is an opportunity for growth, learning, and extension. Perhaps most interestingly, what is the culture of your organization? What are the sensory cues that your space, language, and actions represent? What kind of art do you have on the walls? What color is on the walls? What scents greet you when you walk in? What kind of programming are you offering? What resources are available to patrons? How do staff react to interruptions? What frustrates your patrons? What do those things say about who you are, versus who you are trying to be? You can find out what you want your brand to be, and what it is now, and close that gap.
Stakeholder research
After you have discovered what it is that you are trying to be, it’s important to discover how you are being perceived. If your mission, vision, and culture are either not being perceived or interpreted in the ways that you expect, then the rest of your efforts will be that much more difficult. Through observation, interview, survey and other research methods, you can get a clear idea of how your efforts are being interpreted by staff, administrators, children patrons, adult patrons, and so on. You can find out how you are being perceived, and how you would prefer to be perceived, and close that gap.
Rebranding effort
Finally, you have to assess the gap between your efforts, your branding goals, and the perception of your brand. Once you have a clear idea of how you want to be perceived, and how you are being perceived, you can make changes in visuals, culture, policy, and action that underline, reinforce, and support that brand until your research shows that your intended brand is matching your perceived brand.
If you are interested in getting help for your organization to assess, interpret, and construct the brand that you want for your library or other organization, I would love to sit down with you to have that discussion. I’m lemasney@gmail.com.
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