In the last year or so, we at Edinburgh City Libraries have developed our online presence with social media. This article looks at how we've used some of these tools to engage with and learn about online audiences.
First of all, why should a public library service get involved with social media? I think this quote from Ken Chad (http://www.kenchadconsulting.com/), talking about councils in general, is useful:
'The problem for councils though, is that not engaging now represents a far greater risk than engaging. Citizens will still use these networks to talk about you, whether you add your voice to the conversation or not. Citizens will expect their council to engage with them on their terms, via their channels, and to be openly available online.............in fact, it is becoming increasingly clear that if councils don't use these tools, the citizens will do it for them, and bypass the council entirely.'
In other words - go to where the conversations are taking place - and join in. Here's how Edinburgh City Libraries did this.
Setting up alerts
One obvious way to find out what people are saying about you is to use an alert service, such as Google alerts. These days lots of conversations are taking place on Twitter and there are a number of Twitter alert services you can use, including TweetBeep and Twilert, to find out what people are saying about you, if not actually - and this is the important part - to you.
We've set up Twitter alerts to find out what people are saying about Edinburgh City Libraries, and have used this information in several different ways.
First of all, Twitter is useful for answering enquiries, which may not have been directed at us specifically but are about our subjects of expertise such as local history, genealogy and community information. By finding and responding to these enquiries we've showcased our expertise and promoted the library service as a premium information provider.
Secondly, it is good for addressing complaints. People may not make a complaint directly but they might still grumble about an aspect of your service to their friends or followers online. So while you may have been ignorant about someone's dissatisfaction with an aspect of your service, it's possible they've broadcast their gripe for the whole world to see.
Setting up alerts enables you to find dissatisfied users and, more importantly, respond to them. We have found people appreciate that we care about what they think and that we are making an effort to address any concerns that they've got. Even better, they'll pass this on to their friends.
It's not all negative feedback though, our alerts have brought a lot of compliments and positive feedback to our attention as well; comments that we're happy to share (http://twitter.com/TalesOfOneCity/favorites).
Finding audiences
Moving beyond Twitter, many social media sites give you the opportunity to go out and find an audience rather than waiting for them to come to you. A good example of this is our mystery photographs collection which is made up of images of Edinburgh that we have been unable to identify. As well as posting some of these images on our own Flickr page, we came across a Flickr group called Guess Where Edinburgh, made up of hugely knowledgeable locals. We posted some of our mystery photographs on their page and the response has been tremendous - many mysteries have been solved!
Events are another relevant example - as well as advertising events on our own sites we've used sites like Gumtree Edinburgh and youngscotwow to promote events to wider or more targeted audiences who might never have found out about an event otherwise - and of course it's free!
So that's finding an audience but what about analysing them? Sites like Facebook and YouTube offer 'insights' made up of very detailed information on the interests and demographics of your fans and followers. This is incredibly useful in enabling you to tailor your content to suit your audience.
Our Tales of One City blog is hosted on WordPress, and we've used a polling tool to find out more about our audience. Asking a question such as 'are you a member of Edinburgh City Libraries' tells us about who's reading the blog, and again informs decisions about the kind of material we post there.
So who makes up our online audience? As well as library members, local residents, businesses and organisations, I'd like to highlight these three categories:
Edinburgh City Libraries / Council staff: tools such as the blog are as useful as any in keeping staff informed about what's going on. It's also important for staff to be aware of what customers might read online and come in and ask them about.
Librarians: a significant element of our online audience is made up of our professional colleagues. Likewise, we keep a close eye on what other libraries are doing in the world of social media.
Media: another very useful audience is the local media. We've seen stories which we've featured on the blog, Twitter etc picked up by local media outlets. It's well worth developing relationships with prominent local bloggers and journalists, and keeping them in mind when writing for the web; looking for that angle that might grab their attention. Often they'll be able to broadcast your story to a much wider readership.
It's worth pointing out that our online audience is both local and global. This is not a new thing for us - Edinburgh is very much an international city and we're used to dealing with enquiries and visitors from all over the world - but it's the scale of our global online audience that's significant. Social media allow us to interact with professional colleagues and individuals from across the globe in a way we've never been able to before.
The challenges
This is all great but we have faced a number of challenges with social media, the first of which is access for staff. Many organisations limit access to sites such as Facebook, and while this is understandable, it does mean that we've not been able to do as much with these tools and involve as many members of staff as we would like.
Another issue is that of time. There is an expectation with social media that responses will be immediate and sometimes, due to the nature of an enquiry or comment, a full and immediate response is not possible (another challenge is getting colleagues to limit a response to 140 characters for Twitter!).
It's also worth raising the issue of formal reporting procedures. We live in a culture where complaints, suggestions and other interactions with customers must be recorded and dealt with in a standardised way. But what about complaints such as those I mentioned earlier which were not originally addressed to us, and which we'd never have known about if we hadn't set up a Twitter alert? How should these be recorded? And what about other library authorities - is everyone else doing the same? If not, how do we compare our performance with others?
The final challenge I'd like to discuss is that of developing different audiences, which is just as much an opportunity as a challenge.
I mentioned earlier that social media enable you to target specific audiences, and we hope to develop this further by generating online communities such as book groups. Libraries cater for a huge range of different sections across the community (such as children, business people, students and the elderly) and our job must be to find out the best ways of engaging with them.
The 'one stop shop' idea does not really work online; the potential is there for much more tightly targeted communication and we are looking at ways to exploit this for the benefit of individual communities. 'Putting customers first' is one of the core values of the City of Edinburgh Council and its library service is committed to using web 2.0 technologies to put this into practice.
Graham Mainds is part of the Information and Digital Team at Edinburgh City Libraries, with specific responsibility for Web Services. Graham has been with Edinburgh City Libraries for the past ten years.
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