Taking new add emails from a library catalogue and cascading them through social media to promote the collection and provide multiple access points for customers.
Enhancing Worker Digital Experience: A Hands-on Workshop for Partners
Cascading through social media
1. What’s new for loan?
Spydus New Alert Profiles
cascading through social
media on autopilot
to Twitter and beyond!
2. The problem
Comments like:
• All your books are old!
• You should buy new DVDs.
• Where’s the list of your new stuff?
3. 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.
4. Spydus New Alert Profiles
Just login and fill in the
search details here
6. 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
7. 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?
8. So, we made our emails public,
literary
We created a blog
Set up profiles
Got the emails
And copied and pasted the
emails into Blogger!
9. 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!
10. Where we started: January 2008
Read 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
11. 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
12. 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
13. 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…
14. Spydus upgrade!
• In October 2008,
a Spydus upgrade
saw the profile
emails become
sporadic
• We limped on
until November,
then called it
quits
15. 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!
16. How to automate?
That stumped us ,
until we
discovered that…
You can create
Blogger blog posts
via…
email!
17. 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
18. 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
20. 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
24. 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
25. 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
26. 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
28. There are statistics
Key stats:
Pageviews September 2010
sourced from Blogger Stats
622 young children’s
592 kids
461 teens
138 talking books
310 graphic novels
392 films
312 adult fiction
267 large print
29. And there are statistics
Key stats:
Pageviews September 2010
sourced from Google Analytics
124 in total
33. Conduit toolbar
Key stat:
65 downloads
Also from Conduit: an OPAC search app for browsers
Also from Conduit: a library Twitter app for browsers
34. 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
Twitter
app