Because it’s true. Like Soylent Green, it’s the individuals within the institution that make it great. A big part of my job is harnessing these online resources to bring that same level of personality online. I’m hoping these slides serve as an crash course in many of the tricks of the trade.

Be sure to click on the links in the presentation for other relevant resources. And please share your strategies for organizational identity management in the comments.

Thanks for the admonishment of “Don’t be an ass, this is NOT spam.” Now I can block it under the Library’s no-profanity rule, rather than the spam rule.

Wink!

And now’s your chance to get one for yourself. I’ve got a pile of these buttons to give away during my trip to the Computers in Libraries conference next week, and they’re free for the biblioblogger taking. Just track me down at the conference, and one is yours while supplies last. It’s a great little conversation piece if you’re trying to draw more attention to your blog.

Can’t make it to CiL? Drop me an email (theanalogdivide at gmail dot com) and I’ll see what I can do for you.

Of course, now comes the hard part: creating a marketing push, and working to translate visibility into people signing up for the service.

We’ve taken a number of steps, including signs on the library plasma screens:

Highlighting the services in our newsletter:

I’ve also held classes, talking up the service on the Library blogs, and I’ve been training staff on ways to “sell” the service to patrons. Later on, we’ll send out a mailing to all Village residents, make a handout to be given away during checkout, and the services will be promoted on the front of the library website.

But I’m not done yet. My goal is 500 signups by the end of June (the grant reporting period). As I believe the “kids” are saying, I need to keep up my “hustle” in order to “make it rain.” I think. If anyone wants to double-check UrbanDictionary for me, please be my guest.

One of the steps I’m thinking about comes in the form of these sweet Moo cards:

Which begs the question: what should I do with them? When I give these cards out, I want to give out a few, so that each person shares them with others, thus contributing to their viral value. I’ve already tweeted about it, posted to the blogs, and sent out a Facebook update to all our fans.

Now it’s time to approach patrons in person, and actually shove these babies into their hot little hands. But I wonder if there other as-yet-overlooked methods that I haven’t seen.

So tell me: what am I missing? Do you have any suggestions?

We’ve had C-SPAN running all day at MPOW. Visitors to the library have at least 5 spaces where they can watch the inauguration festivities. Regardless of your political affiliation, it’s so thrilling to see the public coming together to view the induction of a public official in a public space.  What’s even more telling is how many people actually stopped what they were doing to watch the ceremony.

Even more telling was this shot of our normally-full express Internet stations. Despite the fact that multiple sources existed for watching the swearing-in online, people felt the need to get up and share the moment with others. I will readily cop to feeling a warm fuzzy or two. Hopefully you did the same.

As President Obama’s (I keep saying that in your head over and over) first official speech as head of state intoned, we’ve got a lot of work to do to improve our station, and rebuild our standing with the rest of the world. Watching this little area watch the rest of the world watch our new elected leader gives me the hope it can happen. I can only hope we’re all capable of living up to this responsibility.

Key things to remember if you’re planning a tournament of your own:

• Be ready to invest plenty of time. My esteemed colleague spent a long time getting ready for this. We even played a few rounds of Madden just to know how long games would go, and what pitfalls to expect. (As luck would have it, our practice session occurred just as our HR coordinator was leading an outside group through our offices. We were working, I swear.)
• Have a backup plan (or three.) Not knowing how many people were going to show up was a big concern for me. We wanted to make sure people had adequate time and chances to play, but we also couldn’t have games go on for too long. I knew we were going to have at least 16 people, so I made a few “contingency brackets” just in case we had 20, 24, or 28 people. Since we had 17, we were able to have an initial playoff round to determine the bracket seeding.
• Never underestimate the power of free food. One program evaluation was quite profuse: “Even if you lost early, you still won some pizza.”
• Use as many opportunities to market as you can. Beyond in-house signage, email and print newsletters, and listings on our events calendar, we made a point to reach out to a number of nontraditional venues. About a third of the crowd came because they saw an ad we placed on Facebook. We created an ad targeting people in Skokie and a few surrounding towns who had listed “football” and “madden” as their interests. This got our ad about 17,000 views and a dozen click throughs. The total cost? $3.67. Another family came to the tournament after seeing the event listed on Craigslist. These sources are all out there, and their power can’t be underestimated.
• Don’t forget to have fun! Our program room is wired for sound, so I grabbed the presentation mic and made a nusiance of myself doing play-by-play commentary. It ended up being a natural way to keep an eye on things without feeling like a chaperone at a high school Spring Fling.

The results are most encouraging for the next event (just as soon as we decide what we’re doing.) You can view the final results on the Library blog, and see more photos on our Flickr page.

In tangentially related news, have you seen the image on our front page? Those images are chosen at least a month in advance. Makes me wonder if it’s an omen for the Buzzsaw That Is The Arizona Cardinals.

But one of the parking aisles has a problem, courtesy of the foot-dragging electric company:

(sorry for the lousy image quality from my phone)

Let the public shaming begin. Come on, ComEd. Big orange barrel or no, it’s only a matter of time before someone hits that pole.

But I’ve been working on some other ways to make Twitter useful from an institutional standpoint. As I mentioned in the comments on that Tame the Web piece, I’ve set up a number of widgets to troll the outer rings of Twitterdom to see how my library fits into other people’s lives. Among these tools is Twitter Search.

I’ve got several feeds for my library’s location, as well as several other key sites in the area. This includes the names of several parks, schools, and local businesses. If it’s appropriate, I can respond with appropriate information. Here’s an example of a tweet that popped up on my radar:

Of course, I knew that the Skokie Swift train line restarted its weekend service this summer. Good little reference librarian that I am, I sent out the following response:

And I got this response in return:

Our reference stats go up, the CTA gets an extra customer, and I may have just converted a non-patron into a patron. The library is getting out there, and finding ways to help where they didn’t previously exist. And it’s all thanks to Twitter Search.

We’re hard at work to set up a network of library blogs at MPOW. In our efforts to find natural linkages between our existing web content and the incoming blogs, the blog planners and I thought it might be helpful to come up with a shorthand term to denote what’s coming from the blogs. If you look at our website, you’ll see we make liberal use of the RSS icon, and we’ve found that it helps out considerably.

But there’s no such thing for blogs. Probably the closest thing we have is the Blogger icon, as seen below:

But we’re not running on Blogger, and I’m certian the WordPress/LiveJournal/Movable Type would have something to say about this becoming the standard.

So I put it to you, fair Interwebs: What’s should the blog icon be?

Clearly, there’s a lot to look forward to. And don’t forget to vote! There’s plenty of information out there if you’re still looking for the facts.