Sunday, June 9th                    11:15 am – 1:45 pm     

CONSULTING SECTION SESSION: Consulting: Managing the Expectation, Rebecca Jones, Dysart & Jones

Successful consulting is all about managing the expectations – yours and theirs. Come discuss with Rebecca what you need to know about managing the engagement and benefit from what she has learned in over 20 years of consulting.

Sunday, June 9th                    1:30 pm – 3:00 pm     

Leadership Roles in KM: Grabbing New Opportunities! Ramin Assa Booz, Allen Hamilton, Knowledge Management Manager; Denise Chochrek, Frito Lay, Senior Knowledge Analyst; Jane Dysart, Dysart & Jones; Deborah Keller, Department of Homeland Security; Nancy Lewis, DuPont

As David Weinberger points out in his new book, Too Big to Know, organizations today need to recognize the power of difference (fruitful disagreement), public learning (leaving tracks for others to follow & conversations to engage in), filtering information on the way and out (taxonomies and finding places for inclusion while embracing messiness) and opening a window so that the expert really is in the room. Our speakers discuss new opportunities for using our skills in different and exciting ways.

Sunday, June 9th                    3:30 pm – 5 pm    

SPOTLIGHT SESSION: The Experts Are In! – One-Off Career Advice, Stephen Abram, Gale Cengage;  David Cappoli, UCLA School of Law; Anne Caputo, Anne Caputo Consulting; Ann Cullen,  Emory University;  Susan DiMattia; Jane Dysart, Dysart & Jones; Bill Fisher, San Jose State;  Richard Hulser, Natural History Museum Los Angeles County; Deborah Hunt, Information Edge; Jill Hurst-Wahl, Syracuse University;  Juanita Richardson Dysart & Jones Associates; Thomas Rink, Northeastern State University; Ethel Salonen, The MITRE Corporation; Donna Scheeder, Library Of Congress;  Jan Sykes, Info Mgmt Svcs Inc; Rebecca Vargha Univ. of North Carolina School of Library and Information Science; Ulla de Stricker, de Stricker Associates

Do you have a vexing workplace issue and are not sure where to turn?  Are you facing a career decision and would like some advice from senior SLA members who have “been there?” Using a speed dating format, you will have the opportunity to run your challenge past some of SLA’s most knowledgeable and experienced members as they act as a sounding board and give you their take on your situation. This is not resume review or assistance with a job search, but rather a chance to pose that question you were afraid to ask and get an answer from some of the most seasoned professionals in our industry. 

Monday, June 10th                 8:00 am – 9:30 am     

BUSINESS MEETING: Leadership and Management Division Business Meeting and Breakfast

Amy Affelt, Compass Lexecon, Director of Database Research

Join division chair Amy Affelt and the LMD board for a review of the events of the past year and a look at the future. The Karen J. Switt Award will be presented.

 Monday, June 10th                 8:00 am – 9:30 am     

CONTENT BUYERS SECTION SESSION: Content Buying Hot Topics for 2013, Robin Neidorf, FreePint Director of Research; Bill Noorlander, BST America

The session has 3 parts – panelist presentation, attendee ‘round table’ discussion, Q&A * The two panelists will provide an overview of the Content Buying issues and challenges for 2013; * Attendees will have the opportunity to discuss their own challenges, issues and possible solutions on dealing with the challenges of content buying in 2013

Monday, June 10th                 10:00 am – 11:30 am

Leadership: A Commanding Officer’s Viewpoint, Winton Smith Captain, United States Navy

Come hear the Commanding Officer of Naval Base San Diego, Captain Winton Smith, talk about his leadership experiences and how his lessons-learned and insights can benefit information professionals. Welcome Aboard!

Co-Sponsored with the Military Division

Monday, June 10th                 10:00 am – 11:30 am

SPOTLIGHT SESSION: Organizing Knowledge, Patrick Lambe, Straits Knowledge

Internationally known, Founder, Straits Knowledge, and Author, Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness, shares insights on the roles that taxonomies can play in knowledge and information management. Patrick looks at a variety of ways in which taxonomies can underpin other important knowledge management applications, such as content management systems, records management systems, search, data warehouses, etc.

Monday, June 10th                 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm     

MARKETING SECTION SESSION:You Built It. They Didn’t Come. Now What? Communications for Managing Change, Joleen Schultz Joleen, Schultz & Associates

Think about it. We ask people to modify how they request our services. We launch new web site interfaces. We replace familiar databases with other resources. We introduce new services. We enhance our abilities to add insights to our research. Information and knowledge services are either initiating change themselves, or they are being changed by external forces. And you’re at the epicenter. You’ve embraced the changes but how do you get everyone else on board? Change management communications calls for understanding how people change and how communications can affect change. Join us for lunch as our speakers discuss how communications are developed to modify habits, perceptions and processes related to changes in information services. Key communications components will be outlined and best practices will be shared.

Monday, June 10th                 8:00 pm – 10:00 pm     

LMD and KMD Open House

Join your SLA colleagues from the Leadership & Management Division and the Knowledge Management Division for a networking reception that will be second to none! Let’s stay classy, San Diego!

Tuesday, June 11th            10:00 am – 12:00 pm     

Disaster Planning for Information Professionals, Tahirih Fusscas; Tim Siftar, Drexel University Libraries; Dan Wilson, University of Virginia

SLA’s members are experts in information sharing environments and structures. They excel in setting up collaborative systems. They are more likely to occupy a neutral role within their organization as an unbiased provider of quality external information. Come learn how you can be indispensable to your organization when disaster happens! It’s no longer “if,” but “when.” Think Hurricane Sandy, the Derecho, and the mid-Atllantic earthquake. Focus will be on lessons learned by affected libraries and information centers as well as guidelines for effective disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. Using social media during and after an incident will also be discussed.

Tuesday, June 11th                       2:00 pm –3:30 pm      

Leading from the Library: How Can I Be a Leader When ________________? Ulla de Stricker,  de Stricker Associates; Gloria Zamora

In this interactive session, a panel of three SLA leaders will offer their practical experience to help you overcome leadership challenges you face in your work.  Attendees will have two minutes to explain their leadership challenge and our panel will have five minutes to respond.  This session will be facilitated and attendees are encouraged to share and participate.  During the last ten minutes attendees will have a chance to identify and share the “golden nuggets” they will takeaway from this session.

Published this year, the Library Marketing Toolkit has been enthusiastically received by librarians and marketers). Bethan spoke to author and LMD member Ned Potter about how he wrote the book, and his top marketing tips.

1) Tell us a bit about how & why you came to write the Library Marketing Toolkit
I was approached by the publisher (Facet Publishing) after myself and Laura Woods had done a fair bit of speaking and writing on marketing libraries and info services outside the echo chamber (see this SLA365 post as an example of what we were on about) – they wanted a very practical text on marketing, to cover all the sectors (academic, public, special, archives) and all the new web tools which have sprung up recently.

For the previous couple of years I’d had the thought that there would only ever be two books I could write: one about marketing libraries, and one about new professionals. Facet said that they’d be publishing both in 2012, and that you’d were already writing that new professionals one, Bethan! So that left one book I could write, ever, and someone was definitely going to be writing that very book that year, and amazingly the publisher had asked me rather than my having to go through the stress of proposing something to them… All in all, then, even though the timing was pretty terrible as my daughter was only a few months old, I felt I had to take the opportunity! It was then or never, so I went for then.

2) What were the best and worst parts of writing the book?
The worst part was fitting it in at all – I was writing it during my own time, with a young family. That was so hard. Also, trying to cover so many subjects in a relatively short amount of space – there were some chapters I felt like I could have written a whole book on just them. In the end the publisher let me get away with submitting something a long way over their normal word-limit, and that was with a huge amount culled in the editing process…

As far as the best parts go, it was the working with people to produce case studies. My dream wish-list of contributors were all able to get involved, meaning that it’s not just me banging on about marketing for 200 pages, but experts in each field telling the reader how they’ve achieved success. There’s New York Public Library talking about Twitter, The National Archive in the UK talking about digitisation; plus contributors like the SLA’s Rebecca Jones, like David Lee King, like the British Library, like Cambridge University. Everyone was generous with their time and they provide real insight into modern marketing in the information environment.

3) You have a companion website that’s showcasing great marketing material. Where do you find this material?
My Twitter network is the main route – you have to love Twitter for ensuring you don’t miss out on the good stuff. It’s also a network from which I found many of the contributors – not just book contributors, but people writing original case studies for the website too. Otherwise it’s the tools you’d expect – RSS feeds, blog-search alerts, information gleaned from presentations and events.

People all over the world feel passionately about certain things and do all they can to keep on top of the latest developments in their fields – the great thing about being part of the information profession is that passion becomes a filtering and sharing system so others can keep ahead of the game too. That’s the aim with the blog, really – and also to document significant library marketing tools and techniques which came about after the date of the book’s publication.

4) You’ve obviously learned a lot about marketing, both in writing the book, and in marketing it! What’s your one key lesson?
I keep changing my mind about this… The one I keep coming back to is to market benefits not features. This is something which library marketers talk about all the time, but it’s still not filtering through nearly enough. People are describing their processes and their content – they should be making it explicit how these things are going to help their users get where they already want to go. Mary Ellen Bates uses the example of databases – the feature is, we subscribe to lots of academic databases on your behalf. The benefit is, we have access to good quality information Google can’t find. The second version makes it immediately apparent how the library is providing a service which will actually make the user’s life a little easier / better / more efficient / richer / whatever it might be.

What I’ve realised is that a lot of people talk about this without actually doing it. I was at an event the other day when we discussed the whole features / benefits thing, and I was mentioning examples of renaming training courses to make them more appealing. The subject of Endnote, the referencing software, came up – someone said ‘we should rename our Endnote course Magic Referencing because it fills your references in for you like magic!’ And we all laughed at this and nodded and agreed it was a good idea, but then I pointed out the key thing here is to actually go and away and DO the renaming! Not just talking about how it’s a good idea within your librarian circle. A course called ‘Magic referencing’ really will get more attendees than one called ‘Referencing using Endnote software’ or whatever. A hundred librarians may discuss what a great idea it is to focus your marketing around benefits rather than features, but it’s the four or five who go away and actually change their approach who will reap the dividends. It’s a quick win, the gains are potentially huge. So DO it! Actually do it.

The other key lesson vying for top spot is the huge importance of marketing strategically – marketing with a plan. One-off promotional efforts rarely have the effect we want them to – it takes a LOT to actually change your users behaviour, so a joined-up approach is not an option; it’s a necessity. Your marketing can’t realistically expect to make people run to your information service every time they see your email or your tweet, but what it CAN expect to do is make your service the first thing your users think of when they need advice, help, good quality information, competitive intelligence or whatever it might be. One-off or generally not-linked-up marketing can work okay, but strategic marketing is so much more successful. It’s worth the time and effort and, unlike the one-off marketing initiatives, you won’t be disappointed with the results…

The dedicated souls who turned out for the Marketing Section breakfast in Chicago were rewarded with a lively and insightful panel discussion from three online marketing experts:

Social Media Marketing guru Melissa Giovagnoli, President of Networlding
Corporate Media Marketing officer Roger Tye, Director of Consumer Engagement at Allstate Insurance Co.
Our own Connie Crosby, Crosby Group Consulting.

The panel discussed how and why to engage your users through social media marketing, answering a mixture of questions from panel chair Barbie Keiser and questionns from the floor about specific marketing issues attendees had encountered. Key points included:

Connie suggesting neutral topics such as food or the weather to help engagement with a new platform, especially an internal platform. If you get people talking on a ‘safe’ topic, they’ll be more inclined to feel comfortable using the platform to talk about other issues. She also reminded us that those who lurk on social media aren’t necessarily the unengaged – they might be interacting in other ways, such as in person or by phone. Roger also suggested using polls to start driving engagement – easy and anonymous, people can feel involved with a single click.

When it comes to training staff on new platforms, Melissa recommends starting by building simple personal relationships. A great way to get people communicating with each other is to set them the ice-breaker task of finding things that they have in common – there will be more than they think! Once they’ve started building that relationship, they can progress to sharing emotional support, information, knowledge, wisdom, referrals, and opportunities.

Roger emphasised the importance of listening before you speak. If you don’t listen to your users, then you’ll never say the right things to them. Spend some time lurking on a platform before you start using it, and decide what your users want to hear and to get out of that platform, and how you’re going to give it to them. Technology will change, so focus on being useful and listening – people before tools.

Connie has provided a helpful list of resources on using social media to promote libraries and librarians.

At the breakfast we also showcased some examples we’d found of great online marketing.

Thanks to all panelists and attendees for a successful and enjoyable session.

As part of the ALA Public Library Association (PLA) Turning the Page 2.0 free library advocacy training course, they’ve released the participant workbook for the ‘Managing Traditional & Social Media for Libraries‘ webinar.

The webinar replay isn’t up on the PLA site yet, but they do have other free webinars, covering topics such as ebooks and leadership.

Registration is closed for the next round of facilitated Turning the Page 2.0, but registration for the third round opens 15 August. Participation is free and open to all.

Doing something cool with traditional or social media? We’d love to hear about it for our virtual Swap-n-Shop!

Forget ‘bacon’ and ‘fail’: the internet’s word of the moment is ‘pin’. The most prominent example of this is image-based bookmarking service Pinterest, which allows users to create visually attractive virtual ‘pinboards’, and has ‘Pin this!’ taking its place next to ‘Like this!’ ‘Tweet this!’ etc on webpages everywhere.

There are some nice examples of libraries using Pinterest to engage and promote. I like Somer’s Library’s ‘What are you reading?‘ board and Marywood University Library’s ‘Library propaganda’ - and am sad that the ‘Law Books are Fun‘ board only has a single post! Can anyone recommend any other unusual or wacky law books for inclusion?

But pinning isn’t just happening in Pinterest. The British Library has recently launched their ‘Pin-a-tale‘ map, which allows users to enter details of a book, play, song etc and ‘pin’ the location of that work. The idea is to capture the works that capture the spirit and feel of particular places in Britain.

Using Pinterest? Or doing something fun with interactive bookmarking or maps? Why not share it with your colleagues by submitting to our virtual Swap-n-Shop!

LMD member and 2011 SLA Europe/LMD ECCA winner Ned Potter has launched the Library Marketing Toolkit website , a companion to the book, due out in July.

Using content from library and non-library sources, the website brings together case studies, tips and resources, to help you market your library – whatever size, whatever sector.

The website will include publishable-standard case studies, presented in interesting and attractive ways – such as this one on the Bodleian Libraries Mobile app. Ned is always looking for more case studies, so if you have one you’d like to contribute, get in touch!

If you’re inspired by Ned to create some funky marketing materials, why not share them with your colleagues by submitting them to our Swap-n-Shop?

Last month saw the announcement of LibraryAware from NoveList. With Nancy Dowd at the head of the project team, LibraryAware can help you ‘create, deliver, and measure your promotional messages’, giving you templates and guidance to help you create professional-looking print and electronic marketing materials.

LibraryAware is due out in mid-2012 – just too late for the May deadline for submissions to our Virtual Swap-n-Shop. Have something you want to show off? Let us know!

With Early Registration for the 2012 annual conference open, we want to remind you to include the LMD Marketing Section breakfast scheduled for Tuesday morning, July 17, at 8AM. In addition to our virtual Swap-n-Shop, we have an exciting panel discussion planned, Using Social Media to Promote Libraries and Librarians. We’ve asked three extraordinary individuals to lead the discussion, building on their successes over the past few years, so that we can benefit from their unique perspectives as:

Social Media Marketing guru Melissa Giovagnoli, President of Networlding

Corporate Media Marketing officer Roger Tye, Director of Consumer Engagement at Allstate Insurance Co.

Our own Connie Crosby, Crosby Group Consulting.

As always, we thank the Advertising and Marketing Division (AMD) as a co-hosting SLA unit, and look forward to having their members participate in a lively discussion.

If you’d like to inspire others by having your marketing materials included in the virtual Swap-N-Shop, please use the online form to let us know that you’d like to contribute. Even if you are only thinking about contributing, please complete a form so that we will know what we might expect, how much material, and what we need to do at the breakfast to make this accessible to our members. It’s your contributions that make the Swap-N-Shop special!

We need final submissions by 1 May 2012.

Northern Kentucky University offer online courses in Library Career Development. This latest on-demand course on Using Cost-Effective Technology in your Library might be of interest to Marketing Section members, or anyone who wants to know more about using free/low-cost technology in their library.  The course outline includes using QR codes, screencasting and movie making, iPad apps, and running online book groups.

The course costs $125, and particpants will earn 1 NKU CEU credit.

See below for a description of the course.

Join Andrea Brooks for an exploration of easy, low-cost or free web and technology tools that can be used to enhance marketing efforts, instructional programming, reference assistance, assessment, and more in your library.  Prezis, screencasting, and QR Codes are only a few examples of the resources that you will learn to use like an expert.  Library-related iPad apps will be surveyed as well!  Ms. Brooks will guide you through straight-forward steps for successful use of each tool and you will have a chance to experiment with applications in your own library.

Don’t miss this content-packed session.

This is an On-Demand Online Continuing Education Workshop; Start and Finish At Your Pace!

Register When You Are Ready.

Start The Workshop Immediately via Your Own Computer.

Work Straight Through the Units, or Come Back to Review Details As Many Times as You Like.

For a complete list of classes or for more information, please visit http://library.nku.edu  and click on Library Career Development in the left-side menu. 

Or via email, contact nkulibraryce@nku.edu

Have you created an iPad app? Have a QR code-based Library Trail that’s leaving your users looking for more? Share them with your peers in our Virtual Swap-n-Shop!

We all know that marketing is an important part of making sure our users get the best possible services – they won’t know about them without it! But it’s not always easy to think of what to say, or how best to get the information across.

Help is at hand! Hubspot have made available a free ebook on ‘A Practical Guide to Killer Marketing Content‘, with tips including how to create useful personas, and using an editorial calendar to make sure you never run out of content.

If this inspires you to create some new content, don’t forget to share it with others by submitting it to our Virtual Swap-N-Shop!