Jill Stover of Library Marketing-Thinking Outside the Book presented on how to adopt a marketing mindset, from the moment you start conceiving of a blog until after it goes live. She had a lot of good information and links; I’m sorry that I didn’t get her link at the end for her slides. I’ll post it if I can get it.

ETA: I found that link to her PPT slides (1Mb file download) in the program

Click through for my notes on Jill’s talk.

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Marketing the Weblog: Jill S. Stover, Virginia Commonwealth University

Target audience

Think about your target audience first. Then product, price, place, and promotion.

Seth Godin book, “All Marketers are Liars”. Godin says that marketing is about spreading ideas, not about sales. He has a blog

Know This: marketing clearinghouse.

Product

What can you bring that is unique?
What are the needs of your target market?

American Marketing Association site.

Segmentation: what subset of your target market is likely to find, read, enjoy your blog?

RSS Feeds at UIUC Library shows great attention to segmentation.

Converting the idea of “profitable” for library blogs: if it turns out that your target segment is very small, it might not be worth your time and effort to try to reach out them in that way.

The blog reflects on your institution. Make the quality of the content and the editing reflect that.

Blogs need to be updated regularly, or people will quit coming back to check in on them.

Consider the tone; a wide range of tones can be appropriate, but don’t let it happen accidentally. Example of a blog for a children’s library that strives to be welcoming with information about the friendly librarian.

Design should reinforce what you are saying, attract attention, reinforce an existing brand.

Price

You are asking your customers to invest their time, not money, but that is still a real investment. Nothing is free.

Place

Use your RSS feed, and figure out “where is the need for your feed?”

Can you find a “place partner” that works with the same target audience? In academe, in course management software.

Explain the rules for people who want to re-syndicate your feed. McMaster.

Examples:

Promotion

Do it last. Ideally it will take care of itself (if you followed the steps above).

Involve your readers. Let them comment, let them post (with some guidelines).

Involve your staff (early! Generate some internal excitement).

VCU Black History Month Blog: specially-designed buttons, customizing the design of the site around your blog. [This kind of special-purpose blog seems like a great idea for collaboration: get a few interested librarians, faculty, students, staff lined up to do a group blog.]

Q. Some libraries’ legal counsel may advise against letting people comment due to liability: if someone posts something offensive are you liable? If you remove a comment are you open to First Amendment challenges?

A. (from Steven Cohen) Don’t ignore those lawyers! On the other hand, if you have a written policy of what kinds of comments are allowed, you should be able to do what you want with comments.