This document provides guidance on developing an effective social media presence for libraries. It discusses the importance of strategic planning, including assessing user needs, setting goals and directions, and creating a formal strategic plan. It also covers project management aspects like communication, requirements documentation, scheduling, and maintaining an ongoing assessment process. The overall message is that libraries should take a thoughtful, evidence-based approach to social media through strategic planning and project management.
5. LET’S INTERACT!
Does your library have a plan or strategy for
social media?
a. Yes, we have a formal plan.
b. Yes, we have an informal plan.
c. One person manages all our social media, so
we don’t need a plan.
d. Nope, we don’t have a plan.
6. Why Should I Plan for Social Media?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertcopithorne/1474378048/
12. What Should I Ask?
• Which social media platforms do
you use most often?
• Which do you use for school/
research/ choosing what to
read/etc?
• Which would you consider using for
school/ research/ choosing what to
read/etc?
• Would you connect with the library
on any of your social media
platforms? Which? (Don’t feel shy
about naming some for them.)
• What would motivate you to
connect with the library via social
media? Games? Contests? Current
information? All of the above?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kristiand/3223044657/
13. LET’S INTERACT!
Have you done any innovative assessments at
your library, or have you found a particular
assessment technique very useful? Tell us about
it in the chat area.
21. Parts of a Strategic Plan
• Goal
– Initiative
• Action Item
– Measure
• Accountability
22. GOAL: Engage and inform freshmen of relevant
library services and collections through social media.
• Initiative: Choose social media platforms to
disseminate relevant information to incoming
freshmen.
– Action Item: Create a plan for outreach to freshmen. (List
responsible party, due date)
• Initiative: Engage freshman leaders.
– Action Item: Create a short list of group leaders.
– Action Item: Interview group leaders to determine what
content might be popular and what incentives the library
could provide to encourage interaction.
Measures
24. Communication
http://www.flickr.com/photos/richevenhouse/5027240951/
25. LET’S INTERACT!
• How many of you have a “naysayer” at your
library?
– Yes
– No
– I fail to see how this poll question will have any
relevance to the future of librarianship, since this
question is probably just a fad, and especially
considering how much I’m already being asked to
do every day, how can I ever be expected to
answer this question too?!?!
26. Communication
Communication
http://www.flickr.com/photos/richevenhouse/5027240951/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/richevenhouse/5027240951/
27. Processes
1. Awesome idea!
2. Review and approval of
idea
3. Stakeholders meetings
4. Development & Beta
Testing
5. Production (&
Celebration!)
6. Maintenance Cycle
http://www.flickr.com/photos/21218849@N03/2826529899
28. The Requirements Document (1)
•Document Modification History
•Project Description
•Service Need
•Project Purpose & Scope
•Technical Challenges / Issues
•Timeline
http://www.flickr.com/photos/auntiep/4310267/
30. The Requirements Document (3)
•Communication Plan
•Documentation
•Administrative Documentation
•Technical Documentation
•End-User Documentation
•References and Related Documents
•Example!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/auntiep/4310267/
31. LET’S INTERACT!
• In a few sentences, tell us how your library
processes and tracks requests for new social
media tools/features.
36. Cliff Landis, Georgia State
University
clifflandis@gsu.edu
Sarah Steiner, Georgia
State University
ssteiner@gsu.edu
http://www.flickr.com/photos/darwinbell/2602728681/
Editor's Notes
Any online platform that allows users to link to each other and share content. Social networksSocial news sites like Reddit or DiggWikisVideo and photo sharing sitesBlogging and microbloggingBook sharing sitesCommunity Q&A sitesVirtual worldsPeople from all age groups, all walks of life, all areas of the globe are using these. They have pervaded our every waking moment.
Assessment and communication are the most important parts
Social media initiatives often fade and die because they aren’t planned for. Making a Facebook page isn’t a strategy, and it’s not going to work for 99 out of 100 libraries. By sitting down to consider your plan instead of bumbling around, we can save ourselves time, create a far more compelling product, and ultimately make everyone happier: our selves, our administrators, our patrons. Overplanning can also be death—you want something in the middle. You don’t want to pin down every detail in your initial plan, just set the stage for activies in the coming months or years. Enough strategic direction and project management to keep a project on the radar and moving forward as a priority, without planning to the point where you choke out inspiration and spontaneity.
Pre assess, even if you don’t have time for a scientific study with a representative sampling. Some data are better than no data. Do not make decisions that are based on no data. Use your pre-assessment information to determine what you will do in terms of social media. There is no “one size fits all.”There are a lot of national studies out there that will tell you about national trends, but your population is going to be different. Maybe you’re in a rural area. Maybe you’re in an urban area. Maybe you work only with little kids or only with the elderly. If you don’t ask, you may end up with something that nobody actually wanted. Then it will fail. Assessment is so important because it will help you to know what your users really want. Then, you’re getting your vital library messages out and people will actually look at them.
Assessment can help you to choose a likely target population, or it can help you determine what a pre-set population would want. The important thing to keep in mind, again, is that one size does not fit all. We throw content out with no target audience, and then nobody wants it. Which group will you target? Annual plan: graduate students. Another year, it was undergraduate students. Mommy bloggersSchool teachers
Quick or lengthy—quick is better. Create your list of questions in advance. Get them while they’re captive. Waiting in a line. While they’re getting library instruction. While they’re in a lab. Post it on your website: include a challenge!Determine if you want to target existing library users or non-library users. Get an iPad, walk around with it, give a Zoomerang survey. Give them a sheet of paper. Ask them and record the answers. Give them a candy bar.
Sit down with a group: also with pre-formulated questionsAsk the most important questions first, just in case you don’t get through them all. Anywhere from 4 to 7 people is reasonable for a focus group. These are awesome because you get people giving each other ideas.
Observe how people use the library site. What information are they looking for? What other sites are they visiting? Are they perpetually on Facebook? Are they looking up help videos on YouTube? Are they using Yahoo answers? How can you get involved in their processes?Strive to view these people as a detached observer. You’re an alien. You can ask them to watch either in an open setting, if you’re comfortable with that, or you can take them to a study room or something.
I don’t care if it’s for social media! Any technology, anything. What did you do?
We’ll talk about methods for data interpretationAnd avoidance of cognitive bias: we’re all human, we all have biases
Once you’ve pre-assessed to ensure that you’re giving your patrons what they want, and you carefully reviewed what they’ve said to ensure that you’re on the right track, you can start laying your plan! By this point you’ll already have a lot of ideas, so you’re probably just going to be hammering out details and formalizing everything.
This guide from Columbus Metropolitan Public Library focuses on general strategic planning, but it is just as true for social media planning.How does your social media support your values, purpose, and vision? What will your strategies and outcomes be?
Get definitions of goals, initatives.
Remember, these can’t be too granular. You’re not telling the people how they’re going to accomplish each thing. You’re setting up a plan with concrete goals and deliverables, and assigning someone to take on that task. They can determine how to best meet those goals, as based on the assessment data.
A project is a temporary endeavor with a defined beginning and end (usually time-constrained, and often constrained by funding or deliverables),[1] undertaken to meet unique goals and objectives, typically to bring about beneficial change or added value.Processes & Documents will save your behind.Change management: It’s a matter of building up agreed upon habits. Habit changing for one person is tough, habit changing for a crowd can be insanely tough.
*A communication strategy should be built into both the strategic plan and the project management.*Internal and external communication are both vital.1 Elevator Speech2 Convince the nay-sayers first3 Open houses work great as a way to invite folks to see what you’ve done.4 Again, the key word is balance – strike a balance between communicating everything (where you becoming a clanging gong in the background that no one wants to listen to), and never communicating enough (becoming a bottleneck of information, where projects derail because of lack of information flow).5 If you do technical work, you’ll need to have good hi-tech / low-tech translation skills.
*A communication strategy should be built into both the strategic plan and the project management.*Internal and external communication are both vital.1 Elevator Speech2 Convince the nay-sayers first3 Open houses work great as a way to invite folks to see what you’ve done.4 Again, the key word is balance – strike a balance between communicating everything (where you becoming a clanging gong in the background that no one wants to listen to), and never communicating enough (becoming a bottleneck of information, where projects derail because of lack of information flow).5 If you do technical work, you’ll need to have good hi-tech / low-tech translation skills.
The Technology Project Request processGliffy for making online diagrams for freeApprovers should have a metric in place to rank the projects – this makes it so that the approvers can see how they’re ranking ALL the projects in terms of importance. The stakeholder meetings are VITAL, so that everyone can be kept in the loop, and so that it can be made clear exactly what is needed.
Having one document to talk about prevents miscommunication and hurt feelings. It’s too easy for this stuff to be handled by phone calls, individual emails, and hallway conversations, which end up leaving someone out of the loop.Also, if it’s a controversial project, or one where people have differences of opinion, they can talk about the document, rather than about each other (or each other’s ideas).Document Modification History – when did it change, what changed, and who changed itProject DescriptionService Need – How do we know that this is needed? Has there been any pre-assessment? How are we defining the need? This helps limit the scope.Project Purpose & Scope – What will success for this project look like? What is inside of the scope of this project, and what is outside of the scope of this project?Technical Challenges / Issues – Right off the bat, what are the problems that we’re going to encounter? Is it feasible to complete this Timeline – When does this need to be completed? I always like to double my estimates for time and cost.
RequirementsFunctional Requirements – what do we need it to do?Technical Requirements – what tools do we need to acquire and modify to do what we need it to do?PolicyRequirements – what new rules, procedures and processes will this support? Which ones will need to change as a result of this project?Accessibility Requirements – how can we make sure that this tool is accessible to everyone?Project ConstraintsTime constraints – schedule and production rateCost constraints – Human resources, material resources, budgetScope constraints – Features, performance, quality. Do they want it to do more? It will take more time and resources.
Communication Plan – How are we going to tell people about this? Internal? External?DocumentationAdministrative – How much it costs, when and who made itTechnical Documentation – How it works and how to fix itEnd-User Documentation – How to use itReferences and Related Documents – what other projects does this relate to? How will each impact the other?The other nice thing about the requirements document is that you can show it to administration so they can see the progress.
If you are in charge of managing multiple projects, you need to have an organizational system – the more organized you are, the more simultaneous projects you can manage in a healthy way. I prefer the Getting Things Done system by David Allen.Stay flexible, because things change quickly. The more projects you have going on, the faster things will change.Rely on the tiered priority system – as the Approvers approve projects, they should make it explicit which ones come first.There are lots of articles on how to schedule resources for projects, using calendars, gantt charts, etc.Best practices also include things like having backups, making sure that you have seperate “testing” and “production” versions of all your tools, so you don’t break the live version.Be aware of dependencies – Do you want to install a blog? What if the blog requires Ubuntu Linux? Will that require a new server or virtual machine?Once you go to live production, make sure to celebrate the success! Have a little party, or at the very least pass around some thank-you cards and pieces of chocolate. Hard work and long projects should be recognized!
It would be lovely if the work ended once the product goes live, but that’s when the work transitions to production mode. This is where it transforms from a project into a service.What documents do you need to support the content creation, monitoring of comments, etc?Blog management document/posting checklist?IEAP blog marketing initiative details?
Once the project or work is in place, you have to re-assess its success at regular intervals, and make sure that it still fits into the strategic plan of the institution.You can re-do the assessments you did in the beginning, to determine whether user needs have changed, but you also want to ensure that the programs/services/things that you’ve put in place are hitting the mark. If you have a lot of services that aren’t of high quality or aren’t quite what the patron wanted, then you need to approach them differently. The goal or initiative may not change, but your approach will. That’s why the goals and initiatives are so broad and loose. It allows the project managers to make changes as necessary to keep the projects on track and generally awesome.