 Welcome our presenters for today. I'm so excited to introduce to you Lisa Bunker, who is the social media librarian at the Pima County Public Library in Arizona. And Cesar Garza is also joining us today. He's the reference librarian and the chair of their social media team at the Austin Public Library in Texas. And you guys are in for a real treat. They've got some very inspirational work going on at their libraries. Welcome to the both of you. Hello. That was Lisa. Let's see. Yeah. For some reason I'm a little shaky right now, so bear with me. Oh, Lisa, it looks like you just got muted. I'm going to let you unmute yourself. Oh, that's odd. Okay. All right. So I'm going to say a little bit more about how we work at Pima County Public Library. Our social media is structured to maximize contributions from our branch libraries. And our training is very focused on why we are there and on writing with authenticity and spontaneity. I oversee branch writers, but I really don't interfere a lot. And I'm not a manager. I'm a librarian one. I work in the communications and systems office with our PIO and our website team, but I try to get out into libraries as often as I can. I do coordinate loosely with our PIO and our content planning calendar. But I tend to write my own copy and tailor it for social media. For the last three years, I've also taught local businesses and nonprofits about effective social media with two monthly classes, one on strategy and the other a Facebook lab where we get into the guts of an organization's page. I highly recommend that libraries share their expertise this way. It's a great community service. SSR is next. Hi, everyone. This is Cesar Garza. I am from the Austin Public Library in Austin, Texas. And just to give you a little context about how I am involved with social media at my library, I am the... All the library that... All the social media that is produced at our library is actually centralized in a team that we call the social media advisory team. And it sounds pretty official, but it's actually just a committee of library staff from across the library system. On this team, there are reference librarians such as myself. There are youth librarians. There are branch librarians and librarians from other departments across the system. So we all get together. And as a team, we govern the social media strategy of the library. We govern the pages that you find listed on the library's website at library.austintexas.gov.slashsocial. And so, as I said, I'm a reference librarian. I'm based at the Central Library that you see pictured on the slide here. And I'm the current team chair. And currently, I contribute content to the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram page. So today, Lisa, Bunkinari, we're going to cover four essential topics. Those topics are going to be the first one is going to be what is content curation and how can you fit it into your workday. The second topic will be how can you use your strategic plan to create posts for social media. The third topic will be how you can amplify your library's voice with the help of ambassadors. And the fourth topic will be how to add the spice of live broadcasts on Facebook. So we're going to turn the ball over to Lisa. Hi. So I wanted to talk about curation because it's used in the description here, but because it's a word that comes out of the museum world, I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about what it is and what it isn't. So this webinar is about taking it deeper, right? So one way to deepen what you offer is to articulate as a team why you're there, meaning there on social media, and who you're speaking to. So the curatorial mindset can unleash your creativity and spontaneity because it isn't a straight jacket. It's not strict rules about what you can and can't post. It's a mindset where just like a good collection development policy, you're in real life, in real time picking and choosing things that you know are of interest to the people who are your audience on social media. So basically it helps you focus so that you can plan ahead and in a spontaneous way recognize opportunities in real time as they happen. And I believe it saves time because curation would give you useful parameters for content that you always have this kind of voice at the back of your head which is what I think of as a mindset that it has where you're picturing what you want to be posting and keeping an eye out for social media. So when you know why you're there, you're going to see stories all around you. And furthermore, when you do it in a very conscious way, it can help align with your libraries and your community's goals. And I can guarantee that your admin folks will be more supportive of social media when you demonstrate this. So if you want to put it in library terms, curation is a mix of collection development and storytelling. And you're basing it all on specifically what your community needs and what its aspirations are as well as the library strategic plan. Hopefully there's a lot of overlap there. So as with our physical collections of books and movies, curation is only successful when you listen to what your users or customers or patrons value, what they find useful. If you're only pushing out messages about the library, you're not using social media to its fullest and taking advantage of its unique opportunities. And if all you do is broadcast, you're not inviting customers to participate. So I think you're sabotaging yourself because participation is how your audience grows. So you can broadcast, you can cut and paste from your website, you can cut and paste from your calendar, but you're going to be unhappy on social media with the results. True curation hits the sweet spot between what you need to convey about the library and what your readers will find useful and interesting. The highest compliment is when they share something you've posted with your friends. The good news is you're already doing this at your public service desks and have for years. We know storytelling. We know how to hold an audience's attention. We know how to listen to our community's needs and aspirations. If your workflow is to copy and paste from the calendar or website, you're not going to capture the energy of what's going on at the beating heart of your library, and you're not going to take it deeper. And I'm behind the slide, so I'm going to forward there. So the green area is the sweet spot I mentioned. It shouldn't be too much, you know, focusing on just what your customers want. It shouldn't be too much, you talking about yourself. What you want to find is that space in the middle where you both meet and what you post is interesting and useful. Yeah, you're doing this already. You've been storytelling forever, probably, if you've been in libraries as long as I have. And I think we've kind of done, you know, I've been in libraries for almost 40 years. I think we do a lousy job of telling our own story. Social media gives us a chance to tell that story in a deeper way and really focus on telling the story of what we're doing and not other people's stories. Here's some examples of curated content. This may help illustrate what is meant by curation. So you could link to an article about a neighborhood's history. You could post fun and games about books, reading and libraries, real time video of the child who came in to read you a poem, report on a big program you just had, or just post spectacular photos of where you live. And what we're going to do further on is reverse engineer some posts and go from a real post and talk about how they illustrate these different kinds of content that you can do in libraries. Decide what to curate. What topics and messages do you focus on? This is part of a handout that is in your kit. I have this graphic on it above and a space below for you to make your own version of it. This is a very kind of personal chart of what we're doing at Pima County. So, and it helps me, it gives you an idea of sort of what's at the back of my mind, what I'm always looking for, what stories I'm trying to be attuned to around me so that I can get them on social media. So having a chart like this is also a great brainstorming tool, not just for you, but for your colleagues with your admin, with your marketing folks. And it's a list of the things we want more people to be aware of in our 26 libraries. So one would be, and it's one of several, but we're welcoming space for everyone and we are busy. So that's one of the messages I want to convey on social media, but I'm not going to say that I'm going to show that. So underneath our examples of some of the things I've posted that illustrate that that message we want to send without saying it kind of explicitly. So Tucson wants and needs and I hope that when you come to our social media accounts that you get a sense for Tucson, that you, it feels like Tucson, it feels like it could not be anywhere else. And this is a very conscious goal that we want to convey, how much a part of the community here in Pima County that the library is. So in the third key message our library has is we are a place where people get surprised and inspired. And honestly, this is where social media just gets really fun. The more you can surface the stories that are about experiments you're doing about new things you're trying. Yes, story time, of course, yes, job help, of course, but focusing on where where you're trying new things and where are you going to surprise customers. These are the kinds of things that are just extremely shareable and and tend to do very, very well on social media. So these are three statements of purpose for us here in Pima County. These statements can also come from your strategic plan, but they can also be how it could also be a message where you're trying to work against a negative perception. So let's say the negative perception is that people think the library is out of touch. So make a list of the things that you can talk about on social media or share on social media that counter that message and and share how how how really relevant you are in today's in today's world. The next slide's a sample of our content strategy calendar. We use the free database software called air table. And we review this in our meetings for the communications and systems office. We also once a month share the highlights of this with staff, because we're encouraging them to write book lists and blog posts that that fit with the kinds of content that that we are emphasizing both on the website and on social media. You know what, you know, this this calendar is super helpful. I actually pay more attention to what people are talking about that morning on Facebook. Then, then to a library angle. I'm very curious when I log into social media in the morning. Where's the day's energy headed. What's the mood of the day. This is curation to and it's a commitment to listening what people are concerned about at that moment. Your version of it could be going out onto the public desk and just listening to what people are what the buzz is with people are talking about at the desk. This is real research for social media because it allows you to curate in a way that is timely and and just real that it's real life. Just for reverse engineer section. I wanted to show me some of these are like really huge reach posts, but I really wanted to show some of the posts that that are just really good ordinary posts so that you could see what what I'm talking about. This is, you know, I told you that we have a very distributed system here where branch staff have autonomy to post and curate what they know to be of interest in in their neighborhoods. This is one of our libraries wheeler tapped Abbott senior library. And this is the screenshot of the insights for this post so you're seeing information that the public can't see. So if you can see on the left Lupita posted I was a regular series in this with today's act of kindness donate food to the community food bank. And underneath she's given links so that everything you need to be successful at this, this challenge this this activity is there for you and the graphic is is what's most needed the food bank. So for reverse engineer this why was it successful. Why did it work. Honestly, the photograph is boring, and you know gurus will tell you this is way too much text for a Facebook post, and she's got more than one link. You know at the time this page had about 400 likes. And if you look at the reach of over 1200. She's she's definitely beaten the Facebook algorithm and reached 300% of the number of people who like the page that meant that there was a lot of sharing and a lot of interest in in this post. I think this one boils down to knowing what people are talking about timeliness that this was, you can see December early December and 2016 after the election when we know a lot of people were looking at ways to get back to the community and just the time of people are focused on that. And, and just how I think the completeness of the text worked for her in the situation. So, yeah, that's post your own reasons why you think that was successful I'd be curious to hear what you think about it. Okay, here's the next slide. Oh, by the way, we're working with Lupita right now on a year long kindness project that that will start next year. I'm very excited about that. All right. So this is just kind of silly and geeky. And this wasn't as huge a reach as what Lupita did our, this page is the main page, and this page at this point had about almost 10,000 likes. So, so this isn't 100% even of, of the number of likes, but it's still a very, very public post indefinitely beat Facebook's algorithm. If you're curious what I mean by that, take the number of likes of your page and divide it by 5% or to 7%. And this is the worldwide average of the number of people who see a post. And there's all kinds of reasons for that. But if you're beating that 5% to 7%, you're beating Facebook's algorithm and doing a very good job indeed. So let's reverse engineer this one. This was to illustrate our history of innovation and our decades of experience, providing new things that are needed by the community. It's also very hyper local, which is something that is a high priority of ours. And, and just, I thought people would just get a kick out of it that huge CPU. The, the, you know, where are the women, what no internet. So this post has 16 comments and this isn't our highest hit. One of our branches had a post that went over 1,425,000 in reach. And, you know, I'm not, I'm not showing that one, but that, that gives you an idea of, of how big something can get even from a rather small branch library. This is an example of something that went viral for libraries, but the credit goes to the Carrow area district library. And Aaron, you know, this had been a regular series she was doing for the library. And so she, she was kind of surprised that this took off the way it did. But it's a fabulous example and a rare example of direct library messaging really working on social media. If you are familiar with the library's transform campaign, you know that there's some beautifully designed graphics that come from the American Library Association. And they're, they're excellent, but she didn't use those here. She, they, the library had put one of the phrases on their marquee. So she went out to the front of the library and instead of using a very kind of polished wonderful graphic, she made it real. And she, she posted a picture of the, you know, the phrase on their marquee. And it just worked. It really went viral and was made a bunch of major blogs. I think even, oh, I forget. Yeah, anyway, it just, it really made a big splash and it was so exciting for her to do that. So I think the key here is timing, it's clarity, it's simplicity. And the message is, well, it's a combination of message and something hyper local, which, which makes it real. It takes a marketing message and made it real. Part of, part of the context of the time here was that this was March 2017 and fake news was being discussed everywhere. So this post really did hit a nerve. This is a real simple one that I've used twice now. I, and it was very simple to do. I took a picture of my hand with a pen in it and put the text over it and invited customers to, to share what their two words would be. So here, what's curation is that it's, it's a simple challenge that I hoped would be irresistible to respond to. Hopefully, as soon as you read that, you know, what the text was, you yourself were thinking of those two words and thinking how fun it would be to share them with other people. That's kind of what I mean by irresistible. This post that I reposted it recently and it got 188 comments, comments, which was very fun. And again, it was super simple to do. You could reuse my image if you want or just take your own challenges like this really can produce some fabulous participation with your readers. They are a risk. So here's what I've learned about doing these kinds of participation challenges. You do need a decent decent following for it to work. If you have a small number of likes on the page, not enough people are going to see what you post to for it to really kind of catch fire. You do need to make the ask super easy. You can't make it very complicated, like asking, having a two part question or challenge, just make it one, keep it super simple and something that people can do quickly. But also, as I tried to do here, also sort of touch the emotions, touch things like people's aspirations and wishes and reflections on their life. And this kind of thing is really useful, not useful, but it works with social media behavior where a lot of people use social media to define themselves and define themselves to friends and to the public. So that was another sort of reason I posted this is that it helps with that, you know, people, it lets people shine online on social media by posting something about themselves. And so, yeah, make it emotional, but not icky kind of privacy wise. This was another challenge. I think a lot of libraries did this this summer. I redid the graphic. I picked a graphic that was a gift, actually, that I found. And yes, I'm pronouncing it that way. So here's some other examples of challenges you can do. What book was so scary? You refuse to read it again, right? Type, but are, yeah, that's the title, write a haiku about something that everyone is super excited about. For us here in the desert, it might be a rainstorm. And we've done that. We've invited people to write haiku about the rain clouds and rain, summer rain in the desert. And it did really, really well. I think we got 45 haiku. All right, speaking of rain, one of the things I have wanted to achieve on social media is to be the library in real time. And that's what this one did for us. Again, what's curation is hyperlocal is that it's hyperlocal. There is no direct association with the library here, except to convey the message that we live here too. We are fascinated by what you're fascinated by. And hey, you know, boy, rain and our normally dry riverbeds full of water. So I'm always looking for examples of what it's like to live here, the beauty, the weather, the history. And this is a 30-second video I took over my lunchtime, lunch hour of a normally bone-dried riverbed. And it had a huge reach. You can see the numbers here. But what I adored about this was actually the conversations we had in the comments. People shared stories about past floods. They wondered about the history of the river. They discussed rainstorm safety. And I kept up with these comments. And was the library in real time posting articles that answered people's questions, posting historical photographs, and sharing links to other amazing articles and helpful things, and amazing storm photography. So, yeah. So the message here is we, the library staff, live here too. And we get Tucson. We are family. And the library makes everything better. And my last reverse engineer is, you know, I'm just always looking for things that I know customers would be interested in because they ask for them at the desk. So this is another way of sort of doing collection development, but on social media, for social media, looking for the kinds of things that are web examples of what you buy for your physical collection. So I'm worried about time. So I'm going to go forward here. So part of the curation, you can't curate unless you know why you're there. So I wanted to quickly go over some whys and how they can support getting deeper on social media. When I train staff, I start with a brainstorming session about why we're on social media in the first place. What happens is that they learn through this exercise that they know more than they think they do. And it gives me a chance to share real examples of their suggestions or possible drawbacks if there's a misperception. So here are some examples of actual whys for our social media. We want to drive people to our library website. We want to build loyalty and trust with customers. I have lots of customers who are online and I want to provide customer service to them. We frequently have news that we need to get out quickly. Or we have programming that taxpayers should know about that's never advertised. I'll bet you do this too. You do programs in the refugee community. You do programs for teen moms. Kind of closed audience things where, because you're not worried about attendance, you may not talk about them in the media and you should. These are great stories that the public should know about. And another why, the final why I have, I'll talk about here is that we have customers outside our immediate area or that haven't been in the library for a long time, and we want to entice them back. Social media is the best tool we have for sharing the deeper story of the library in real time in our own voices. And that I think is just the genius of social media and what's in it for libraries. I'm going to skip over these very quickly. These are some samples of handouts that are in the kit that you have that I hope complement the kinds of things that we're talking about. I also have a challenge for you that is another handout that may help you rethink your workflow. If the kinds of things that I've been talking about is curation, you're thinking, oh my God, I don't have time to do that. Or where will I find the time? What I hope this homework challenge will do is help you think differently about how your workflow happens and how you plan for social media. All right. I'm going to turn it over to Cesar. Thanks, Lisa. Hi, everyone. This is Cesar Garza again from the Austin Public Library, and I have returned to tell you all a little story. It's a short story starring the Austin Public Library supporters that we call our social media ambassadors. And in sharing the story with you, I'm hoping to just illustrate or to give you an idea of what you can do at your own library if you want to amplify your library's voice on social media. So to get started, we need to ask, you know, who are these ambassadors? The ambassadors of the Austin Public Library are simply citizens of Austin, or Austinites for short, who love the library and share that love on social media. And it's really as simple as that. And it's also simple to sign up, because you don't need to apply to be a social media ambassador. You simply need to go to the library's website at library.austintexas.gov slash ambassador. So when you go to that website, you add your name and your email to our email list for the ambassadors. And then about once a month, you'll get a short personal email from the Austin Public Library. And I would emphasize that the email is short because it's not a newsletter. I would emphasize that the email is personal because, again, it's not a newsletter. It's actually just a letter from a library staff member to the ambassadors as a group. And in that letter, the staff member will encourage the ambassadors as a group to use a certain hashtag to promote a certain library event. Or just to help promote the library in any way they can. So if you were an Austinite, a citizen of Austin, and you were a social media ambassador, you would either use the hashtag that we email you about, and or you could use the permanent hashtag, basically. That is the program hashtag, hashtag APL ambassador. And when you use that hashtag, we're basically just trying to encourage you to be as creative as you can to promote the library, whether it's posting what you're reading, what you checked out from the library, what your favorite branch is, what you're looking forward to, anything, almost anything having to do with the library. You can share it, use the hashtag APL ambassador, and that's how you are, that's how you become an ambassador. And I'm happy to report that to date, as we record this webinar, December 2017, we have 1,100 Austin Public Library ambassadors. And the list seems to be growing, so we're excited about that. So now I want to talk about why, you know, why we did this, why we organized the ambassadors, why I think we need them now more than ever. And one of the reasons why is on the next slide. So this slide that you see on your screen, it is a screenshot of an article from the blog of Hootsuite.com. The blog is titled, organic reach on social media is declining. Here's what to do about it. I'm not going to go over the whole article, but I just wanted to share it with you, because it talks about organic reach. Now I know that I think Alisa did address organic reach, and in a previous part of this webinar series, organic reach was addressed as, it's basically just free advertising. It's the number of people that see any given post that you publish on your social media page without you having to pay for it. So it's free advertising. And unfortunately, the organic reach that we have depended on for so long is declining. One takeaway from this article is that organic reach for Facebook pages fell 52% in 2016. That's 52%. And in the next article I'm going to show you here on the screen, it is an article from the website socialmediatoday.com. The article is titled, new study finds Facebook page reach has declined 20% in 2017. So I just showed you an article that said the reach declined 52% in 2016, and then it declined to further 20% in 2017. So clearly these networks are trying to move us away from free, getting anything for free, I'm sorry to say. But one of the takeaways from this article on socialmediatoday.com is where it says that organic reach on Facebook has been in decline since late 2013. Now I have managed a Facebook page for a library since 2010, so I have seen firsthand how the organic reach has changed over time, how indeed this is true, it is now really hard to get your content in people's news feeds, and I can tell you this decline was one of the reasons why at the Austin Public Library we organized the social media ambassadors program. So that's just one reason. There are actually a few that I'm going to share with you now. One is, of course, the decline of organic free reach. The second reason is the increasing emphasis on ads, which costs money. A third reason is the increasing demands on staff time, and as time goes on, these networks, they evolve. They become more sophisticated, and the more sophisticated they become, the more time they require from staff to actually be effective at using them. And now as you've seen, especially on Facebook, Facebook is now much more ad-driven from the page perspective. They want you to pump money into ads so that you can get in people's news feeds. But perhaps the biggest reason of all why we need our social media ambassadors is reality. It's the reality of library land that we all inhabit here at the Austin Public Library. We have no formal social media budgets, and we don't have any social media staff, which is to say library staff that was hired solely for the purpose of managing social media. When I introduced myself earlier in this webinar, I pointed out that I'm a reference librarian, indeed I am, but all the social media I contribute is in addition to what I was actually hired to do, and that's true for all my coworkers on the social media team here, and my hunch is that most of you listening to this webinar right now are probably in the same situation. So we devised this ambassador's program to basically implicitly share the responsibility and the fun of social media with our ambassadors because I think that in a very literal way, these are social media ambassadors. They embody the organic free reach that now eludes us. And I'm going to show you an example of how this is true and how this has played out for us very recently. So recently we, in Austin, we opened a new central library downtown. It is the library pictured on the slide here, and we mobilized our social media ambassadors to help us promote the new central library using the hashtag New Central Library. And when we did that, they helped us sort of amplify, raise awareness, sort of generate chatter in the community about this very beautiful building that opened on October 28, 2017. So how did this happen? I would say that this, the way that we mobilized the ambassadors actually happened over the long term. It didn't happen right away. It didn't happen overnight. We launched the ambassador's program in November of 2015 knowing that the New Central Library would open. So this was a tactical decision we made. And then over a two-year period from November, 2015, when we launched the program to October, 2017, when the New Central Library opened, occasionally we would email the ambassadors as a group to give them an update on the New Central Library. And there was, we already knew that there was a lot of interest and excitement about this new building. And usually there is in a community when you open a new library. So anytime we email them an update, we would say things like, you know, use hashtag New Central Library. And they would share the updates. And just in doing that, they would generate organic free reach for us. And I suppose you can say that the crescendo, the peak of all these efforts to amplify, to mobilize our social media ambassadors, to amplify the New Central Library, it happened on October 22, 2017, when we allowed a group of our ambassadors, a ticketed group of our ambassadors, to get a sneak preview of the New Central Library before it opened to the public on October 28. So the way that we did it, we used a website called eventbrite.com. We used eventbrite.com to issue free online tickets to our ambassadors. One of the stipulations was certainly the ticket was free, attending the preview was free, but you had to be a social media ambassador in order to attend. And each ticket allowed an ambassador, plus up to three of their guests, including children, to come to the sneak preview. And when that happened, we got a lot of photographs and a lot of excitement and emojis being used when they saw the New Central Library for the first time. And that there was a lot of more organic and free reach for us. So on the next slide, this is a picture I took myself during the sneak preview for the social media ambassadors. This is a group of ambassadors with their families and friends. They are gathered in the first floor of the New Central Library at the foot of the atrium. That actually goes up six stories. The gentleman on the lower right corner is the director of the Austin Public Library. And I arranged for my director to welcome the ambassadors before we just set them loose into the building to start tweeting and posting and using the hashtag. And so he did that. He only welcomed them for about five minutes. And I insisted that it be a very short welcome because we didn't want to hold the ambassadors back from just going wild in the new building. So now before this preview happened, over the two years before this, from November 2015 to October 2017, we tracked how much the hashtag APL ambassador was being used and we can see that it was being used most on the big three social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. So if you ever have a chance or if you're ever interested, I would encourage you to go to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, look up the hashtag APL ambassador and the hashtag New Central Library for the post stated October 22nd, 2017, which was the day of the sneak preview just to see what kind of posts they put up. There was a few hundred of them, especially on Instagram. So for this webinar, I created a little collage. On this slide is just a collage of screenshots that I took from the hashtag APL ambassador on Facebook, hashtag APL ambassador on Instagram and on Twitter. They did October 22nd. I just wanted to show you all what the posts kind of look like. And it was just a myriad, it was just a very diverse group of perspectives and comments and it was all just very exciting. Okay, so what are the takeaways? What are the lessons and tips I can share with you about the ambassadors program? The foremost one, the first one is that your social media ambassadors, they share and thus amplify your community's library love, hashtag library love from the grassroots because as I said, they are simply average everyday citizens of your community who want to just share their love for the library on social media. Another lesson that I glean from this is that ambassadors are a long-term strategy to both organize and build your library's online identity. I would emphasize long term, it is something you have to try to think of the big picture and over the long term you can build up the group of ambassadors and then over time they can become a fort, they can be something that you can really count on, a group of people you can count on when you need to get the word out. If any of you listening to this webinar have any interest in trying an ambassadors program, I do have a few tips for you. The first tip is just to make it simple to sign up and like the library open to everyone. The second tip would be to build an email list. Here at the Austin Public Library we use Mailchimp, which is an email marketing platform that you have to subscribe to, but there are other email marketing platforms out there. There's another one that's called Constant Contact, and if you wanted to, depending on your budget or if you couldn't subscribe to a platform, I think just even creating just a simple email list on Excel spreadsheets or even just in a certain email account to use for the library and just emailing the group, it can really be as easy as that. I think that it's important to attach some sort of action to the action of signing up to be an ambassador. You want to make them do something to become one. You know, even just signing up for an email list, I think is more than enough. Another tip I have for you is to strategize. So you build an email list and you strategize the emails long-term. There's the keyword again, long-term, based on what I would call your library's big moments. A big moment is just a high-profile event in the timeline of your library, such as opening a new facility, launching a new service, a new program, a new partnership. And once you've identified those big moments, you turn one of them, or maybe all of them, into an incentive to sign up as an ambassador. So here at the Austin Public Library, when we extended the sneak preview to the social media ambassadors, we first of all, we knew we were going to do the sneak preview, and then we started promoting the fact that if you were a social media ambassador of the Austin Public Library, you would get a chance to get a sneak preview of this new central library. But in order to get a ticket, to get a golden ticket, if you will, to this sneak preview, you had to be a social media ambassador. And when we started promoting that, our email list went from like 300 to like 800 people. So like hundreds of people signed up anticipating that we were going to do this for them. And we did. And so that's definitely a big tip for me. Okay, so now I'm turning this over to Lisa. Well, I'm going to actually jump in. This is Jennifer. Thank you so much. Oh, my goodness. Both of you, so many, so many ideas. I'm going to just have a little pause here to share some of the questions that I've seen come through with you all. And I'm going to work backwards. These are, I'm going to ask you a couple of the questions that came up. Sure. One of them was specific to who picks the hashtags that APL uses. The social media advisory team, the social media team of the library, we picked them. We just sort of survey our pages. We just try to get a sense of what is trending and what we think we can use over time. Again, over the long term, the hashtags that we've identified are the ones that we used frequently. Excellent. Fantastic. And I'm curious how many other libraries have picked up on library love, hashtag library love? There's actually quite a few. I mean, we, that hashtag library love, I believe was trending long before we even got to it to identify it as trending. But it's out there. Yeah. Yeah. We used it to publicize our rebranding campaign. Oh, excellent. Fantastic. Yeah. That's a good one. There was a question about sort of how you orient your ambassadors, especially in terms of making sure that their posts are available publicly. So do you provide them with some guidelines and recommendations for how to post? We don't provide them any formal guidelines other than what we say, what we articulate in the email, the letter that we send to them as a group. It's the letter written by a library staff member in the first person. It goes something like, Dear social media ambassadors, my name is Cesar Garza. I'm a reference librarian at the Central Library. We have this new Central Library opening. We would love it if you use the hashtag New Central Library. And we don't really go much beyond that because we feel like the ask is just to use a hashtag and we kind of leave it up to them to decide how they're going to use it. For the most part, all the posts are library friendly. So if we wanted to retweet them or share them on Facebook or reground them on Instagram, we do that. But we definitely are careful about things like that. So if we see an ambassador use an image with the hashtag APL ambassador, if we don't think it's appropriate for the Austin Public Library of Instagram, we won't regram it or retweet it. Okay, excellent. And then there are a couple of folks who are curious if you've either had negative posts related to the ambassador program or are there any downsides to having social media ambassadors? I haven't seen any negative posts because the nature of the group is that they love the library. And the way that we describe it, the way that we have them signed up for the email list, the message is always, we're so grateful you're doing this. We know you love the library and now show us how you love the library. So I don't see any downsides. It's just the only downside, it's just the challenge of maintaining it, of trying to find ways to engage them of finding topics for emails or hashtags they might use that they will actually use. That's the challenge, it's just actually getting them to do it. That's the biggest challenge, but it's not a downside to me, it's just the challenge. Okay, excellent. All right, and there were a few questions specific to Lisa's portion. Lisa, somebody loved the, if you could write the two words and that graphic you created, somebody said, can we use that? Of course. Yeah, it was something I did just last week, so if you go to the Pima County Public Library Facebook page, it should be in the photographs folder. If you're a member at the Libraries and Social Media Facebook group, which I invite you all to, I can repost a link to it there and a number of us share graphics like that in this group and in another group that, I'm blanking out, but yeah, Jessica Bacon started. So there are some Facebook groups where libraries share successful images like that that they've made or found. Yeah, excellent. And Jessica was a presenter on our first session, so yeah, definitely head back over. I did post her link to the shareable click group earlier when somebody was asking about how do you... A couple of people commented, Lisa, that they don't have the engagement that you've been seeing and wondered what are some tricks. So I definitely recommended the shareable click as a way to see some of those posts that libraries are making that have gotten traction. So definitely check that out as well. And then, Lisa, one more question for you. Somebody brought up the issue of in terms of curating content and staying true to your brand. For example, the library's brand guidelines at this library state that photography of people, events and programs should be used rather than illustrations or gifts. How do you sort of work through those different sort of branding policies if you need to coordinate with other folks that are making those decisions? Yeah. It's helpful that I work in the same office and was actually on our branding committee. We have a very similar part of our branding where the only images, for example, that can be used on the website are professional photographs. We prefer things that are local and taken of our own programming. But when we don't have that, we have access to getty images for that. We try to minimize stock photography as much as possible. On the other hand, we saw social media as a place where, and for now it's the only place that staff can post their own photographs. Because of the branding, they can't be on the website. So social media was seen as an outlet for that creativity. And photography is something that we have trained staff on, how to use photography to tell the story, that kind of thing. If we have a barrier photography-wise, it's that we have to get written permission for everyone who's recognizable in a photograph. And that can be onerous and definitely get in the way of spontaneity. I hope that answers that question. Yeah, that's helpful. And I know that we touched a little bit on policies. We've gathered some policies that folks have both for internal library policies and external that we're going to be sharing in a little bit on Web Junction. So we'll be sure and let folks know on these event pages when that's available. All right, well, in the interest of time, let's continue on. And for those of you that need to leave at the top of the hour, we will continue to record. So you can certainly circle back and listen to the rest of it when you have a chance. So thank you for being here. Lisa. All right. What I wanted to show here are some examples of what you can accomplish when you have your whole staff behind you and at this point, I've been training staff on social media for, gosh, maybe nine years. So we definitely hit critical mass as far as number of people that know what we're doing on social media. It's also part of the training we give to every new member. So I'm part of the new employee training and I talk about our goals on social media and social media ethics. So if you remember our goals here at Pima County, I want people who read our Facebook page to say at least once a month, God, I love my library. Or, wow, I didn't know I could do that at the library. Or the library helps make our community strong. Or I am welcomed at my library. And I can't, I can't, sitting in the fourth floor of main library, I can't do that without the help of my fellow staff members. And I know many libraries have policies that restrict who can post directly to social media. So I kind of wanted to make an argument for using your staff as ambassadors as well. Because this is how you're going to get the stories of the library and people's lives. It's how you get stories of staff excellence in real time. It's how you find ways to connect with people and local business and community groups. And it really does reinforce the sense that the library is synonymous with your community when you have many more of your staff members posting as the library on social media. What I say is these frontline staff members represent the library face to face every single day. As far as I'm concerned, they are the library voice. And this is the library brand. And I don't really interfere a lot with what they want to do with their branch pages. So isn't this wonderful? This is actually a photograph that is three times as wide. But one of our branches serves neighborhoods that have a very high number of recent immigrants and refugees. And they've made a very concerted effort to have staff that speak these languages. We have a great telephone translation service. But whenever possible, we try to have staff that can speak these languages. So what this branch did for their Facebook page was take pictures of the, you know, 15, 16 staff members holding up signs of the languages they speak natively and then share it on their Facebook page. We have reused this photograph to show, you know, in a number of kind of similar contexts. There's no way I could have really gotten this picture very easily, and it was all on this branch's initiative. Your staff are ambassadors, too. This photograph came from a staff member. Read to a Dog is one of our most popular programs and extremely photogenic. I can't be there to photograph, but the staff can be. And they feed me wonderful things like this. This is another story that, let's see, Amarilla, if I'm pronouncing her name right, and her twin sister come into the library in Sarita a lot. And this one day, Amarilla came in and asked Tanisha if she, the librarian, if she could recite a poem. So I won't show it, but this is a video of Amarilla reciting the poem at the library. And Tanisha listened to her, her mouth dropped, asked Amarilla and her mom if she could get permission, if she would read the story again for the camera, and then got it on social media that day. And, you know, this is just gold. So, yeah, I can't say it enough. Be hyperlocal. Share in real time more often than you schedule posts. Empower your front-line staff with tools like cameras or tablets and training and time. And honestly, at your locations, have a camera or tablet with a camera handy for staff to use. Cesar, it's your turn. Thanks, Lisa. Hey, everyone. This is Cesar Garza again. So I am from the Austin Public Library and we're in the final leg of our webinar here. I am just going to talk about Facebook Live and how we've used it here at APL. I know on the survey that Web Junction and TechSoup have been sharing with folks. I know a number of responses have been about how you do live broadcasting. So I'm hoping to just very quickly show you how it can be done and how it's not as hard as you think. So here at the Austin Public Library to date, December 2017, we have recorded 28 broadcasts. They are archived in the Videos tab of the Austin Public Library Facebook page. If you browse through that tab or at the direct link that we're sharing with you now, you'll see that our live videos have range in topic from crafting to Austin history to e-books to live music and the closing of the Old Central Library, which we had to close in order to open the New Central Library. And on average, our viewership during the broadcast has been from zero, you know, no one watching, to 30 viewers. And that's just an average in that I hope that's not discouraging to people, but for a library Facebook page, my observation has been that it's not that bad. So although the viewership during the broadcast might be discouraging, where you get your most views really happens after the broadcast is over. So for the Austin Public Library, we've had live videos after the fact that have gotten from 350 video views to 6,100 video views. In that last one, the 6,100 video views, it was a video by live broadcast about the closing of the Old Central Library in the lead-up to the opening of the New Central Library. And that video was one of a series of Facebook lives. It's our flagship series that we call Q&APL Live. And this is a series in which we pose a library-related question and then we answer it live. And as it happens, we encourage people who might be watching to ask their own questions or leave their own comments and we answer it live. And so one way you can think about the Q&APL Live is that it's basically just a library FAQ on your website that you then turn into a Facebook Live episode. So, you know, speaking of questions, I think a question that we all have to ask ourselves and maybe other people will ask is why do we need to do Facebook Live, do we even need to do it? And I would say the answer is a big yes. I think we have to do it now. And one reason is an article I'm going to share with you and the link is going to be shared as I speak. It is an article on the website of Forbes.com. It is titled Top 10 Video Marketing Trends and Statistics Roundup 2017. Just the screenshot alone on the slide here has two big talking points, two big points that hit home at the top. One is over 500 million, that's half a billion people who are watching video on Facebook every day. Another big point here is Internet video traffic will be over 80% of all consumer Internet traffic in four years. So the gist here is that our newsfeeds, especially the Facebook newsfeed, is primed for video. So I would say, I would argue that the benefit of Facebook Live is pretty straightforward. A video on Facebook these days generates stronger customer engagement. It is more likely to be shared. And in the sharing, that's where you get more reach and it's that organic free reach that is so elusive to us these days. So now I'm going to share with you some four tips about how to do Facebook Live. And I hope you will find them very helpful. So my first Facebook Live tip is just to borrow ideas from other libraries, see what other libraries are doing. There is an article on the website of libraryjournal.com that is titled Live from the Library. It was published in April of 2017, April of this year. And full disclosure, this article features the Austin Public Library Facebook Live, but it features us alongside other libraries across the country. And I think this article might give you some ideas. For instance, there's other libraries that are doing weekly virtual reference sessions. There are other libraries doing reader's advisory, such as what to read Wednesday. There's other libraries that are using Facebook Live to give a tour of a new exhibition that is being held at the library. And so I think it's a worthwhile article to look at. So the Facebook Live tip number two would be to just equip yourself. Use a smartphone and tripod. All you need is your personal smartphone. And in the picture on the slide here, those are my hands in the lower right corner, my hands peeking into the frame. I'm holding a 6-inch smartphone tripod. And this only costs about $10 or $15, depending on where you buy it from. But I found this very useful because it actually helps me hold my smartphone camera a certain way, and it helps me stabilize the video and reduces handheld shakiness. Now, in my experience, when you record the video, you can get rid of the shakiness completely. It really just comes down to how steady your hand is. But that stabilizer, that tripod, the way you hold it when you hold it up with the phone, it's actually very useful. So all you need is your smartphone and just get a little tripod, and you're good to go. Facebook Live tip number three. Promote the broadcast as a library event. What you're seeing on the slide here is just a screenshot of the way that you might see an upcoming episode of our flagship Facebook Live series, The Q and APL Live. And in addition to the question, this is a Facebook Live we did on November 30th, 2017. So very early on, I decided that we would promote our Facebook Live broadcasts on the library's event calendar. So we would post this Facebook Live as an event next to our story times, next to our classes, next to our book clubs, because it is library staff are using library time and library resources to organize this. So all events are created equal on the library's event calendar. So I put it up there, and that's just one way to promote your event outside of social media. So the last tip, Facebook Live tip number four. Broadcast a fun, focused conversation. Fun as in casual, not overly scripted. It's ultimately up to you how scripted you want it to be and how much you can memorize of a script. I would say don't overdo it and just don't be afraid to make mistakes because those are perfectly fine, and that's part of the charm of Live video, I think, is being able to see just regular people that happen to be library staff members make mistakes and try to recover, and those mistakes become teachable moments as it happens. Spontaneity is fun too, so that's definitely encouraged. So you want to broadcast something fun and you want to make it focused, you know, focused on the question, on a topic, an event, anything related to the library, anything that might get people's interest in coming to the library or using a certain resource. As long as it's focused on something, I think that's all you really need to worry about. So the last part of this tip is just, if it's possible, get yourself a Facebook Live team of three people so that you have one person behind the camera, one person on camera, and one person monitoring comments either on camera or somewhere else in the building, in the library. And I videotape. I record about 99% of the Facebook Live videos. I've recorded all the Q&A PL live series videos, and I'm one whole, it's my smartphone, so I just hold it up and I actually talk to the person on camera and the person monitoring comments. And amongst the three of us, we just kind of chat amongst ourselves, we try to stay on topic, and we just try to invite viewers to join our conversation. And the reason that I think it's important to have someone behind camera talking to the person on camera or just to have some sort of conversation is because earlier in an earlier slide, I mentioned how sometimes we get no one watching. And that does, that will happen, and it's nothing to be discouraged about, but sometimes people just won't watch. So the whole point of Facebook Live is to engage with people watching, and if no one is watching, there's going to be a lot of dead air there. So if you just plan to have some sort of conversation on Facebook Live, you can still be confident in the fact that once it's over, it'll still be viewed. And if, depending on the topic you cover, you can actually use the Facebook Live video and reshare it or take it out of the Facebook by embedding it on your website or a blog or something like that. So that would be the end of my tips here. Wow, fantastic. So exciting, really, really powerful to see the ways you've been using Facebook Live. I wanted to mention that there's, the Milwaukee Public Library, I'm going to put this video in there, live streamed their Lucha Libre event that they hosted just earlier this month. And so that's a perfect example of some pretty big live streaming events that you could do at your library. I just featured them in the Social Library edition that I published just today. And I want to be sure, I forgot to mention that during this session, that I go through a couple times a month and find examples of things that libraries are doing mostly on Facebook. And APL was featured for their live streaming in an earlier edition of Social Library, one of the ways that I tracked Caesar down. So I really want to thank you for sharing all of those great tips. There have been some great questions specific to Facebook Live. Thanks for the tip on the equipment that you use. People were curious how you keep steady. Someone asked about using a laptop versus a mobile phone, and it sounds like your focus is really looking out, not necessarily sitting behind your laptop and speaking, that's correct, right? That is correct, Jennifer. That's a good question. We've funded more, I suppose, the video to be more interesting if I move around a little bit. And sometimes, you know, if I use any smartphone, really, I don't think you can zoom in as the video is happening. So you literally have to be sometimes in your co-worker's face to talk to them and make the video. So I do the tripod because it lets me move around. It lets me create a different shot and frame it in different ways just to make it interesting to look at on top of everything else. Okay, yeah, and it seems like an iPad. I've seen people using iPads for that purpose. Yeah, I think can. iPads are larger than iPhones, so iPads are heavier, and it's just totally up to you if you're willing to hold up an iPad with your bare hands if you don't have a stabilizer for 20 or 30 minutes. If you're comfortable doing that, then absolutely, yeah. Right. So there have been a couple questions about how long your segments are. Someone talked about would it be a good idea to use to record a book club meeting? How long are your segments usually? On average, our Facebook Live segments are between 15 and 20 minutes, and that's especially true in the RPL Live series where we pose the question and then answer it. Sometimes we don't really need more than 30 minutes to do that. There has been one or two Facebook Lives, which was, I think, an author talk that was given. I didn't record it, but it happened on our Facebook page, and that talk was about an hour long. I guess it really just depends on how much, like, on the topic itself, on our Facebook Live video, not just as it happens, but maybe afterward. If it's something you want to recycle in some way, certainly it can be longer than 30 minutes, or certainly it can be an entire author talk from beginning to end. It's really just up to you how you want to use it. I would just recommend to be strategic about it. Do you want to just have this is going to be a one-off event where it's never going to happen again, then maybe you do want to capture it again. Okay. There's a great question about any tips for making your Facebook Live episodes handicapped accessible. Have you, I see some Facebook, I don't think I've ever seen the live sessions closed caption, but have you investigated how to do that? I have investigated the closed captioning, and we cannot close captions through when you do Facebook Live so that's where I'm kind of, we're kind of stuck in the way because all I have available is the mobile device. The way to do closed captioning is you would need to feed your Facebook Live video through, I think, you would need like a laptop or computer with certain software, and you connect the laptop to like a high-end camera and then the camera feeds, and you record Facebook Live through the camera into your computer, and then you just set up in order for the closed captioning to happen. Okay. Yeah, so it's a little complicated. That's good to know. Worth investigating for sure. Yeah, excellent. All right. Well, somebody put a sort of a big question out there, and I just want to put it out there verbally. Someone said, will the loss of net neutrality affect the way Facebook interacts and chat as well? I don't know if either of you have comments on that at this point. Well, my understanding is net neutrality, it's going to change because of Congress or the Communications Commission, but it's not changing just yet, so it remains to be seen how it's going to affect libraries and Facebook Live. Right, right. Yeah. I could think of is that one of the things we saw before the rules were in place during the Obama Administration was that large corporations were flowing other corporations broadcast to a trickle, and I think if that's one of the effects that we can probably count on Twitter and Facebook to protect their bandwidth and yeah, I'm not really worried about social media. Yeah, well, it will certainly be interesting to see what comes. I do wanted to also, you mentioned, Cesar, that you use events to let folks know when you have live events coming up. Do you also communicate that kind of information directly with your ambassadors? Is that a part of your message, or do you just assume that they're probably following and we'll jump in with their ambassadorship through the Facebook, or through their feeds? Sometimes we do communicate our upcoming live broadcast. We certainly communicated the fact that we had scheduled a live broadcast before we closed the old Central Library in order to open the new Central Library. That was a big push for us. We don't do it all the time. Sometimes the ambassadors on their own will find out that we're doing it because we've tried to clue them into the fact that we schedule our live broadcast as much as possible ahead of time. It's a little of both. Sometimes they'll find it on their own and sometimes we'll email them about it. If we don't do either of those things, we just leave it on the event calendar and just go with it. Is your mobile device your own or the library's? It is my own device. It's my personal iPhone. I'm not able to get from my library an iPhone, so I just use my own. It's okay because I use a Facebook account that technically belongs to the Austin Public Library. I use that account to log into the Facebook app, but anything you do with Facebook Live, it goes directly to the Facebook page. There's nothing being saved on my personal device. There's nothing that can be captured there. It's just all directly into Facebook, so that's why I'm comfortable using my personal device. Okay, excellent. I see a little bit of some folks sharing the connection between YouTube and Facebook in terms of as an option for adding captions. I do know that that can be done. I'll try to seek out some resources that outline that process and add that to the event page, but if anyone's got that experience, feel free to chime in. A reminder too that the Facebook groups that we mentioned, especially the libraries and social media group, is an excellent place to get tips from others who have been exploring some of these great ideas as well. Every day I go and I'm amazed at all the great ideas that I see shared there. If you're running into problems, you might be stumped or need a little inspiration. Be sure to head on over there as well. Well, I'm going to we've got just a couple more things since we've got a bit of time. I was really curious also to check in with folks. I mentioned that the survey is something that we've been collecting and if you haven't yet taken the survey, you have a little bit more time. We're going to close it down and start looking at the results of the survey and share those results with you after the new year. Thanks to TechSoup for helping us with this great work. In the survey, one of the questions we asked you all is about what you are using social media for. One of the questions or one of the ways we looked at your responses was to understand the ways that you would like to start using Facebook or start using social media more. I thought we would have a little bit of interactivity here and get some thoughts from you all on how you would like to use your social media a little bit more. I'm going to give you access to our annotation tools. You'll see over to the far left corner of the slide, there's a little marker. If you click on that marker, it will turn blue and you'll get this panel on the left side of your menu. Go down to the square and then there's another little teeny tiny arrow that gives you access to a check mark. Click on that check mark and feel free to use this slide to test your check mark. I'll know that you all have checked once I see all those check marks coming up there. Excellent. All right. Now I'm going to ask you to hold your check mark. I'd love for you to think about three of the things that you see that you would like to explore a little bit further. Hold your check mark, everybody. Hold your check mark. Here are some of the top ideas that folks talked about wanting to start using on social media more. I know some of these are a little bit more platform specific, but some of them cross over. I think everyone's ready to livestream after your presentation, Caesar. I'm glad to hear that. That will be good to circle back and take a look at what libraries are doing. This idea of images of work I love the way people talk about staff as ambassadors. I think we can always do a better job of really showing all the different things that are happening, all the different roles that we play in libraries. I love that. Readers or reference advisory looks like another top. It looks like lots of people are saying all of the above as well. So those of you who are answering here probably have in the survey already. Well, I'm so excited that people are excited about exploring some of the different ways to use social media. I encourage you all to for sure take a closer look if you were not part of the earlier sessions because we dive a little bit deeper into some of the other platforms. I know we were really focused on Facebook talking more generally about Facebook today. So be sure to check those out. As I mentioned, we will be I'll follow up with you today once today's recording is available. And all of those recordings will be available to you all to share with your colleagues and teammates. Perhaps some of your youth advisory board folks if you have teens engaged with your social media, lots of folks who benefit from the learning. And again the Facebook group libraries and social media, Lisa Bunker is one of the founders of that group. So really great to have Lisa's expertise and look forward to seeing more folks joining in in the conversations in that group as well. And I want to thank especially Molly for joining us as a TechSoup for Libraries staffer and being here for the series with us. It's been really great working with you and thank you again to Cesar and Lisa for your great work and we look forward to continuing to follow all the great work you all are doing in your libraries and being prepared for whatever is to come with social media and our communities that use them. So thank you all very much for being here and thank you to our captioner for today. Thank you everyone have an excellent day. Take care everybody. Bye bye.