Cascading through social media

What’s new for loan?

Spydus New Alert Profilescascading through social

media on autopilotto Twitter and beyond!

The problem

Comments like:• All your books are old!• You should buy new DVDs.• Where’s the list of your new stuff?

How do we promote our new stock?

We started with a couple of ideas:• Create a New Books display• Promote Spydus Profiles to customers:

We called it Read Alert.

Spydus New Alert ProfilesJust login and fill in the search details here

And get emails like this

Online, the most obvious thing was to

• Promote the Read Alert customer set up profiles

• Provide a PDF with instructions

• That was in November 2007

But we wanted more

Instead of asking our customers to set up Read Alert profiles themselves, what if we could do that for them and enable

one click access?

What if… Read Alert profile emails went public?

So, we made our emails public,literary

We created a blogSet up profiles Got the emails

And copied and pasted the emails into Blogger!

We were already familiar with Blogger

• We’ve been blogging with Blogger since August 2006.

• It started as a web 2.0 pilot project and it’s still is.

• We even run AFL footy tipping competitions on it!

Where we started: January 2008Read Alert Live

• Set up Spydus profiles for collections

• Used existing Read Alert branding

• All collections on one blog but posting separately

• Combined some collections into one stream, e.g. Kids includes Picture Books, Big Books, Early Readers, Young Children's DVDs

The experience

Difficulties• Poor library website design with most

customers accessing us via the OPAC rather than the website homepage, where the link was

• Link was hard to find on the homepage• Negative staff view of the website, so

reluctant to promote it

Wording the link

We did an experiment.This was our 1st link:• What’s new for loan

This was our 2nd link:• New books, CDs and DVDs

Key stat:up to 90 visits a month

Key stat:up to 150 visits a month

It was manual but it worked

• We were able to copy and paste, clean up and publish each profile email as a blog post in less than a minute

• We got the occasional feedback comment (all good)

• But then…

Spydus upgrade!

• In October 2008, a Spydus upgrade saw the profile emails become sporadic

• We limped on until November, then called it quits

Under review

• We wanted a blog for each collection and collection group

• Wanted to make it accessible via social media• We wanted to automate the posting of the

Profile emails• We wanted a new library website!

How to automate?

That stumped us ,until we

discovered that…

You can create Blogger blog posts

via…

email!

Don’t panic!

• Each profile email has a link directly back to the Profile

• This works without logging in

• But only inside the library• Outside, it doesn’t follow

The steps to a new what’s new

• Create a blog for each collection or collection group

• Create a separate membership and profile for each collection and collection group

• Give each profile the Blogger email address• Promote to staff • Link from website and Blogalogue• Created the page as a Blogalogue post

We re-launched in March 2009

In January 2010 we went even bigger

We went live with our new website!• Integrated Spydus within the website• What’s new page now linked under homepage

search box• Added canned OPAC searches of new adds

Linked from every page

Blog links

Canned search links

Key stat:between 600 and800 visits a month

Canned searches

Canned OPAC searches• By collections, e.g. Adult

Fiction, Films, Teen• Combine various kids

collections into one stream, e.g. Picture Book, Big Book, Early Readers, Young Children's DVDs

• For current month and all of previous month

Access your way

Along the way, we have broadened the means of access to include

• RSS feeds• email updates• Twitter alerts• Facebook posts• Library toolbar access• and to your mobile gadgetry things

On autopilot to social media

• We take the Feedburner RSS feed into Twitter via Twitterfeed

• Twitterfeed aggregates the feeds from all our blogs, including the Blogalogue

• We then take our Twitter’s RSS feed into our Facebook page via the Social RSS app and onto our Conduit toolbar

Sample blogKey stats:62 RSS feed subs18 email subs

There are statisticsKey stats:Pageviews September 2010sourced from Blogger Stats

622 young children’s592 kids461 teens138 talking books310 graphic novels392 films312 adult fiction267 large print

And there are statisticsKey stats:Pageviews September 2010sourced from Google Analytics

124 in total

On TwitterKey stat:267 followers

On Facebook Wall and..

Key stat:121 followers

FB RSS feed subscription..

Conduit toolbar

Key stat:65 downloads

Also from Conduit: an OPAC search app for browsers

Also from Conduit: a library Twitter app for browsers

It goes something like this

Profiles emailed to RSS feed and email subscriptions by

blog RSS feeds aggregated and sent to Twitter

Twitter’s feed sent on to

Social RSS app

Twitterapp