 I'm sorry, am I waiting on you again? Yes, yes you are. I've just started the recording. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Do not panic. That is a blank screen you're seeing, and it's OK. We'll get to what that is in a second. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online show where we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians across the state and across the country now. We do these sessions live every Wednesday morning at 10 AM central time. And they are recorded, so if you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. You can always watch any of our recordings that we have out there. We are in our fourth year of doing this, so we have quite a few recordings out there. We do all sorts of different things here on the show, presentations, interviews, web tours, anything that we can think of. And we do have commission staff that do presentations for us, and we do have guest speakers as we have this morning. Today with us, and you've already heard him on the line, we have Ben Bizzle, who is from the Craighead County Jonesboro Public Library in Arkansas. Say hello, Ben. Hello. Good morning, everybody. I know you were there. And you may not know who Ben is, but you may know about some of the things you've done if you've seen them, some of the marketing that he's done for their library there. And that's what we're going to talk about today, have him tell us about how that went through. So before we do get started, Ben, I think we do have to come clean with a little something here, and you may get into this more as you talk about what you're doing there and what you've been doing at the library. But you're not a librarian, are you? I am not a librarian. My history is in technology. And I brought that to the table when I came on about four years ago. And as a result of that and some other folks that are involved in the things that we do that aren't librarians as well, I think we wound up with a bit of a different approach to our marketing as well as our technology than some other libraries that hopefully we'll get into later. OK, so how do you want to start here? You seem to have a plan. Yes. You just let me know when you're ready. No, we're good to go. Yeah, we're good. So you've been doing some interesting things. Do you want to start with actually your background? Actually, you said you are in more technology. You're the director of technology. Is your title there? That is correct. I'm the director of technology. I'm trying to find my screen right now. That's not it again. Hello, everyone. There you are. Yes. My name is Ben Vizel. I'm the director of technology of the Craighead County and Jonesboro Public Library in Jones Boogie, Arkansas. So hopefully, I know we've got some folks on here from our library and some other folks from Arkansas as well. So they know me. And yeah, I started out. I guess I've got 20 years or so of experience in technology. 28 years, if you consider when I got my first computer, I started out on a Commodore 64 when I was 12 years old. And at any rate, yes, I was in health care technology for about 10 years, or seven years, I guess. And then I took some time off and worked from home and then went back into technology and came to work at the library about four years ago, four and a half years ago. OK, great. So when you came to the library, how were things going there? They're actually going really, really well. We started four years ago kind of revamping the library. I'll tell you what I'm going to do now, Christa. I'm going to go ahead and pull my slide show up. I kind of, the way we introed here was a little different than what I expected, thus the blue screen. But I'm going to go ahead and get started and we'll kind of intersperse the questions and so forth, if that's OK. Absolutely. Is that good? First thing I want to point out to everyone is that this is not my platform. I apologize in advance for whatever it is that you experience today because webinars are not what I do. I need an audience. I actually feed off the interaction that I get from folks. I do have Joe Box here next to me. He is going to serve as my sticker head here. Wave for a second, Joe. Hi, Joe. He will serve as my live audience so that hopefully I've got something to kind of feed off of to some extent. Beyond that, I'm going to apologize in advance. And I hope that somehow or another I'll manage to learn something today. Today we're going to talk about marketing on the edge, which is just some catchy little title that we've given the approach that we take to marketing because for some reason folks seem to think that our marketing is a bit adventurous relative to some of the things that other libraries are doing. Our marketing approach, I will guarantee you, is better than this PowerPoint, however, because I'm not a PowerPoint kind of guy and Melanie was busy doing her real job. So you get something that resembles government cheese as a PowerPoint presentation. Nonetheless, hopefully the information will be good for you. We can talk about some things later on. Excuse me. I will apologize as well in advance because of the fact that I've got some sign of stuff going on. I'll try my best not to have to clear my throat. I will pick up this bottle of water on occasion just to keep from choking. So we'll do the very best that we can. Let's go ahead and get started. The first thing I want to talk about is what it's like to actually have to market for an institution, any kind of an institution, but specifically for us libraries. There's one type of marketing you can do for a library that's more conventional, things that a lot of folks do that doesn't really put a whole lot of risk involved, save money at your library or get free e-books or whatever the case might be that somebody's trying to promote. Generally, it's a sharing of information. And oftentimes, there's not a lot of creativity that's gone into it. The creativity is the part where people get themselves into trouble sometimes and where those anxieties occur. It's not as easy as some people may think to actually come up with jokes. If I ask you right now to come up with five jokes about biographies, don't give me more than 12 words. They won't fit on the poster we're going to make. You're going to find yourself challenged to do that. And as part of the process, when we work together as a creative team, it's myself, along with Joe Box, our systems administrator, Brandy Hodges, our virtual librarian and PR person. She's phenomenal at outreach. Melanie Dunlap, our graphic designer. She does a wonderful job with the artwork that we have with our marketing. And Valerie Carroll, who is one of our reference librarians, she's actually not a librarian. Her degree is she's got a master's degree in English and was a teacher and came over to work in the library. But at any rate, that makes up our creative team. And collectively, we come up with the things that wind up going on billboards and posters and Facebook covers and so forth in that nature for the library. Most of our creative meetings are rather challenging. It's not easy to come up. We have a lot of fun, don't get me wrong, but it's also a bloodbath at the same time. If we have a necessity to come up with a single poster, then what we'll generally do is each person will have to come in with five ideas on whatever the theme is or the subject matter, and we start whittling away. So we've got 25 ideas often to start with and that's not the beginning because oftentimes it will spawn one idea off of another but the most common phrase in our meetings is, that sucks. There are a lot of dead ideas laying around in the office where we meet. They are maimed and slaughtered on a regular basis and our egos get that way at times too, but that's just the way things work when you're trying to be creative. The thing about it is the great ideas are the slaughterers of good ideas and if you can think in that mentality and keep working at it, fail often and fail harder until you get the right one, then you put yourself in a position to actually have a marketing campaign, have something that's got some substance to it. Don't just settle for the good idea, go for the great one and we try to do that. The challenge is that you don't really know. I mean, when five people sit around in a room together for two hours hammering out ideas, you don't often know whether or not the idea that you wanna wind up settling on is a good idea or if it's a result of exhaustion and just ready to quit, we do our best not to find ourselves in that situation but then at the same time, we have to put something together. At any rate, we're gonna talk about moments of truth and the moments of truth for me, oftentimes when it comes to marketing, is that first roll out to the public when they get their first look at the work you've done because you can get your approval from your director to go forward and you can get the consent of the board to move on something and that's all well and good and those people need their support, have to have their support but the real test is when you put something out there for the public and I don't know how many folks have ever put themselves in a situation where they've been at risk or felt that sense of anxiety. Maybe it's kind of like skydiving for the first time or bungee jumping or whatever but you get those butterflies and you hand sweating and those sorts of things because you really don't know what's gonna happen. Now that was the situation back when we decided to go with these billboards that we were going with on this marketing campaign this year. We got the call, we had gotten our approvals and everything, it was gonna be several weeks before the billboards were ready and we finally got the call that the billboards were ready and that one of them had gone up and Brandy had let me know that it was ready so four of us got in the car together and headed over to take a look at our first billboard. I know that that's breaking presentation protocol to drink water but it's either that coughing you people's ears so. Oh don't be silly, of course you need to drink something, you're talking here. At any rate, yeah so we get this phone call says the billboards ready and which one it is and where it is and so we took off down the highway and had to go back, loop around and come back to take a look at it and it was an anxious moment. Billboards are a lot better than computer screens and this was the first billboard that we had go up and I was standing on the side of the road and I'm looking at spoiler alert Dumbledore dies on page 596 and I go to ask it myself, was this really such a good idea because this isn't like billboards that you're accustomed to seeing. The two on the bottom are more accustomed to what you're, or more in line with what you're accustomed to seeing and. Which makes them very boring and nobody hardly glances at them though. That was the idea, I mean you know, if you're driving down the road that light blue billboard's gonna catch your eye a lot more than any of the rest of them on the road in that area. So that was the goal was to create a marketing campaign that got people's attention, that put billboards up that looked different than any other billboards that were out there and to just get people thinking about the library. Excuse me, I apologize. At any rate, standing on the side of the road looking at spoiler alert, Dumbledore dies on page 596, I'm like, okay, it's out there now, let's see what happens because we felt like we were being funny, but the public was gonna let us know whether or not we were being funny. As it turns out, we've had an unbelievable response to our billboards here locally. People love them, people love this one. This one actually has taken off and gone viral on the internet. It's been seen millions of times if you do a Google search for Harry Potter spoiler billboard, it's like the first four pages or so and so forth then. They've made the front page of Reddit and Imgur and NineGag and a whole bunch of other websites and so we were proud of that. Now, mind you, a lot of the comments that were made about this billboard, we pretty much got crucified for it because it was, oh no, you're spoiling it for the children and so forth, then that's a hand-ranger approach to things, the fact of the matter is we're not stupid, we know what we're doing and we took an assessment of what the impact of the billboards we were putting up would be and in our opinion, we were talking about something that's become part of pop culture. Virtually everyone knows the storyline to Harry Potter, similar to the way they know the storyline to Star Wars and so we took the heat from the internet and then turned around and kind of grand about it and thanked the internet for its attention and moved on. Something awful.com, I don't know if you're familiar with them but a couple of months ago had taken this billboard and done a similar thing where we thought it had gone viral and gone away but it popped back up a couple of weeks ago but something awful created a Photoshop thread out of this billboard where they blanked out what we wrote and put other things in and it was to quite humorous effect. One of them was motivational and you're gonna die alone, nobody ever loved you, not even your mom.org. Oh. As well as a political one. Obama's fall or already gets reelected in 2012. These are not two of the funniest. These are only two of the ones that I would be able to put up during this presentation because the others were profiting. At any rate, if you're not a fan of that language. Yeah, not safe for work. Yeah, they would have not been suitable for a presentation to an audience for the Nebraska Library Commission. I'm trying to, you know, I'm gonna make sure that I don't slip up and say a cuss word during this presentation. So I didn't figure putting one on one of the slides would be appropriate. Though I do encourage everyone to take a look at something awful and you can do a search there for the Harry Potter billboard. You'll find that there's some pretty humorous stuff in that. But anyway, we were flattered. We felt that, you know, if people were looking at our stuff and putting it on the internet and you Google search it and it shows up on four pages as the top hit, you know, and see my millions of people that apparently did something fairly effective. So, you know, that's the way that we look at it. We're proud of the work that we've done. We do have other billboards though. That's the one everybody likes to talk about because it's the one that gives you any level of controversy at all, which is surprising to me and we'll get to that in a second. Other billboards, this one, cheap date, you get dinner, we've got the movie, is, excuse me, this is actually, well, I thought this was a good looking billboard. I like the artwork on it, the guy with the wilted flowers. He kind of looks like the guy that we would want to be talking about or whatever, you know, and this one is kind of, you know, let folks know that we've got movies available to the librarian in a clever way. We're delivering information. What's really neat about this one is the story behind where it's located though. This billboard is in the parking lot of the corn shop locally, and when we first went and looked at this one and I got back to the office and I told Phyllis that it was where it was located in this parking lot. She was living, she had a fit. Phyllis is our director, I'm sorry. She had a fit and you know, I told him I didn't want that billboard. I told him that if that was the one available then just don't feel it. I can't believe this and I slowed her down and stopped her and I'm like, Phyllis, this is perfect, it's great, because regardless of what people's opinion is of the local sex shop, whether they have a positive or negative opinion of it, when they're driving down that road, their eyes automatically gravitate to it and our billboard's sitting right there. So anything that's pulling eyes toward where our billboard is is good as far as I'm concerned. I'm not really, you know, nobody else has drawn the association between that store and our billboard. So, you know, to me that was an opportunity for people to be looking that direction and have a chance to see our billboard. So, you know, I kind of like where it wound up located. A couple of the other billboards that we've got put up are romance novels, Cheaper Than Cats. I think this billboard particularly does a good job of, it's a good example of what we were looking for with regard to the simplicity of the billboard. I don't know what it is, but there's something of an elegance to that billboard and it's appealing. You wanna look at it, you feel compelled to read what it says. The other billboard on here are the worst stacked billboard and that's my Star Wars, not there. But the other billboard the worst stacked is the one that I actually thought we would get some pushback on. This was the billboard I was concerned with. You know, I felt like people would take the opportunity to, you know, well, that's not funny and that's not the way you ought to be acting as a librarian. Don't present yourself that way and so forth, but everybody has really loved that billboard and it got no attention whatsoever as far as beyond locally. It just didn't get any attention. So we got away with that one, the one everybody got upset with, if you call it everybody, I mean, millions of people liked it and the chattering class, a few of them did have comments to the negative, but the one that wound up having controversy to it was the Dumbledore billboard. But at any rate, this is our billboard campaign, we wanted to talk about it first, kind of get it out of the way because that's what everybody kind of got to know us for was these billboards that had been shared at the computers and libraries and I posted on the internet and so forth. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I have a low production budget here at my home office and I was just notified that I ran a little bit long talking about the billboards. So we need to cut. I apologize, I do apologize and Christy if you'll give us a minute. We need to cut to a word from our sponsors. So if you'll hold on, I'll be right back and we're going to go to a word from our sponsors. Okay. The segment has been brought to you by the Cricket County Jonesboro Public Library. Please visit us at www.libraryinjonesbro.org. Like us on Facebook at facebook.com slash ccjpl. Follow us on Twitter at twitter.com slash ccjpl and check out our comedy series on YouTube at youtube.com slash public library one. Oh, and those videos make sure you share them with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. We now return you to In Compass Live. This week's guest, Mr. Ben Fizzle. Very nice. Okay folks, now we would like to go ahead and transition over to our website. I want to go back and tell a little bit of a story on how we got to where we are today because that's what I want to know about, yes. The way we look at our marketing is not the same way that other people look at our marketing. The impression that I get is a lot of people see the marketing that we do and how do they get away with this stuff and what on earth are they thinking and how do you ever convince the board to let you do these sorts of things and so forth. I've got to tell you, it's not like somebody came up with an idea, walked into the board one day and said, hey, we're going to put these billboards up and we're going to use a meme on the internet to promote the library and y'all are going to really like it without building up some capital with those people over the course of years for them to have faith in enough in us to let us do that. So I want to talk to you about that story a little bit. We'll start with the website. And I just looking over here. There we go. This is our website. We are in the process right now. We'll go ahead and smite our full disclosure. Let folks know that we are in the process right now of redesigning our website four years ago or four and a half years ago when Phyllis Burkett, our director was interviewing the director of technology. She asked me, she said Ben, she said, do you have what it takes to take our library to the next level? And I didn't know really what the correct answer to that specific or the honest answer to that question was. Because I didn't have any idea what level a library was on or that there were different levels for libraries at the time of interview, I actually didn't have a library card. I was interviewing for a technology position and a library was the one offering it. But what I did know was the correct answer to that interview question. And the correct answer to that interview question is, yes, I can take this library to the next level. And so that's what we set out to do. Phyllis was looking to re-event a library and we had a website that was designed back in the 90s. It looked like it was designed back in the 90s. I'm not in any way discrediting the work that was done, but it was done by somebody who was not a web designer who was trying to have a web presence for the library and they did the best they could with their knowledge of the way the web worked. But it did have spinning stars on the front page if that gives you any indication as to what we were working with. Yes. On the front page. So. Yes, definitely. Yeah, we didn't have a platform to really work from and we certainly didn't have a digital presence that I was going to hang my hat on. So we started looking at the need to build a new website, but I never looked at it as building a new website for the library. For us, what we were trying to accomplish was to build a digital presence. We were looking at building something that would be the digital equivalent of the library's brick and mortar building and to convert as many resources as we could into a digital format and then try to design a website around that that's appealing to look at. It didn't suck that made it easy for folks to find what they were looking for. So that was kind of our goal and this was the end product. But the thing was that in order to get here, what we had to do was to convince the board that the direction we needed to take as a library was a digital direction that in order for us to remain relevant for our patrons and in order for us to do the things that we were capable of doing, we had to start a process of building a digital environment. And for this one, I like to give little names to the things that we do, the initiatives. And this one we call tearing down the walls of the library. And it also gives the board something to hold onto, something that they can relate to. What are you doing? Well, we're tearing down the walls of the library. It's an easy way to kind of grasp what our goal was. And the website, as you can see, we have a slideshow on it. A lot of library websites have a slideshow. We're a little softer, a little more cartoony than I would design it today. It's one of the reasons we're in the process of evaluating and makeover. But we wanted to make sure that we made it simple enough and easy enough for people to read, appealing a lot of visuals on it for visual people. But at the same time, accessible. One of the goals that we had in designing our website was that we have a three-click rule. Nothing goes on our website that we can't get to within three clicks of the homepage. That way, we don't wind up getting lazy and just burying information off somewhere that becomes useless because it's inaccessible. There are some tricks to doing that. In designing a website, one is the menu bar across the top here. You can do mouseovers to get a lot more menu bar out of your menu bar than you have room on your screen with the drop-downs. And underneath research, you can put a number of things. You're still single-clicking to get to these locations. And it makes it easy for folks to get to where they want to go. Our library search bar, we try to do something a little nice with, we use shadow boxing here. And we use triple-I as our ILS vendor. And so we incorporated the search bar from Encore, which is their, I don't know what you call it. It's their fancy overlay product. We put the search bar from Encore on here. And then we shadow box it. So if you do a search for Mark Twain, we actually shadow box the catalog itself so that we keep people on our homepage and still let them do all their searching and so forth in the catalog. So that was kind of neat. We liked the way that we did that. It was pushing things at first because there wasn't a whole lot of shadow boxing being done three years ago. But now with Facebook doing that with pictures and everything, people have gotten accustomed to be able to click off to the side and get out of their shadow box. So we kind of liked that design. We had a goal of trying to keep people on our site when they were trying to do other things. And this kind of helped do that with our catalog. Some of the ideas weren't so great though. I think I've got the databases over here. We wanted to, again, keep people on our site. We didn't want to open up new tabs or new windows for databases. So we decided the databases into the pages of the website. The problem is you wind up with this clunky ugly thing here on the ones that don't format correctly. So we added this little toggle full screen switch, which allows you to toggle it full screen with still remaining on our site and then the information for your database underneath. This is one of those designs that we wouldn't do again. It's just easier to have folks go to another site, pop down as another tab or something like that. Nonetheless, the point of all this is that we were building a virtual environment and we weren't just putting up a website. There was a lot of thought that went into the way we created, the way people accessed information, the different things that you could do. I mean, we have an information announcements box here, but if you click on hours of operation, it converts over and gives you hours of operation as well. And you can go back to the announcements. For major sections, we put big blocks down here to try to get people to be able to see where they go. On our children's page, we tried to jazz it up a little bit and make it kind of kid-friendly and that sort of a thing, and the little pictures kind of move a little bit when you mouse over them and stuff, those sorts of things. To give you an idea of, you see the Happy Talk now online, the sorts of things that are mindset when we're trying to create digital environments. As an example, we had this Happy Talk program and Happy Talk was a program for children. That had been recorded. This lady had read these books and sung these songs and so forth and recorded it on the cassette. And we had a telephone line that had been donated by the local telephone company for us to use, free of charge, where people could dial in and listen to these Happy Talk stories being played off of this recorder. And one person could call in at the time and it was one story, I think, a week that they were playing and they'd switch it out every week. For me, if you tell me that, I'd be like, okay, that's not ever gonna work. It was hugely popular in our community for years and years and years and years. People loved Happy Talk. Happy Talk was one of the defining features of this library. And so anyway, our children's librarian had come to me and asked me if we could put Happy Talk on CD and still play it because the tapes would wear out and stuff like that. And I told her that maybe we ought to look at putting Happy Talk online. And she asked how we could do it and I said, well, if you'll convert all of the cassettes to CD, I'll convert it to MP3 and we'll put those up in an MP3 player on our website, which is what we did. So now instead of having to listen to, let's go back to our original screen on Happy Talk. Now instead of having to go and listen to one song or one story per week on a telephone system, daycares and preschools and people at home and so forth of that nature, actually have an online Happy Talk where they can go and we've broken into four sections for animal tales, holidays, sing with me and stories to share. And if you click on any one of these playlists, it actually pulls the full playlist up of all of the songs, for instance, that we recorded. I think there's like 120 to 150 Happy Talks that we've got and it's a way of digitizing and creating a digital environment for something that you used to have to get an entirely different way. And so this is what we're trying to build. This is what we were explaining on the board that we wanted to do and this is how we wanted to take the library and they bought into it. They bought into the idea that we needed a digital live, elastic board that really looks at the library as something that is important to them and is important to remain relevant 21st century, that they're willing to take risks in order to do the right thing to have the library have its importance in the community that it should. Anyway, so that was our website and that was the tearing down the walls of our library phase of this project. The second phase was what we called your library everywhere you are and that segment of build was set up around our pocket library, our mobile presence. Now this is the best I could do to represent a telephone. I've kind of sized it down and so forth. So if you'll pretend like this is an Android or an Apple device, then you'll get the idea. But this is our mobile site scaled down to work but it basically looks like on your phone. And we built this site based on the idea what is it that people want to see? You know, why would people pull their phone out and want to engage with a library? What is it? And we started answering those questions as we answered those questions. We started implementing those things. Okay, yes, this will go and this will go and this will go. And we went to our board and explained to them that smartphones and tablets and stuff are gonna be a really big deal. And this was two years ago, two and a half years ago and we put ourselves in a position when we came to our board, we were like, look, smartphones have not taken off in a huge way but they're the future. And this is one of the rare opportunities for libraries to actually be part of something rather than playing catch up on it. I'm sure that all of you can probably relate to the catch up game once things are established, you finally kind of come around toward the end and try to implement it because folks finally were convinced that make decisions, that it was, you know, that internet thing is gonna stick around. At any rate, our mobile site, branch information, take one of the branches and kind of show you how we integrated the features of a mobile phone, our caraway branch, for instance. Your picture, hours, librarians information. Now on a mobile phone, if you tap on her email, you'll actually pull up your email client for your phone and be able to send an email directly to the library. And if you tap on the phone number, it'll be able to call the librarian. And if you tap on the address, you can get directions to the library or get a map and then directions and navigation to the library. So we incorporated functions of the phone to try to make the experience in a mobile environment what was capable on a phone. We can get back to our homepage here. We incorporated our overdrive and our Friegel into the mobile environment. Once Friegel came out with their app, and what we did with that is we actually pointed people, you can't see it on, okay. You have the option of installing Friegel for iTunes or for Apple or for Android. And we pointed to the appropriate app store for downloading the music, depending on what device that you've got and for downloading the app, depending on what device that device that you've got. Epsco's Journal Articles, they have a mobile site and we incorporated that. Storytime schedule, events, our events comes off of our events page on our website and it actually feeds directly into our mobile site. A Facebook connection as well as staff picks, text a question right there from your phone. So if you go to our website, you can actually text library questions and our videos on YouTube that we've done, which we'll get to shortly. Now in the process of designing the mobile stuff and talking to the board about how we wanted to go mobile now that we've had a successful physical presence where people had laptops and Wi-Fi connections or we're at home and that sort of a thing, it was time for them to take their library with them. We wanted to be able to tell the people of Cricket County and Poinsett County that no matter where it is that they are in the world, they have access to their local library and we thought that was a neat thing, that you can always be connected with your people and we thought it was a marketing thing, that that's something we can sell to people is the idea that your library is with you everywhere you go and that was the campaign for it. The slogan that we use was your library everywhere you are and our mobile library, once we added eBooks, we actually added our mobile site before we added eBooks through Overdrive and the mobile site was getting hits and so forth but once we added eBooks, we really had the opportunity to see what mobile could do because our mobile traffic tripled and it's continued to steadily grow since then and it's a result of people using their mobile devices to hit our website and download directly to their mobile devices through our Overdrive service. So I can't stress enough how important it is to have a mobile presence for libraries, it's just time, it was time two years ago and it's definitely time now. I personally prefer websites to apps but to each their own, there are advantages to both and that's a discussion for another time. At any rate, I had mentioned that we did some things other than when we did the mobile site, we also added some other features to our digital presence. I have to figure out which one of those, that's not it. There we go. Here's our Overdrive collection, it looks similar, I'm sure to everybody else's Overdrive collection who has Overdrive, if you don't have Overdrive or some sort of eBook collection, it's probably a good idea to start doing that if you're a public library, it's hugely successful and it's a great service that you can market to your community. We also have FreeGo Music, that was one of the things that we, in this period of time, FreeGo Music is a free download music service, you have to get to keep the MP3s, for our patrons we have a five song, most libraries I understand are doing three week per song limits, excuse me, but nonetheless, it's free music and it's worth the price of the service and marketing value alone in my opinion. When you go to tell them people that they can get free music and you explain to them that it is free and they get to keep it, that creates enthusiasm. People like that, people like free stuff and they're not having to steal the music to get it for nothing and that's kind of a good thing. We encourage that. We also have the Text to Librarian service that we implemented through Google Voice and anytime we do something, this is the actual landing page describing our Text to Librarian and this shows off some of Melanie's web work as well, some of her artwork. This looks very simple but that's intentional. We wanted it this way. We're delivering a message here and the questions here were chosen intentionally. Who sang that song about boats? We wanted to let people know we're gonna dig for you, we're gonna try to find out whatever it is and any question is fine with us. You folks don't try to be funny and text that number with something perverse that wouldn't be appropriate. No, I think we just send all those questions in one giant text. Yeah, there you go, just send all those questions and Valerie's probably working the desk today and she'll beat me up when I get back to the office. Hopefully you should have those in a standard. Here's the answers to the ones we've suggested just in case someone decides to be funny. Really? What we should have done is just added answers there so we could have just foregone those but nonetheless, during this period of time we had also started developing our social media presence. So we were building a digital environment and we were building what we believed to be a successful digital environment. We had a nice website that was accessible that people really was, it was light years ahead of what we had had before. Our numbers were continually increasing. We had launched our mobile website, excuse me, and taking the it, our numbers were coming up on it. It was gaining popularity and all of these things were always in constant contact with our local media as well. We're always letting the newspaper and the local television station know what we're doing. Currently we actually have an opportunity, I think it's once a week that we do, that we part of the morning show on television and Brandy or somebody from the library will go down and talk about some of the services that we offer or one of the programs that's going on or something like that. So we've always been media conscious and media savvy with regard to making sure that we got as much free advertising as we could through our print media and through the television station, radio stations and things like that. Public service announcements, it's not marketing, it's not selling, it's public service announcements and public awareness about the public library. And that's fine, if we sell it that way, get it for free, then we'll do it. And that's what we do. But nonetheless, we started building our social media presence at this time. I had an idea that it'd be neat if we made web videos. And I wanted to, I thought it, because we're trying to do this whole social media thing and I had these aspirations of doing something that went viral and I thought that, at least in library land, maybe it could get some attention and so forth if we did some funny web videos. So I was a fan of the office and I knew that our quality couldn't be all that great because we're amateurs. So I decided that maybe it'd be cool if we did it as a documentary style, sort of like the television show, The Office, where it seems like people are just kind of walking around with cameras in kind of an organic natural environment. And so I'm thinking about this and I tell Phyllis, our director, I'm like, hey, Phyllis, I kind of got this idea. I thought maybe we could make these videos and I think kind of get some traction with it. And it kind of appeals to that 16 to 40 target market we're talking about trying to tap into and everything. This is kind of their thing. And she said, yeah, Ben, and this is one of the things that we have to be careful around our library about. If you have a good idea, you're liable to wind up a situation where it's time to start working on it because that's how we do it. If it's a good idea, let's see what happens. And that's what happened here. Phyllis told me, yeah, that's a great idea. And Genealogy Night's coming up in two weeks. And so make us one for that. Let's see what happens. So that was not quite the timeline I was looking for because I'd never directed anybody. I'd never written a script. I'd never done anything that was proud to make a video and didn't have any equipment. That was, that is very, very... We're allowed to create something. Yes, that is very, very, that is very, very short notice to pull something together like that. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what happens sometimes. But at the same time, how often do you get an opportunity to make a comedy web video at work? So wrote a script, threw a thing together, got some folks that are willing to participate. And we shot our first episode, which was Genealogy Night. And looking back at Genealogy Night, I would not do that video today, but it sure is funny that we did it then. It's the story of how Joe plays the corporate character, but it's the story of how one of the employees sneaks in and spikes the punch for our Genealogy Night lock-in that we have on an annual basis. And some of our older patrons wound up getting drunk and our director makes out with one of the pages. So it was funny, people liked it. And I encourage you folks to watch the series if you hadn't and share with your friends kind of like the advertisement earlier pointed out. So it was the, I just want to, did the director actually play herself or was that someone else? No, that was, that's Phyllis. Oh, okay. She's actually, okay. Yes, that's our director and she is a sport. And I want to step back for a second because this is important to point out, I believe, about our library. We answer as a library to the board. The board has final say on anything that we do. And I think that maybe to some degree that gives us some leverage that other libraries find more challenging because they have city groups that they have to get approval from as well who aren't quite as willing to, aren't quite as maybe interested in the library or aren't quite as willing to allow the library to spread out and grow and just don't have a commitment to the library the way they do maybe some of their other responsibilities. For us, our board serves to try to help create the best library that we can create. And Phyllis serves as the director trying to create the very best library that we can create. And we have a passionate team of people that are constantly trying to come up with ideas on ways to make the very best library that we can create. So I think that when we have that kind of a commitment from everybody and you have a director who's willing to put herself out there the way that Phyllis is and let the joke be on her sometimes, then you can make some special things happen. And she has a commitment to making sure that her library is a 21st century library. She's actually gonna be retiring next year and then back when she hired me, our assistant director had come on about six months earlier and then Joe had come on about six months earlier. So we had kind of had this group of people that was fresh blood, new blood and setting a stage to try to make something happen that hadn't happened in the library before. They've always run a really good library but I'd have to say that it was still very much 20th century at the time. And I think Phyllis wanted to build something different to shift us into the new digital age and made a commitment to do that was willing to take risks in the process. So that's a long answer to say yes. Yeah, definitely having the support and commitment and trust of the upper administration of your supervisor and your supervisor, supervisor if that's how it works, helps in any of these kind of situations. We're gonna do something new, something different. The library needs to get out there more and you need from everyone being able to trust you and saying go do it, be risky and just see what happens. Yeah, and that's kind of the way that it is. I talked to people in the library community who talk about the struggles they have with getting things done and well, we've got to get a policy written for that. We don't know whether we really don't work that way. I mean, yeah, we've got policies and procedures and expectations and all those sorts of things, but we thrive on the idea that if it's gonna be good for our patrons, let's figure out a way to do it. And that's our first and foremost objective is to reach out to our patrons, to engage our patrons, to provide services to our patrons and to excel for our patrons. We'll figure out the back end stuff and the policy on it, all that kind of stuff. Once we have a good idea for the patrons, those things will take care of themselves. And I think a lot of times people get lost in the process and don't wind up looking at the end goal and considering what that is in their decision-making. We started our Facebook page. I went to Phyllis and said, Phyllis, we've got a Facebook page now and this is what we're gonna do with it. And this is why we have it and this is why it's valuable. And her response was, okay. Because it was, it was a good idea. We needed a Facebook page and yeah, there's some policies on, you know, appropriateness on social media and stuff like that. But basically it boils down to don't be stupid. You know, the people that have had man access to that site have some responsibility and that's the post in a way that's, you know, in line with what the expectations are for the library. And, you know, we're not idiots. We know what we're doing. We're not gonna be fools and put stupid stuff on Facebook. Which brings me as a great segue to Facebook. This is our library's Facebook page. And it's our current cover photo. We have some photos. I loved that. I loved that new cover photo that I saw you just put up. I was gonna comment on it and saying, you know, maybe with less mud, but you know, it's on the lawn in September. You never know. I wasn't sure if that would happen. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, this was one that we, you know, we did three posters for a concert series back in the summer. And then we did, we only did one this time for the fall concert. It gives an opportunity to tell, you know, one of the little funny stories about how things work in our creative meetings as well. We had, a lot of the things we come up with, particularly Joe's land in the floor over here, particularly Joe, can't make- You don't have a chair for him? Well, he wasn't in the chair. He moved off and laid in the floor in my floor. I don't know. He said, I have comfy carpet. Anyway, onto Facebook. I digress. A lot of times, the things that we come up with, they couldn't make it to billboards, posters, or cover photos. And, you know, we have to pull the profanities out and water them down and get it, you know, work down to something that would be acceptable. It's a shame we can't be as funny as we actually could, but now we're getting a lot of trouble for that. You know, one of the things we came up, I say that because one of the things we came up with for fall concerts was fall concerts on the lawn. We've got the best grass in town. And, by your silence, I can see that it's probably not a good idea, and that's the reason it didn't get- No, I think it's hysterical, but you're right. Yeah, that's necessarily not the kind of thing you want to put out for general public consumption, no. Yeah, I mean, you know, we thought it was funny in the confines of the closed room when we were being creative, but it's one of those that wound up dying on the floor begging for its life because it thought it was funny and it didn't make the cut. But, yeah. Actually, I mean, I have to just say, other people think that's funny, too. Jennifer Korber is on the line. She's from Boston Public, you know her. She said, I just scared my office mates by laughing so loud. So, it entertains some people, yes. Yeah, well, I mean, you know, we try. You know what I mean, I mean, it's a good time. But, at the same time, I don't want you to think that we're just playing and don't have any idea what we're doing or anything like that, either. We are very calculated in the approach that we take to this. It looks like, you know, maybe the appearance is that the patients are running the asylum or something like that, but when we sit in these meetings and we discuss these things, the end product that you see may be, oh, wow, that's funny. How do they get away with that? But, the fact of the matter is that there's been a lot of discussion on, you know, what it's gonna mean, how it's gonna impact, and those sorts of things. We're fairly savvy at that sort of stuff. And you go through lots and lots of ideas before you really come down to the one that becomes public. I mean, you have to. Oh, absolutely. That's what I'll say. Basically, with any program that we do, with any poster, billboard, new event that we're gonna market or anything like that, what we do is we'll come in with five ideas a piece, and that gives us 25 ideas to start with. And most of those ideas are terrible, including mine. I am probably one of the least funny of the five of us when it comes to coming up with original ideas. But, you know, we hammer it out. We work it out. We sit in there and we keep working until we come up with something, and then we wind up with something like Woodstock on a budget and some of the other stuff that's been popular. I wanna talk about Facebook right now, though, just for a couple of minutes, because Brandy Hodges does the vast majority of the posting on our Facebook page. And I can't stress enough how important it is to have a decent Facebook following, to work very, very hard to build up your fan base. My current project, I'm not gonna go into any kind of detail about it right now, but it involves doing that. I'll be rolling that out toward the end of the year, maybe the first next year. And I think there's some real good stuff in there about how to build up a fan base. And then David Lee King posted yesterday, and I tried to share it in a number of different places. A lot of them are posting pictures, similar to the things that you see here that Hannah had discussed and worked on a little bit together. He's collaborating with me with some other folks on this current project. And I'd ask him, I put this up on your website or on your Facebook page and see what kind of response you get. And these are the sorts of things that we work on. We try to figure out what gets responses. How do people engage? How do we better engage? And Brandy is absolutely wonderful at taking information and in finding a compelling way to share it with people. She used to be a newscaster with the local television station. So she's got years of experience of taking information and finding compelling ways to share it. And it fits perfectly with her role at the library. And she does an absolutely masterful job in delivery for the library. An example right here, I was trying to scroll through the pictures and stuff like that, just off the cuff example. It says, many places across Jonesboro now offer Zumba classes, but ours are always free. Join us today at 5.30 to shake and shimmy the pounds away. Now that is great Facebook posting for you folks that are just used to putting up Zumba class tonight at 5.30. This is how it's done. This is good posting here. This is engaging posting. This is the sort of thing that makes you seem human rather than just an automaton that's spitting out information about when the next event's coming on. When you're using phrases like shake and shimmy the pounds away, you're human. You're engaging, you're being friendly. When Neil Armstrong passed away, we put a quote up, I really wish I would have posted this and when should have put a picture with it. But we try to do those sorts of things. Neil Armstrong deserved to have acknowledgement even from a library. And we wanted to acknowledge Neil Armstrong for the wonderful person and the contributions to the country that he had made. It also gives a compelling post that people are gonna interact with as well. So we do have maybe some self-serving motivations in everything that we post because we wanna make sure that people realize the library is somewhere that they can get engagement in any kind of subject matter. Go through some of the billboards and posters for some of the folks that may not have seen those. We're gonna switch over. This was a summer concert poster, concert's on the lawn. It's the closest you'll ever get to being a groupie. This was for our summer movie series. Our summer movie series, we showed four movies for grown-ups this year for adults this year. Not those kind of adult movie, stop, Krista. I know, I was talking about the subtitles. Oh my gosh. It counts as a book if you turn on the subtitles. We thought that was catchy. Concert's on the lawn because what else are you doing on a Tuesday night? And self-deprecating humor is also okay. We wanna make sure that we never insult the people who are providing services for us whether it's entertainers or whatever the case might be. But we can kind of poke ourselves a little bit. And isn't that really what we're talking about? I mean, let's not glorify or church it up too much. We're having concerts on the lawn. They're good fans and they're fun, but it's library concerts on the lawn and free ice cream. That's a big deal. People like their free ice cream. I see you're sponsored by Andy's Frozen Custard, yes. That is correct. I would come just for that. How about, see there, we have another fan just like that. This one, yeah. This one I loved. Yes, so that was one that made me laugh out loud too, yes. Yeah, concerts on the lawn because the chairs kept falling off the roof. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I'm glad you found it funny because that's what I say. Sometimes when we put these things out there, it's like, seems funny to us at the time, we'll see how the public reacts. Now what we do with these posters is put them up all over town. And there are lots and lots of businesses and convenient stores and stuff like that who like having these posters in their window. They ask us when the next thing's coming up so they can swap out posters because they want something fresh. And these things don't cost money. People talk about what your ad budget and how much money you have to spend on all this stuff and all those sorts of things. The fact of the matter is you can be creative doing things like this at a very low cost and give it a certain bit of cost a lot of time. So people will let you put posters up. You print out a poster or a bunch of posters and go around town and put them up. And it's a great way to advertise. The thing is you've got to have something compelling and that's the creative aspect of it is, think, be big, be bold and come up with something creative so you can get people's attention like concerts on the lawn because the chairs keep falling off the roof. And taking on this, the some e-cards way of doing it, look, look, there, look, totally catches people's attention too, is I think you've said before, maybe not here, but in previous conversations with you, it's something that some people recognize that. Absolutely, the words and the drawing and that you've used that to get people's attention of, ooh, it's one of those e-card things. Oh no, it's not, it's the library. Well, that's, they're kind of cool. They're on top of the cool things going on and that are out there. And like you said, it just gets people talking. Absolutely, and that's the idea. Our entire goal with everything we do from a marketing perspective is to have people, one person, see something we do and say something about it to somebody else. If they're driving down the road and they see a billboard of ours, we want that billboard to stick in their head long enough for them to get to work and tell Susie or Bobby, you know, have you seen the billboard at the library? Oh yeah, have you not got a library card and engage another human being in conversation about the library? That's, to me, that's outreach. That's what you're trying to do. That's the goal and if what you're doing is delivering information, you know, and that's it, you're not gonna hook people. 49.99, which one of those motels is 49.99 and which one's 44.95? You don't know because you didn't pay that much attention to their billboards and that's kind of my point, you know. But I know that Dumbledore is dead. You do know that Dumbledore is dead and we mourned his death. It was a tragedy. But I didn't hear what that said. We just want one person talking to another and we had these discussions because the idea of a lot of the stuff that we were doing didn't have anything to do with specific library services and I kept saying, you know, that's not our objective, that's not what we want to do. You can't sell services, sell the library and then tell them about the services when they inquire. We'll get them if we'll do it this way and then we can teach them once we've got them. But if you try to teach them on the front end, they're probably not gonna pay that much attention to you because it's hard to make databases look sexy. I'm sorry. I don't know how much you like databases. It's just not a really compelling thing that you can put on a billboard and get a lot of attention with. So we do romance novels cheaper than cats and people seem to like it better. Here's one we did for our genealogy lock-in. Your Roots are showing. That was clever. And back again. Our cover photos, we like to have fun on Facebook as you noticed over here. Here, with our cover photos, if we figure anywhere that we can get people's attention, draw people to the library, get them engaged, we take advantage of it. Our cover photos, the Woodstock on a budget, I put this one up, actually, I'm gonna go this way. This was the very first cover photo we had when they introduced cover photos. It was nice and appropriate and so forth and boring. I was also notified that you're not allowed to put your web address in the cover photo for Facebook. There's something in the terms of service about that. A librarian obviously pointed that out to me. I knew there was things about how you couldn't put, like, that you're selling stuff or costs of things or that kind of things in it. It was supposed to be something more creative was there reasoning for it. I didn't realize about the URL part. Yeah, I was informed. Then we transitioned a little bit and we went with the most interesting man in the world. I don't always read books, but when I do, I get them from the Craig Hague County Jones World Public Library. There was a hate girl meme or is a hate girl meme with Ryan Gosling and we played off of that for a little while. I'm sorry, I'm pulling more Harry Potter for folks. This one is actually kind of funny because this one actually got autographed by Samuel L. Jackson. I saw that one, yes. Yes, I'm gonna show that and you're just gonna have to forgive me because it's worth showing. But a friend of mine happens to be a chef and he's the chef on this luxury yacht in the Mediterranean and he was chefing for Magic Johnson. Magic Johnson had leased this yacht for a month and two weeks in, Samuel L. Jackson got on board with him and he and my friend kind of hit it off and my friend printed out a copy of this cover photo that I'd done and showed it to Samuel L. Jackson one night and he took it and signed it as only Samuel L. Jackson can. That is just awesome, yes. That needs to be framed and put up somewhere if you haven't already. Did you get it yet? It's in my office, yeah. And I ain't even mad because it's Samuel L. Jackson, so I'm okay with that. Our last video, the one that you see here displayed, Book Club is a parody of the trailer for the movie Fight Club and the author of Fight Club was Chuck Pollanik and Chuck Pollanik, I've got it pulled up over here back in May when we released that video, we got published on Chuck Pollanik's Facebook and Twitter pages and we were honored. That's quite a privilege to, you know, that's an endorsement and it was thrilling at the time because things started blowing up. I started getting these emails of poster and comments and so forth on my YouTube video and I'm like, what in the world's going on? And I kind of started looking like, oh wow. And then I got to read through these comments here and it's brilliant and genius and wonderful and great and I'm like, oh man, virality is awesome. And then Reddit got a hold of me from our Dumbledore billboard and morality has steeped as well. But anyway, we were really flattered. We've had a big year, you know, in the course of one year, we've had a very successful marketing campaign that's ongoing. We're currently about to take 24 or 22, I'm sorry, original posters and put them on the ends of each one of the shelves in the library and they're reflective of information based on whatever the books are on those shelves. For instance, biographies, natural history, mysteries, Westerns and so forth. The different genres of books, we've made e-cards to go on the shelves for every one of the shelves and, you know, Westerns. We live in a dry county and on our Westerns, the catchphrase or the joke is the only place to get a drink in a dry county. And for biographies, I'd made that comment earlier about come up with five jokes about biographies. Well, we did and the one we wound up settling on is living vicariously through the figures of others. We do actually have a question about the posters that you're doing there. Now that you've started talking about them more, Jennifer from Boston Public wants to know if you're talking about being able to do this on your own and locally, do you print those in-house and are they in color or black and white? How do you do those? You said, you know, this is something that some places can, you can do without having a huge budget for marketing. Talk about the posters themselves? Yes, yes. Yes, the posters, primarily, we do hang them up inside, you know, but basically there's kind of, we hang them up as works of art, more so than publicity for the events inside. But anyway, we do plan on putting an entire wall of them up when we get finished with the campaign, kind of the preservatives, this year's campaign, because of the excitement that's gotten generated over it. Primarily, the posters are printed to take out into the community and post up in the various places to promote services or events that are gone at the library. But do you print them in the library yourself? Or team? Yes, we've got a color, we've got a color copier that we print or a color printer that we print them off of. We don't send them off to the ground, we print all the posters and stuff. We do send some stuff off to print, but the posters themselves, no, we don't. We print those in-house. Boy, I shouldn't have offered to answer questions because I don't know where I was going now and I'm kind of sitting here like, what do we do next? Sorry. At any rate, I need to step back a little bit because I kind of got into talking about the marketing campaign, I just kind of transitioned into that. The point I want people to realize is that our board has watched us grow in a very significant way over four years or four and a half years. And they're very pleased with what we've done. So we've kind of earned a confidence level in our board that when we go to them and talk to them about what it is that we wanna do, we've got an entire series of successes to build on in asking for that trust. So when we ask them, if they'd be willing to let us use some e-cards because it's an internet meme, and I'd like to, well, let me finish this first. An internet meme, we're gonna kind of copycat that or whatever and we explain the appeal and why people will like it and those sorts of things. Then they wind up thinking, okay, well, we don't really know about that and we're not familiar with it, but this seems kind of funny and we understand that you've been right before, go for it, let's see what happens or whatever. They don't really put a whole lot of concern into it the way that you might think that, oh, Lord, they're gonna do it. And we don't go every time we create a poster or something to get approval. The billboards we got approval for because those are really big things and it was the kickoff to the campaign. So we wanted to make sure that the board was on board with us because you don't put billboards up like that without making sure folks are okay with it. They're big. And those also. In front of it, hide. And those also I assume would have cost more money as well. That's it, they're like more. Oh, certainly. Budget would have to go into those to pay for whatever it costs to get a billboard done for yourself. Right, I mean, when we do cover photos, that just takes a few minutes of man hours or a little bit of man hours. The posters are similar ways. It's not very expensive posters up or whatever. And we know where our boundaries are. I mean, it's not like we're gonna put profanity on a poster or something like that. We're not gonna be vulgar or anything. We know how to kind of, Brandy is, we call Brandy our moral authority. She's kind of our moral meter. She tells us where the line is and the backup and stuff like that. So yeah, we've got some checks and balances to make sure that we, it's kind of like the same thing as our Facebook. Don't be stupid. That's, maybe that's our tagline. Don't be stupid. I wanna go for a couple more, go with a couple more cover photos real quick. Before you continue, I just wanna interrupt for a second here. Try and keep your thoughts so you don't lose it again. We are just brief, we've just gone to about an hour, a little over now. So we are gonna obviously go over time. We have some questions to ask from the audience still. I just wanna let people know we will stay on as long as it takes. The system's not gonna shut us off or anything. But if you do have to leave or something because we are officially supposed to have ended at the top of the hour, everything be recorded. So you can always watch these things later. But I just wanna let everyone know that we'll probably run over, we already have run over a little bit by our time. Yeah, I like to hear myself talk. I apologize for that. We'll try and wrap it up quickly though so we can get all these questions into. Yeah, well, the thing is I get to talking and I wanna explain things to people about what it is that we do and how we do it. And then I don't know really whether or not I'm doing more showing them what we've done or rather than telling them how we got around to it and stuff like that. The fact of the matter is is that we have a board that's really excited about having an excellent library. And if they feel like the stuff that we're trying to accomplish is gonna be a compelling way to reach out to the community and tell them about the awesome library we built, then we ought to do that. And they had faith in this particular marketing campaign that it accomplished that. Or at least they had faith in us that we would, we had a good idea that we were gonna try to use to accomplish that. And thus far this year we've had a pretty good run. I mean, you know, so far we've had a billboard go viral on the internet. We've had a video posted by the author of the book that the video was parodying the movie of. And we've had a Facebook cover autographed by Samuel L. Jackson. And to be a little, you know, I'd say we're fairly decent sized, but I mean, to be small town Arkansas, that's, you know, in a public library, that's pretty good. We're doing something right, I'd like to believe and to get that kind of attention. And then if you look at our local numbers, and I think maybe this is important more than anything else, if you look at our local numbers, in the past four years we've doubled foot traffic in the library. We averaged 1,000 people, we averaged 1,000 people a day in the library four years ago. We now average 2,000 people a day in the library. And that's a fairly significant number. I mean, we're getting a lot of utilization with 2,000 people a day. Our summer concert series, we average 200. We had four concerts last year and averaged 200 people per concert. Our fall concert series this year, we had four concerts, we averaged 400 people per concert. So we doubled our concert series attendance by and large as a result of the marketing that we did to promote it. Our Zumba class, we have it on Mondays and Tuesdays and it starts at 5.30. We are filled the maximum capacity every single time that we run it, people don't have room to go in and exercise. If we ran it every day, we'd fill the room up every day that we do it in. And it's about 60, 70 people that pack themselves in there. We just did a play not too long ago. If you got our Facebook page and then looked through some of the photos, we did a murder mystery, which was one of those engagement things for the audience participation and so forth. And I played one of the characters. I was Antonio, I was kind of a sleaze bag and I had to talk with you the entire time and hit on women. So that's what I did. At any rate, we had 80 people show up for a play that the library put on one night and so the numbers are just remarkable. We used to worry about whether or not anybody would show up for the things that we did. And now we worry whether or not we're gonna have enough room for the number of people that are gonna wind up showing up. And that's a good place to be. So, a lot of people, they kind of, they almost ask me, you represent the library in a way a library shouldn't be represented. That's not the image of a library that you want to have. Well, I don't know, our people seem to be liking it. Our community seems to enjoy having a library that seems normal rather than Stygie and stiff. And we're just kind of regular people and we'll make a joke just like anybody else will. And we want to be engaging and we want to be part of the community instead of something that's kind of separate from the community. We'd much rather the community see us as one of them rather than seeing us as a government organization. Because that just kind of sounds boring. And that's not what we want to be. We don't want to be a government organization. We want to be this just banging library that doesn't cool stuff all the time that you want to go to because you never can tell us a lot will happen next. We'll be shooting a video and ask you to be in it or something, so yeah. I mean, that's what a lot of libraries are working towards, I think, is trying to rebrand themselves in many ways. But one of them is to be the center of the community, to be the community. Look at the Haitian where people go for the interaction with other people and that kind of thing. And that's another, and just doing this helps do that, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And that's kind of our approach. We don't look at the library as a library, I guess. We look at it as a business and we make our decisions based on a business decision. It's not like, well, we don't make any money. We don't need to look at ourselves in that light. No, we do. We look at ourselves very much like a business and we market ourselves like a business. If it would be good for a business and we think that it would grow a business, then why wouldn't it grow a library? That just seems to make sense for us. We don't feel like you have to talk about library stuff in order to do that. Right, and you're a business, but your output isn't the profits and the money. It's the interaction and the community and the people coming in and benefiting from whatever you do. Whether they come into the library or if they go to the Facebook page or they use your mobile app, whatever, that's what you get from marketing yourself rather than the, you know. Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's a whole plethora of statistics I can throw at you that validates the success of our marketing campaign and they're very similar statistics that a business would use. The only difference between us and a business is a business is also gonna talk a whole lot about a bottom line and we're not gonna talk about that, but we're still gonna talk about foot traffic and website increases in web traffic and increases in checkouts and increases in library cards and all those sorts of things. We can look at the same sorts of metrics. That does lead into actually one of our questions we have from the audience from earlier, actually, about wanting to know how you measured the return on investment on the billboards. How are you able to be able to do anything like that? Like, what was their effect? We don't really measure return on investment on any individual element because we believe that our process, every individual element fits into a whole. That's part of a whole. So you can't really say how much bang for your buck did you get from the billboards because how do you isolate the billboards from the PR work that you do? Brandy is phenomenal at sticking a brochure in somebody's hand, smiling and introducing it in a way that compels them to look at that brochure and how do you hang a value on that specific thing or the work we do on Facebook or the posters that we put up. What we can do is we can look at numbers prior to the things that we're doing now and we can look at numbers as a result of the things that we're doing now as a whole. But we can't really break it down and say the ROI for billboards was this because we're not gonna take a survey of people to ask them, did you see the billboard and was that what brought you here today? I don't know how to do that without looking dumb. Well, there are surveys that are done that way. I've seen lots of things where I've gone and signed up for something or registered for something that says, how did you find out about us? And it lists all the different options, yeah. But yeah, you did as a whole thing. I do wanna try and get some of these questions before it gets too late though, if that's okay. That's fine. Yeah, I like that one. Sorry, you're gonna keep distracting me with these. The graphic design on the ads and posters, you have someone like that drawing there, you have someone that's on your staff that does those as well. You didn't outsource it. You have a person in your team. We have people on board that work at the library. What we did with the 22 that we came up with at one time to go on the shelves is we actually had some folks that worked at the library who have friends who are artists that we asked them if they'd like to draw some of them as well because it was just gonna be too time consuming to come up with original artwork with one or two people doing it. It's 22 drawings, it takes a while. So we actually subbed it out. I think we paid people $25 a drawing to do some of the drawings. But the vast majority of the stuff we do in-house, if we're really in a bind and we're gonna do something and we need to drop it quick or something like that, we will go to somewhere like iStock Photo or something and buy an image and put it up there. But we really don't like to do that because we like for our stuff to be original. And which leads me to something else. I don't know if anybody asked about it or not, but it was brought up on a couple of occasions to me as to how some eCards would feel about this or did we get permission from some eCards or something like that. And the fact of the matter is we don't need permission from some eCards to use pastel backgrounds and pencil drawings to make jokes. eCards have been around a long time before some eCards came along. And if you're doing original work, you're not, we were pulling their images or we were using some of the phrases that had been produced there, then yeah, that's probably something we would need to shy away from. But using an idea because it's effective is not something that is invading on their brand or anything like that. And that also leads me to something that I'm kind of proud of for our library. And that's that on two separate occasions now since we started this campaign, people locally have copied our work. The local college actually had a card that they sent out to their freshman students. That was a sum eCard. And we were kind of proud of the imitations, the greatest form of library and that goes all the way up to sum eCards from us as well. And then one of the local downtown restaurant bars who hangs our posters in the window created some t-shirts that were eCards that they're selling that they got inspired to do as a result of the posters that we had put up in the campaign that we're running. There's 50 shades of, you gotta make a 50 shades joke if you're a library but we'll let you block about that. And this one here, this one was our answer to the internet when they kind of got that at us a little bit. So yeah, we don't shy away from anything and we're proud of the work that we did. Go ahead, you got some more questions. No, actually there's just one other one that came in about smaller libraries. You have a large team, a team of, you said five people, your creative technology team. Do you have any recommendations for small libraries that do not have a team like that? How would they go about starting creative marketing or being more edgy like this if you are a one person library or a small library that wants to get themselves out there as well and doesn't have a special team of five people, IT people, graphic designer, that kind of thing. Yeah, ideas are free. That's the first thing I want to say. Creativity is free. It's the responsibility of an individual to say these are the resources I've got to work with and my mind doesn't cost any additional money so let me see what I can come up with. Now that's kind of a cheap answer but it's true too. And that is that we're not paying somebody to come up with the ideas that we've got. Sure, we have kind of a delivery mechanism for the work that goes into it but anybody can type on, you know, these cover photos are 851 pixels by 315 pixels and you can open up GEMP which is free or any other kind of editing software and create a background and then color it and type something funny in there and then find an image to stick on it and you have a cover photo and it costs you zero. So yeah, there's cost involved to put up billboards but you don't have to put up billboards. If you're a small one-person library or something like that, you don't have the kind of people, the numbers of people to market to that we do either. You could almost go around handing them out and we do that as well. That's another good point is that the posters, we actually reduce down to postcard size and we hand those out to people as well so it's anything to get the word out and the compelling part that people keep talking about does it cost anything? So, you know, when you talk about how do you do edgy stuff, does a small library afford to do edgy stuff? Well, it's not the fact that it's edgy that the cost factor in it, you know, that's free. Be funny, you know, get feedback from folks that, you know, or maybe you're not funny. Get one of your snarky friends to help you be funny or maybe funny is not the approach to take for your library. You know, you have to decide what you want to be to your community and then figure out how you tell that story to folks and then be compelling in the story that you can. And no, this goes with almost everything a library's do, know your community too. What will they respond to? What are they interested in? That's the first step in a lot of this is just that, which in small towns and small libraries, which we have a lot of those here in Nebraska and I know in a lot of other states that are watching, that's the majority of the libraries is the small town where you know 90% of the people in town and they know you in the library, you know what's gonna reach out to them and get their attention. But you do need to, and you also know your town who is not coming into the library, who you need to reach out to even more. So figure out what they would respond to. That is true, but I would argue that you don't want to find yourself in the trap of oh, we couldn't get away with that because we know our community because I don't buy that either. You need to give people more credit a lot of times and sometimes maybe your community needs a little push. Why don't you dare on? Go into somebody's office with an idea and see what happens. That's kind of my approach is, if you're sitting back saying we can't do that, you're not gonna do that. You're not ever gonna do that. And if you don't have passion about your library and how to make it great and figuring those things out, take risks, put your job online every once in a while, you're probably gonna stay where you are. It's a matter of what you wanna be as an institution and how hard you're willing to work for it. I don't think that money is gonna get in the way of you being successful. If you make enough money to keep your doors open, you can make enough money to keep your doors open and figure out a way to tell people about it. And I just believe that. And I don't work eight hours a day. I work when inspiration hits and I don't stop until I get it done. And if you can get energized and committed and put forth the kind of effort that we put forth that our library to be successful, then you'll be successful too. Money is not the issue standing in the way of libraries being as successful as they can. Not in this arena. Creativity is free. Sounds good, okay. Sorry, I got on my soapbox and started pre-hand. No, that's what they were all looking for, yes. And that's it for the questions that we have. Anybody have any, I think we're gonna probably wanna wrap it up now. We're way over our time here, but that's okay, like I said. Does anybody have any last-minute urgent questions they want to ask Ben right now? If you do, you can type Min. If not, he is available. I believe you have contact info somewhere that they can reach you. Oh yeah, hang on. I guess maybe I'll have a commercial for that. Hey, how'd you like the commercial? I thought that was very cute. Yes, that was a surprise to me. I was like, I don't know what he's doing, but I'm gonna trust you and let you go for it. Yeah, these are all our contacts for the library itself. For me, Facebook at slash benbizzle, I think is my Facebook page, isn't that terrible? You don't know who you are. Yeah, I don't know who I am, that's terrible. It's at benbizzle, B-E-N-B-I-Z-Z-L-E on Twitter. I don't tweet a whole lot, but you're welcome to Twitter at me if you want to. Facebook is, yeah, facebook.com slash benbizzle. I do encourage you all y'all to go over there and check out our YouTube videos. They are very funny, yes, I've watched them. My email is ben at libraryandjonesborough.org. I feel that's easy to get in touch with. We do have a tip from someone on the line, Jennifer Korber from Boston Publican says, he'll answer Facebook messages right away. So if you do want to get in touch with him, the quickest. I seem to be connected all the time, it's kind of bad. I have to make myself go to bed at 1.30 to 2 o'clock in the morning and so forth, but I love what I do. And you're maintaining and keeping up with the library's Facebook presence, so it's important to be there to do that. I do that for our presence as well for the library commission. I'm always on just keeping an eye on things on the various Facebook pages that we run through the commission as well. So I got lots of thank yous for the webinar, yes, as people are logging out. Okay, great, bye. Thank you so much, I don't know how I did, but anyway, I hope there's somebody around. I think it was great, hey, it was very good. Yes, thank you. Oh, great, because this is not my format. It was perfect, just very, I don't even, very inspirational, informational, got everything out there, and that's what I wanted to do is to get people to know what was going on with these signs and things they've seen and around on Facebook and online and shared out there and figure out how this all happened. Thank you for the great information we have, yes. Another comment. Thank you very much, I was glad to be here. Okay, well, I think we will, unless you have anything else urgent that you need to tell us about, Ben, I can wrap it up. I'm good. Okay, thank you very much, Ben, and thank you everyone for attending today. I am going to pull back control to my screen. And there we go, and just say thank you for attending this week's Encompass Live, and I hope you'll join us next week when our show is letting the patrons drive. We just added this a week ago or so to the schedule, so it is new you might not have heard about it yet, about patron-driven acquisitions. Creighton University's, Sally Gibson from Creighton University will be talking about, they've been working on that, they have some updated statistics on that, so she's going to be sharing all of that with you next week. So please sign up and join us for that. And also we do have a Facebook page for the show for Encompass Live, so please do go there and like us on Facebook and you'll get notices and updates about all of our shows when they're coming. Announcements of them and when our recordings are available. We'll let you know that as well on the Facebook page. So other than that, thank you very much for attending and we will see you next time on Encompass Live. Thank you, bye-bye.