Blog Post Week 9

Ms. Purviance's presentation was a basic discussion on the meanings and inherent value of social media in a concerted marketing effort. The presentation discussed the basics of what exactly social media is, and also discussed major usage trends among the mainstream demographic audiences on the internet. She was also able to articulate within the presentation the advantages in engaging a user base through the use of social media, as well as how to measure the success of a social media marketing campaign. Measurement of a campaigns success could be reliably measured via conversion metrics such as the ratio of site views versus online transactions, and several others.

In general, I agree with Ms. Purviance's thoughts on social media; they are indeed effective and needed ways to drive interest in an organizations activities in a way that could potentially lead to a better bottom line. There is no doubt in my mind of this. In the 21st century, it is necessary to use social media to not just talk at your audience, but engage them in a genuine and meaningful way. People need to feel like they're a part of something in order to feel more motivated to actually contribute to your bottom line. As odd as it sounds, it's important to make them feel good about themselves as they spend their time and money on you and your brand.

What I find problematic about the use of social media tools is how to articulate the necessity of such things in a public library environment. Budgets are being tightened all the time, and social media, especially outside of the bay area, is perceived as still being a frivolous online activity. How does one go about explaining to government officials who are looking to cut your budget and look good to a cash-strapped public, why it is important to spend time and resources on things like facebook and twitter. It seems like a difficult perception to fight against in this case.

For marketing purposes, as I have stated in other posts, I do indeed feel that libraries would benefit most from facebook and twitter as a way to engage communities, and also extend library services beyond the reference desk. Doing so could prove to be the future and the key to libraries' survival in the years to come.

Marketing Critique Paper

Binh Tran

Marketing Critique – San Jose Public Library

For the survival and success of an organization, marketing is an integral component, regardless of its mission statement. The ability to advertise its existence, promote its agenda, and increase its value in regards to cultural currency can often prove to be key to the organization increasing its access to actual monetary currency as well. This can be achieved as a result of acquiring new sponsors, fund raising supporters, or even simply increased foot traffic as a result of an extensive marketing outreach campaign. In the non-profit world of public libraries, marketing is equally important, as doing so can increase patronage and thus not only achieve organizational goals, but also highlight specific operational needs and provide to city government officials a tangible need for additional funding.

In this sense, the San Jose Public Library system accomplishes this task with varying degrees of effectiveness. Beyond the use of name brand recognition, newspaper, and television, SJPL, based upon initial survey of its efforts, proves to be fairly effective in the use of the internet to promote its existence and agenda. SJPL's staff has clearly made significant progress in its efforts to use a wide variety of social media technologies to market itself as a community learning organization, with an emphasis on patron services and public participation.

In order to reach its patrons and the general populace of the City of San Jose, the San Jose Public Library has embarked on a fairly extensive online marketing campaign utilizing RSS Feeds, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and online video sites such as Blip. The library has devoted the largest amount of time and resources to marketing via Facebook, Twitter, and RSS Feeds. Both facebook and twitter have been used extensively to promote awareness of public events at SJPL's various library branches, as well as bring specific, but related issues to the attention of the SJPL's online followers. A number of these issues range from possible legislation potentially affecting libraries, to information on city hall meeting dates for budget hearings regarding the library. RSS Feeds have been used to not only bring information to patrons regarding any news about the library, but also information on any and all updates to the specific collections that are of interest. These collection specific RSS Feeds make it possible for patrons to stay abreast of the latest additions to the library's children's or non-fiction collections, for example. Virtually all major library functions have regularly updated RSS feeds to inform the public of anything going on at the library.

In addition to the largely informative marketing provided through the aforementioned Facebook, Twitter, and RSS Feeds, the library also engages in producing content for patron consumption as well. This content largely consists of pictures of events through Flickr, videos on Blip, and also podcasts. The production values of these efforts are largely amateur level, but they do possess a certain degree of personal charm, and are effective in highlighting specific activities and events at the library. The downside of this however is the fact that each of these efforts, largely driven by individual branches, feels a bit too personalized. The content reflects more of an individual library's interests than an overall content policy developed by the library system as a whole. It is difficult to note this as necessarily a negative, however. Despite the overly personal tone of each individual work, it is clear that these pieces of content do reflect the specific communities each library branch serves. While it may seem unprofessional and disjointed, it does also significant value in each branch's mission to serve their community.

Overall, the content and efforts produced by the San Jose Public Library System's online marketing campaign is effective in reaching the communities that are already aware of its existence and participate in its activities, but it may be seen in a more negative light to those that do not. The materials are largely aimed at those who are already active patrons, but do little to reach out to those who do not often go to the library, but may have a reason to want to do so. The overall tone of the library system's marketing makes it come off as friendly, but also somewhat idiosyncratic and even a bit cheesy. Due to the wide variety of content, there is a general lack of a strong brand identity, despite its name recognition.

As a general online brand, its identity is very weak as well; few are aware of the the San Jose Public Library System beyond the confines of the city itself. While this may seem outwardly unimportant, this is critical in the grant writing process. No outside organization is going to give money to a group that is largely unknown outside of its own small corner of the world, so to speak. Certainly at this point, the San Jose Public Library System does not get nearly as much online recognition as the New York Metropolitan System, or the Library of Congress. While those may seem unfair to compare to, it certainly does not mean that the SJPL should not at least try to strive for that kind of notoriety.

In order to achieve a stronger brand, greater efforts must first be made to make the San Jose Public Library's online image stronger and much more professional. An extensive overarching policy regarding content, including media formatting, resolution, and watermarks should be created. While all content should be unique from each other, the “window dressing” as it were should have similar traits, much like a company's standardized letterhead for official materials. In addition, it is recommended that the SJPL should hire a professional graphic designer and web master to reconstruct the system's various online pages (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) Proper graphic design adhering to a standardized aesthetic design is important to convey a strong, professional image that inspires confidence in the brand. Choosing a standardized color scheme, mascot, and logo is also very important in the construction of the library's identity, not only online, but offline.

Works Cited

San Jose Public Library Blip.tv Page - http://blip.tv/san-jose-public-library

San Jose Public Library Facebook Page - http://www.facebook.com/sanjoselibrary 

San Jose Public Library's Podcasts - http://sanjoselibrary.libsyn.com/ 

San Jose Public Library RSS Updates Page - http://www.sjpl.org/updates

San Jose Public Library Twitter Page - https://twitter.com/#!/sanjoselibrary

Week 8 Post

What are some of the possible barriers to internal collaboration in organizations? (Tags = blogpostwk8, blogpostwk8n1)

There are several possible barriers to internal collaboration within the structure of an organization. One of the first, is the general structure of an organization. Some organizations can be very fluid, with resources and personnel being moved around easily to meet the needs of a project, but most organizations tend to be more rigid. Organizations tend to be more compartmentalized, however. Resources tend to be limited to control under specific section heads and managers. The result is that attempts at cross-departmental internal collaboration require a lot of scheduling and agreements among managers. Communication is extremely important in this respect, but also somewhat difficult due to the requirements for organization.

Personal issues are also always a major barrier to internal collaboration as well. Though we ideally hope to have our personnel act in the most professional behavior at all times, sometimes reality sets in and it simply isn't possible. Personal issues and professional rivalries can and sometimes do get in the way of work.

Differing skill levels in various talents, most notably in regards to technology is also a major barrier to internal collaboration as well. The use of tools such as twitter, wikis, and sharepoints can prove to be great ways to share information and expertise. However, ut it can also be very challenging if staff members are not all equally capable in the use of technology, as it is the basic platform for most if not all forms of internal collaboration in the present age.

Blog Week 7

What are some of the weaknesses of tagging for making content more findable? (Tags = blogpostwk7, blogpostwk7n4)


The major weakness behind tagging content for findability is the fact that it is an ad-hoc action; unstructured and off the cuff. Categorization in the traditional sense was created to produce a logical, ordered, and consistent system of organizing and also finding data. Granted, anyone who's studied the history of librarianship knows that cataloging was not originally intended to be used for such things, but it's had hundreds of years to become that, so we'll ignore that part. Ultimately, cataloging is an effective, but somewhat slow means of organizing and retrieving data.

Tagging is fast and easy, but there's not as much thought put behind the work. It's a case of throwing it out there, and then letting the search engine do the rest of the work. That's fine and good in most cases, but when you're trying to build a consistent, professional database for storing materials, this just doesn't work. The more technical issues of aboutness become major issues; especially when you start splitting hairs over the intended meanings behind particular words. Sometimes those aren't universal, and you come up with a big mess in terms of organization.

That's not to say that tagging is bad, but it's important to consider what it's being used for. When tagging is used for personal photos among friends, blog posts (like this one), etc; then it's just fine. Your friends generally know what you mean when you mark something with a tag and they just go with it. But, when you're creating a database collection for a much larger group of people to use, you have to stop assuming everyone knows what you're talking about. Often in my opinion, tagging becomes overloaded with terms to represent its content when all it does is just create more confusion. Want a real life example? Website metatags during the early days of the browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft. Websites become overloaded with tags that often had nothing to do with the content of the page, and there was no rhyme or reason to it all. The result? No one could  find anything. You think search engines are bad now? Be glad you never had to use Hotbot or Alta Vista back in 1995.