Cascading through social media
- 1. What’s new for loan? Spydus New Alert Profiles cascading through social media on autopilot to Twitter and beyond!
- 2. The problem Comments like: • All your books are old! • You should buy new DVDs. • Where’s the list of your new stuff?
- 3. How do we promote our new stock? We started with a couple of ideas: • Create a New Books display • Promote Spydus Profiles to customers: We called it Read Alert.
- 4. Spydus New Alert Profiles Just login and fill in the search details here
- 5. And get emails like this
- 6. Online, the most obvious thing was to • Promote the Read Alert customer set up profiles • Provide a PDF with instructions • That was in November 2007
- 7. But we wanted more Instead of asking our customers to set up Read Alert profiles themselves, what if we could do that for them and enable one click access? What if… Read Alert profile emails went public?
- 8. So, we made our emails public, literary We created a blog Set up profiles Got the emails And copied and pasted the emails into Blogger!
- 9. We were already familiar with Blogger • We’ve been blogging with Blogger since August 2006. • It started as a web 2.0 pilot project and it’s still is. • We even run AFL footy tipping competitions on it!
- 10. Where we started: January 2008 Read Alert Live • Set up Spydus profiles for collections • Used existing Read Alert branding • All collections on one blog but posting separately • Combined some collections into one stream, e.g. Kids includes Picture Books, Big Books, Early Readers, Young Children's DVDs
- 11. The experience Difficulties • Poor library website design with most customers accessing us via the OPAC rather than the website homepage, where the link was • Link was hard to find on the homepage • Negative staff view of the website, so reluctant to promote it
- 12. Wording the link We did an experiment. This was our 1st link: • What’s new for loan This was our 2nd link: • New books, CDs and DVDs Key stat: up to 90 visits a month Key stat: up to 150 visits a month
- 13. It was manual but it worked • We were able to copy and paste, clean up and publish each profile email as a blog post in less than a minute • We got the occasional feedback comment (all good) • But then…
- 14. Spydus upgrade! • In October 2008, a Spydus upgrade saw the profile emails become sporadic • We limped on until November, then called it quits
- 15. Under review • We wanted a blog for each collection and collection group • Wanted to make it accessible via social media • We wanted to automate the posting of the Profile emails • We wanted a new library website!
- 16. How to automate? That stumped us , until we discovered that… You can create Blogger blog posts via… email!
- 17. Don’t panic! • Each profile email has a link directly back to the Profile • This works without logging in • But only inside the library • Outside, it doesn’t follow
- 18. The steps to a new what’s new • Create a blog for each collection or collection group • Create a separate membership and profile for each collection and collection group • Give each profile the Blogger email address • Promote to staff • Link from website and Blogalogue • Created the page as a Blogalogue post
- 19. We re-launched in March 2009
- 20. In January 2010 we went even bigger We went live with our new website! • Integrated Spydus within the website • What’s new page now linked under homepage search box • Added canned OPAC searches of new adds
- 22. Linked from every page
- 23. Blog links Canned search links Key stat: between 600 and 800 visits a month
- 24. Canned searches Canned OPAC searches • By collections, e.g. Adult Fiction, Films, Teen • Combine various kids collections into one stream, e.g. Picture Book, Big Book, Early Readers, Young Children's DVDs • For current month and all of previous month
- 25. Access your way Along the way, we have broadened the means of access to include • RSS feeds • email updates • Twitter alerts • Facebook posts • Library toolbar access • and to your mobile gadgetry things
- 26. On autopilot to social media • We take the Feedburner RSS feed into Twitter via Twitterfeed • Twitterfeed aggregates the feeds from all our blogs, including the Blogalogue • We then take our Twitter’s RSS feed into our Facebook page via the Social RSS app and onto our Conduit toolbar
- 27. Sample blog Key stats: 62 RSS feed subs 18 email subs
- 28. There are statistics Key stats: Pageviews September 2010 sourced from Blogger Stats 622 young children’s 592 kids 461 teens 138 talking books 310 graphic novels 392 films 312 adult fiction 267 large print
- 29. And there are statistics Key stats: Pageviews September 2010 sourced from Google Analytics 124 in total
- 30. On Twitter Key stat: 267 followers
- 31. On Facebook Wall and.. Key stat: 121 followers
- 32. FB RSS feed subscription..
- 33. Conduit toolbar Key stat: 65 downloads Also from Conduit: an OPAC search app for browsers Also from Conduit: a library Twitter app for browsers
- 34. It goes something like this Profiles emailed to RSS feed and email subscriptions by blog RSS feeds aggregated and sent to Twitter Twitter’s feed sent on to Social RSS app Twitter app