Laura Solomon - The Librarians Nitty-Gritty Guide to Content Marketing

Success flows to organizations that inform, not organizations that promote.

Jay Baer, Youtility

Several years ago I was asked to come up with a presentation about how to improve the online presence of a library. The organization wanted me to talk to a group of new library directors, not only about websites, but also about social media work. At first, a lot of disparate things tumbled through my mind: usability, accessibility, metrics, engagement, and all sorts of other buzzwords. Any one of these things would easily rate an hour of discussion, but I needed to narrow it down to something that was meaningful and could be conveyed in a short amount of time. What were the things that really mattered? With only an hour, what needed to be the big takeaway?

I spent some time considering the most common online mistakes Ive seen by libraries. I looked at a lot of library websites and social media accounts. While the number of issues was many, I kept coming back to the idea of finding what all or most of the issues actually had in common. Why did I keep seeing the same mistakes, over and over? Why were so many problems related to how libraries attempt to promote themselves? After a lot of thought, I realized that there was really just one underlying concept that makes anything actually effective online. Without doing this one thing, it wont matter what kind of fancy-schmancy website a library has or how many different things it posts to social media channels.

They needed to get over themselves.

An effective online presence really comes down to not putting ones ego first. That could be the collective ego of the library as an institution, the ego of the director, the ego of the board of trustees, or the ego of that territorial staff member who controls the librarys online content with an iron fist. Its easy to tell, online, when a library is operating from ego or not. Think about the following scenarios and whom they actually aim to please:

+ Social media accounts that only post program and event announcements

+ Event announcements that are only about those at the library, not the community

+ A library blog that gets virtually no engagement (and staff keep writing it, anyway)

+ Social media accounts that sit, inactive, for days, weeks or even months

+ Blog posts full of paragraphs of text and little else

+ Maintaining online content, such as links lists or pathfinders, that metrics show gets few (if any) visits

+ A website full of pages that havent been updated in months or years

+ Online program announcements that tell readers how exciting the program will be, but provide no description of actual benefits to be gained by attending

Ive seen each of these scenarios multiple times (and Im betting you have, also), and the one thing they all have in common is that the library prioritized the needs of itself over those of its users. Many libraries only do whats easy or comfortable for them online. Sometimes there are logistical reasons for this, but mostly there arent, and good planning should have prevented the vast majority of them, anyway.

As soon as any person or entitys ego overrides the needs of the user, the library, as a whole, loses. People will only care about your librarys content if it has some value for them. Content that is completely self-serving or self-promotional is an active turnoff. When libraries, like so many other organizations, are struggling to get their online content seen, its hardly a good idea to continue with strategies that are known to turn people away.

I encourage you to take a long, hard look at what your library does online. Are you really doing it for the online patron, or to please someone/something internally? A library is only effective online when it realizes that the people reading the content matter more than the people creating it.

While the rest of this book is about content marketing and how to do it better, its essential that you first make a cognitive leap. Stop thinking that everything your library does online is purely about promoting itself, and at least begin to understand that you need to have the benefit for the reader in mind first and foremost. Jay Bauer, a digital marketing expert and author, refers to this idea as Youtility:

Youtility is marketing upside down. Instead of marketing thats needed by companies, Youtility is marketing thats wanted by

For many libraries, this idea represents a huge shift in the online marketing paradigm. Social media, in particular, has long represented little beyond a promotional opportunity for libraries, with little understanding that social media was never designed for marketing. (For more about this, see my previous book, The Librarians Nitty-Gritty Guide to Social Media.) Libraries represent an abundance of information, but few if any ever capitalize on that asset to make themselves invaluable, or a Youtility, to their communities.

The fact that libraries have not generally taken advantage of this kind of strategy is somewhat bewildering, considering that they are probably one of the organizations least likely to ever run out of content. This situation is probably due to the perspective that most libraries have about marketing in general: still very much entrenched in the broadcast model of sending promotional messages out to the masses (especially only about events), rather than considering how those messages might actually be useful to the masses.