Below are my notes for a talk I gave at the Innovative User’s Group meeting last week in Chicago. This talk was given as part of the Public Library Luncheon panel. Please keep in mind that these are notes, and that they refer to other things specifically talked about by other panelists and presenters at the conference. Some of the notes refer to answers given by luncheon attendees.
Social Media Engagement Through Listening
Innovative User’s Group Meeting 2012, Public Library Luncheon
Is anyone here involved either directly or indirectly in their library’s Social Media initiatives? Anyone involved in drafting their library’s Social Media Strategy? (You do all have one, right? That’s a talk for another day!)
When discussing library social media initiatives, the usual question is: what do you push out? What kind of content do you create to present to your users?
In my experience, there are five basic answers I usually get to this question:
- Announcements of library events and programs
- Book reviews, new materials, recommendations
- Facts, trivia, etc. with links back to library content
- Articles, interesting topics
- Replies to messages directed at the library account.
But this isn’t the question today.
Today we want to ask: Who do you follow?
Who do you respond to?
The real value of social media is in:
- The conversations they enable.
- The relationships they help us build.
- The ideas they help us as develop as a community.
- The cycle of communication, action, and feedback they can help us sustain.
If the real value of social media lies in the conversations they enable, then our goals must include encouraging interaction and engagement. Which means listening to what people are saying and responding to them… because conversations really don’t start until someone responds.
What is it to start a conversation? We often think it’s about throwing a topic out there, but not really.
Think about real life networking – go to a cocktail party, and the “conversation starter” is usually thought of as the person who walks up to someone and throws out a topic. “Wow, those little root beer floats were terrific!”
But the conversation itself really doesn’t start until someone takes the bait and chimes in with a good response, creating a two-way stream of communication. “Yes, but did you try the tiny beignets?”
So when it comes to social media, how do you as a library make the conversation happen?
Being not only the person throwing out the topic, but the person who responds and really gets a dialog started. The person who chimes in and says, I have an idea on what you just said.
Imagine someone standing in the middle of your library shouting, “I wonder how hard it would be to build a wine cellar in my basement?”
You would (after giving them a very strange look) go over to them and try to give them a suggestion on how to find out this information. That’s what we do we figure out what people are looking for and help them find it.
Believe it or not, there are tons of people from your community doing just this via social media. They are tweeting, sharing, pinning, posting questions you can help them with… even if the questions are not presented directly or even in the form of a question.
(But that’s OK – isn’t that what the Reference Interview is about? Listening to our patrons and figuring out what it is they are really looking for regardless of how the problem is stated?)
Which gets us back to who you are following, who you are listening to, and who you are responding to.
Who can we follow?
Local organizations, businesses, community leaders
How can we facilitate listening? Listening as an act of customer service
Devoting time to listening, using tools wisely
In what ways can we engage with people to make the conversations happen in a way that fits our overall Social Media Strategy and feeds back in a constructive way into the goals and mission of our institution and the profession?
One good, practical thing to think about is how we can use the tools John just alluded to in the Encore Social development to further our efforts in this vein.
When I was listening to Alan’s presentation on this yesterday, my mind was filled with ideas on how our libraries might use these tools to reach out to their patrons.
The idea of libraries creating various public pages to recommend and push content is the immediate and most obvious thought.
But the whole following component potentially gives us another tool we can use to connect and converse with our most active library users.
And the possibilities for integrating this into a Sierra dashboard – or some other staff dashboard interface if you’re not quite up to Sierra yet. I know I’m looking forward to collaborating with my colleagues here in this room and elsewhere to find creative ways to further our goals using these tools.
So, since my time is running very short, I want to leave you with this:
Above all, we are in a customer service profession. And I can’t think of anything more central to good customer service than listening to and responding to the needs of your customer base. Without doing that, businesses, institutions, and entire professions die.
So in implementing a social media strategy, please don’t forget how fundamental listening and responding in a meaningful way can be.
By all means, push out your announcements. Link to your content. Throw out topics for thought and discussion. But don’t forget to listen.
