 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. You can call us that. We won't be offended. We embrace our webinar-ness. We cover a variety of things or anything that may be of interest to libraries, librarians, many library activities and topics we are happy to have on the show. The show is free and open to anyone to watch so you can join us on Wednesday mornings at 10 a.m. central time when we do the show live or if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays you can always go to our website and see all of our recordings of all of our previous shows are all available there as well free and available to anyone to watch. And we do a mixture of things here, presentations, book reviews, interviews, sometimes many training sessions. As I said, anything library related, we want to have it on the show. We do have Nebraska Library Commission staff, of course, do presentations sometimes, but we also bring on guest speakers often. And that's what we have this morning on the line with us today is Maurice Coleman. Hi, Mo. Hi, everyone out there. And Maurice is, he's a bunch of things. He is the host of tea. I mean that in a good way. Yes, yes. He is the host of Tea is for Training, which is a podcast done every other Friday, I believe it is. Every other Friday at 2 p.m. afternoon. He's on the ALA learning roundtable. I am the program chairperson for the ALA learning roundtable. So if you go to ALA and hate the programs there, come find me. We have someone to complain to. I did see you were trying to recruit people to be there this year to join in in some of the programming. Back in 2010, he was one of the library journals Movers and Shakers, of course. And he is also as kind of a day job in addition to all that, because you need more. A technical trainer at the Hartford County Public Library in Maryland. So he's online with us from the East Coast. It's drizzle snorkel. It's not quite the monsoon we've had over the last couple of months, but it's reminiscent of it. Well, I hope you say dry. And this morning I've asked Moe's on to talk about social media, which is a nice big vague topic, of course, because yeah. But just how to do it well. You know, it's something that a lot of people have been doing for a long time, of course. Facebook, Twitter, whatnot has been around for years. But there's lots of people brand new to it or wanting to maybe revamp, restart what they're doing. So I asked Marisa to come on and give us his tips and tricks and thoughts on that. So I will just hand over to you to take it take over and tell us what you think. Okay, well, thank you everybody. And Chris, did you mention about questions during this whole thing? Yeah, if you have any questions you can ask at any time throughout the show. You don't have to wait till the end. Yeah, yeah, we'll take questions throughout. So yes, feel type into the questions section whenever you get the urge. Or if you have a microphone, like I said, let me know and you have a microphone and I can unmute you and you can ask your question that way. Okay, so Chris asked me to talk about doing smart social media online. And throughout the hour we'll be together, you'll see, I do have some slides to help you focus and give you something purdy to look at every once in a while. But I don't just call it social media. I call it media because it's what it is. It really is me. It's not just social media. It happens to have more social elements to it. But it is still a form of media. So I tell you a little bit about me as my presentation doesn't move. There we go. Come on. There we go. Alrighty. I am Maurice Coleman as Chris mentioned. You can find me on the Twitter engine at baldgeekinmd. Or you can find me at my Decnight Day Job email address. You can feel free to contact me. I do talk to people all over the country, yes, including Maryland libraries, about various things. Which is why thank you, Christopher, for inviting me on the program. And all my images are used with permission via Creative Commons or by right of the folder of the copyright. Thank you very much. Let me tell you a little bit about me and my background and my library's background. I've been working in libraries for the last 10 years. And before that, I was a consultant and grantmaker and all sorts of things and technical assistance person in New York City. Came down to Maryland, got a job at the local library because they finally asked me to work there since I was in the library so much. And a little bit about my library. My library is a county system. 11 branches and two service vehicles. We have a blend of truly everything. My library system has almost every type of library within its borders. Very rural. Our Weiford branch has a hitching post because as I have learned working here, Amish folks really love their DVDs. We have branches that are primarily surrounded by farms. We have migrant farm workers who come to our northern branches. Our northern part of our county is extremely rural. We have bedroom communities of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. D.C. is about an hour and a half away, but still close enough we have folks trained down to D.C. or drive every day. We are approximately two hours away, two and a half hours away from New York City, an hour away from Philadelphia, hour and a half away from Philadelphia, so people go up there to work. It is a very pretty place. Oh, and I forgot about a very large military base down the bottom. We have, as it says on the screen, Amish rural farm, suburban, military and urban populations. An urban population, yes, if you have an urban issue, we have had it here at Hartford County. We're just not big. We're just sort of that thing in microcosm. We're sort of the terrarium-owned library. We serve a quarter of a million customers and we were just named a library journal three-star library. You'll also notice down the lower right-hand corner of the screen that HCPL's Twitter handle is there. You'll find HCPL online. If you search for us using the Google Enter or go to our website, HCPLonline.org, you will see a whole listing of the various things that we use here at HCPL. So let's talk about some ways, before we talk about ways of doing it, let's talk about ways of not to do it smartly. Either you are not, you don't have enough organizational commitment or you're lacking in audience engagement. Those are those two different things. People who do not do social media well, if I take a look or if anyone's a critical, I will take a look at what you're doing. These are the two different things that will pop up that you'll say, oh, that's why they are not doing it. So let's talk a bit about commitment. Some of you may know the story of breakfast, how in a bacon and egg breakfast the chicken was involved with the pig was committed. That can be applied to using social media for engaging in forming community. You have to choose to do it right to get good results. Just having a Google Plus presence or oh, we have a Twitter feed or surely have a Facebook page and why we have an Instagram account. We have a good Reads presence because we like to show people what books we're reading here at the library. It means absolutely nothing if you're not committed as a library to doing it right. So some folks doing, you know, doing it smart, doing it not smart is not taking it seriously. This is a fictional conversation, a typical conversation between me as an outside library person, a library consultant, hey, you have to come in and say, hey, talk to you about stuff. And this particular will call this person the director. So the director would say, we're at the cutting edge. We have a Twitter account and a Facebook page and a Google Plus page. Me, that's great. What was the last time you posted something on it? Well, eight months ago, we ended summer reading. We had a really successful program last year. We wanted people to know about it. Nothing sense? No, we haven't had anything to say. You can insert me shaking my head here. To make great connections via social media, you have to be committed to taking it seriously. And by taking it seriously, that means committing to do it. Not just do it when you have something really good, but always having some sort of content. Libraries always have content. It's a matter of thinking about that content, thinking about what they do in a way that would translate well to media coverage. Also, some people think doing it is easy. Sure, I'll just crack open. I'll just have a Google Plus account. All right, you have an account. Slap a little logo on the front page of your website, which is also a marketing tool. Social media, media is marketing. Marketing is media. Your website is a big marketing tool. Slaping that logo up there and saying, hey, connect with us too. Oh, I like us on Facebook. Well, there's nothing there to like on Facebook that's newer than six months. Then the person's not going to engage with you. Again, it is not easy. It takes time. It takes commitment. It takes energy to take pictures, postmessages, answer questions, monitor feeds, and to continually engage your audience. A way of not doing it smart is to marginalize it. To let the young people in your library do it, or the new library, or that little project over there. Lighten that techie library, or the CERC person handle your entire new media presence. That is okay if your new media presence is involved and integrated with other forms of media and marketing that you do as a library. It's fine to physically have someone else do it. Maybe they're comfortable doing it. It'll give them a chance to showcase their skills, get them involved. You want to keep them around your library, or you just don't have enough warm bodies to do it, and it happened to fall on this person. The person physically doing it doesn't matter their position. The whole thing has to be an integral part of what you're doing. Integral part of what you're doing. Just as if you were asked to be a spokesperson, essentially the people who are doing your social media are spokespeople for your library. So think of them in any other way, anyone who represents your library, their guidelines, their rules, where would you have them in the planning process plan for this person? If you have an event, have a great event, you have an insert famous author coming through town, and they're coming to your library, or a really wonderful program that's not done very often in your state, you should have that person at that program, sending out, before again, sending out informational tweets or Facebook posts or Instagram photos, setting up for this event, backstage selfies, etc. If the thing is marginalized, it will not work for you, and it will be your fault. If you're the administrator, it'll be your fault because you didn't integrate it into your media plan. Oh, another way of not doing it smartly is to make it random and not targeted. You cannot just throw things out there as a way of communicating with the audience, and you can't just randomly scatter shot do it. You have to have some sort of plan, just like everything else. Again, even in a small library, you can have a very basic essential media plan. How do we cover this? Who do we talk to? Who are our friends? Who do we connect with? Who shares our information? Who do we need to know? Even the smallest library, you can do this, all these things scale. You do it to the best of your ability. Yes, if it's you, the director, with your phone, and you're posting stuff to Instagram, and your people in your community are following you on Instagram, that works because people are seeing what you're doing. You're now you're, they get immediacy of the interaction. Make sure it's targeted, targeted, targeted, just don't randomly do stuff somewhere and say, well, no one showed up, no one responded to it. Well, if your folks aren't there, we'll talk about that in a little bit. If no one's there, that's why they're not going to respond and not dedicating enough time to it. Yes, that means you may have to not do one particular thing. But if this is important enough for you to think about and important for you to have an account, then it's important enough for you to dedicate time and resources to it. And resources, I mean, again, staff time, and hash. You may have to buy something. You may have to get a sub. If you're a small library, you may have to bring someone in to work the customer service areas while someone does this. If it's important enough to bring more people to your library so you can hire that person full time, if it's all part of your media, you may have to bring someone in. If you don't dedicate enough time and you let your feed drop by the wayside, you will get dead air, which is just as bad when using newish media as it is with not quite as new media, television, or radio. What happens is this is what people will see. This is what your folks will see. It will lead to your new media being a test pattern. Again, someone, a library that doesn't do stuff for a month, especially with newish media, it was any media, it was any type of communication. But especially with this, that a media see is the corner of the realm, you're a test pattern. That's all your, you're just a test pattern. And you become background noise and more importantly become irrelevant. Your customers will disengage from the information and that's what you don't want them to do. You don't want them to disengage from the conversation. All right, this may be a good second if anyone out there has any questions, if you could relate them to me. I'll wait a minute. This is purposeful dead air as it were. Yes. Yes, sometimes it's take people time. I know to type everything they want to type, so I always give a little. Yes, do you have any questions or comments, thoughts on what Mo was just saying? I did have a question, but then you said you're going to address it later, so I think I might say, waiting to get to it. Just how do you figure out where users are where to target? But I think you said you're going to get into that later, because I know that's an important thing is, well, where should we be if we're not supposed to be here? If they didn't find our stuff there, yeah. Here's a simple question, ask them. Two words, ask them. So, do you use social media, yes or no? Okay, what do you use? It's the same thing as, it's the same thing as if you want to capture any other data about your customers. What do you do? You ask them. You ask them, do a survey, just ask whatever, yep. If you're in a small enough library, usually you know your customers, and most libraries are your customers. Ask them, hey, do you use insert and do our media thingy here or do you read this newspaper? Is that someplace that you would look for information about us? If not, where would you look for information about us? Ask them, where would you look? Where would you expect to see us? Right, where would you expect to see us and where would it be nice to see us? Engage your users, it's all part about user engagement. And also, those users that are not just physical but digital users, put something on your website. You can do a survey, you can embed a survey on your website. Not all of your users are actually physically coming into your building. Right, your users who do not physically come into your building are just as important as the users who do physically come into your building. So are we, no, any questions out there Chris? No, it doesn't look anything urgent came in, nothing came in while we were chatting, so I'd say let's go on and see if something else catches our attention, yep. All right, let's just make sure everyone's awake out there. That's what I always hope for. So we talked a bit about the chicken and the egg. Let's talk a bit about engagement as my computer lives behind. Let's talk a little bit about engagement. There it is, okay. Let's talk about how to engage with the newer quote unquote media. And really the engagement is all about you creating the content. That is the biggest thing. You, the user are creating the content. The tenant behind the newest web as opposed to some big mountaintop. Here is our stuff. You can access our stuff at any time. The people who are accessing stuff are also people that are producing stuff, which can lead to different levels and different forms of engagement. But really engagement is the key. It's always the key. It's a key to engage your customers where there are a point of entry, their point of access, whether it's a digital customer or a physical customer. If you are too quiet, your communication will fall in deaf ears since you won't be relevant and right now. Make sure that your social media engagement is conversational, not defensive. Sticks in the stones may break your bones, but a disengaged and defensive voice will make your use of new media muddy at best and tragic at worst. It's conversational. It's not defensive. If someone doesn't like what you're doing is a library policy and because of the, shall we say, anonymity of the internet, sometimes folks are more than likely to really not act with the best of etiquette being anonymous. And that's fine. But you as an organization, you as a representable organization, by the way, anyone who's posting to social media because individuals are posting it, you are representing your library, especially if you're doing it by a library count. Do not get defensive. Someone doesn't like something, someone wants to challenge a book, etc. You do not get defensive. Everyone has their own opinion. We have methods for doing this, etc. You do not have to get defensive. You do not have, don't get defensive, really. Do not be confrontational. Be conversational. It's about having and carrying on a conversation with your customers. You also don't have to be perfect. You do not have to have four or five people edit 140 character tweet before you send it out. You don't have to be perfect. People who use the newer media, who use user generated content, understand that perfection is not, it's certainly a goal to look for, but it is not, don't be paralyzed by it. You have to be immediate. You have to be relevant. You have to be timely. Don't have to be perfect. A month ago, a month or so ago, an airline retweeted an inappropriate picture. The first responsible for that mess up was not canned immediately. The airline spokesperson recognized that we're not all perfect. And this person made a mistake. It was a quick retweet of something. They probably didn't even get a really good look at it. They just said, oh, okay, you know, they mentioned our airline. Let me retweet it out and say, hey, it does sound like a really good thing. But it was a really heavily inappropriate picture. But the message in that tweet was appropriate for the airline. And the airline didn't care. I thought that was rather mature. And it showed them some intelligence about using social media. You don't have to be perfect. People make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. You don't have to have the perfectly worded every single media, new, engaged, individual media, blast thing. Your Facebook posts, it shouldn't have relatively decent grammar. But it doesn't have to be perfect. It don't be the place that has 18 people added a tweet. It's 140 characters. Really quick. Remember to use back to, we talked about a little bit, the conversational professional voice, not personal attack. Even if you think that customer is a full-blown idiot and they're calling you and your library and you as director or you as a manager an idiot, you don't call them an idiot. You can think they're an idiot, but you don't call them an idiot. Use that professional voice all the time. The high road is always best. It all communication. Remember this even when in casual conversation with customers on Facebook. It is a public faith. It is a public presence, which means professional voice. Pretend you are out at the Chamber of Commerce luncheon. You're representing the library. That's exactly the way you deal with engagement in any of these types of media. You think you, because you never know who's going to share what. My director here at Harper County Public Library answers questions directly for our customers on our Facebook page. She is usually the one that will send out a message on Facebook if we're closed. We get no days. And she makes a decision in a very, very, very early hour of the morning. And she will put it on our Facebook page and say, hey, we're not going to be open today, but the library is always open at, insert our web address here, hcplonline.org. You can get a book. You can download a movie. You can do all these different things. You always have access to our databases. Just be physically or not open today. But you can always access the library. And you can access our 24-hour library and through our local access to our virtual library. So the library is pretty much open. You just can't get your hand on the latest DVD or book or talking book or children's toilet or puppet, et cetera, that we have here at hcpl. It is always best to ignore the spammers, ignore the stalkers, and ignore the trolls that come along with all this engaged media. As I mentioned before, the anonymity of the internet is sometimes a wonderful thing to help shy people engage. It could also help creepy people be creepy people. So ignore all those folks, ignore those spammers, ignore those stalkers, ignore those trolls who may disagree with you on every single thing. We want to challenge you. That's a stupid idea. Why did the library do that? Why are you wasting my tax money, et cetera, et cetera. In the internet arena, it is usually best to ignore the spammers, ignore the stalkers, and ignore the trolls. And unfortunately, libraries always have creeps attempting to scare you away from your mission, which indicates that any of these type of media outlets is to inform and engage your public. That's what you're there for. You should also encourage, not incite to riot. Encourage your customers to communicate with you. Encourage them either as Chris and I talked about briefly, a little bit, you know, do a survey, a card, take two seconds, hey, you connect with us on Facebook, put at the bottom of your receipt. This is how you connect with us. If you go home, hey, connect with us on Instagram, look at us at this address. Look up this user, that's us. We'd like to connect with you. We want to share what we're doing to be a bigger part of your lives. You want to encourage that communication. The people who do that engagement wrong incite argument and flame wars, and they do not encourage proper internet behavior. So always be the model of how you want people to engage with you. That is part of that commitment to engage. You're committed and you're engaged. If you do those two things, you will have a great social media presence. And this is a good time, Chris, if you want to take a couple of questions, if there are any. Sure. Yeah, does anybody have any questions? I did have someone who did comment earlier to that. They're awake. They just didn't have any questions at the time. Does anybody have any questions or thoughts about using the new media that we're using now? And while people are typing, it's strange to do these webinars. I've done them for you many years. And you just never know. With some platforms, people are talking all the time. At least now, there's no one engaged. And some platforms, it's hard to see whether or not people are talking. So you don't know if they fall asleep at their keyboard. It is difficult, yes. When you were talking earlier about not having to have like 10 people decide what your tweet's going to be, I think that kind of made me think about what you said in the beginning about having your administration be engaged, involved in it, having their confidence that you can do this, whoever's doing it can do it. So there's a lot of trust from above that you definitely need to have that whoever they've decided will be in charge, knows what they're doing, can do it right, and can do it without, you know, if you have that trust from the administration, give you a lot of confidence, I think, in being able to just put out there what you want to say and say it well. Because you're not, it's no different. We're going to talk about this, but I'm always going to talk about this, Chris, but thank you very much that nice, soft fall. It is no different than engaging this way than if someone represents you at, say, the Chamber of Commerce luncheon, or on a listserv, or at a state conference, etc. It is no different. Libraries trust their staff to represent them in meetings at a local, state, regional, national, international level. This is just another, this is just a different place. It is the exact same thing. It's that weirdness that people get, no matter what, if it's something to do with, it was an on-off button, they're completely different rules, which I just don't understand. But why make more work for yourself? Yeah, just think of it as the same as those situations. And yeah, it's just in a different location. Right. Yeah. It's exactly the same. It's exactly the same. You trust your staff to represent you on listservs. And listservs are places where sometimes people get into some serious, very vociferous arguments about minutiae on listservs. And if they had those same things on, let's say, Facebook, people go, oh my God, they don't know how to use Facebook. The same thing they're doing on a listserv. That same conversation. It's just the context of the conversation change and the venue and the message delivery method. That's all. Okay. Well, it doesn't look like anything came in. So let's go ahead. Move on. All right. Cool. Let me show you how to smartly use new media. So you have these accounts. You don't know what to do with them. You want to effectively incorporate it into your library's online presence. Great. Here are some tips to do that. First thing you have to figure out is who are you? Know thyself. Know yourself as a library. Are you willing to commit the time, the resources, the learning curve, the money to do this at all, and more importantly to do it right? Are you just exploring your social media, which is fine too. If you're just exploring, that's cool. That's know who you are. Know what you're doing. What do you hope to accomplish? Do you just hope to place a few things out there and see what happens? Do you want to truly use this as another method of engaging your community? Really have smart bold, strategic measurable, actionable bold for using all of your media, not just social media. But figure out who you are as a system, who you are as a library. What do you want to accomplish with it? Why do you want to reach the people you want to reach? I have a question about that or a thought. This is something that you may have already done. This new social media that everyone's using now. How did you use to promote your stuff before Facebook and this stuff existed? Did you have a newsletter or did you put a weekly thing in the local paper or radio ad or whatever, the same thought process that went into doing those, you just carry over into this. It's not really something you have to reinvent necessarily. Exactly. It's like, Krista, I swear he didn't send me this. But really, you're absolutely right, Krista. What do you do with traditional communication? If you really think about it, ladies and gentlemen, traditional communication, radio is relatively new. Radio is 100 years old-ish. Television, full mass media, what, 60 years? It's not that old. Newspapers, I've been around for a little while. But what do you do with that traditional methods of communication? What, how do you have guidelines for staff to represent the library and traditional communication methods? Television stations, television reporters, newspapers, newspaper reporters, the local light and shopper, like a local advert paper. How do you have folks represent you in book talks, public presentations, media, on-listers, writing letters to the library? What do you do with traditional communication? If you already do this stuff with traditional communication, you don't need anything different. I'm about to say something about that. Do you trust your staff enough to engage in these areas without stringent guidelines that you should trust them enough when it comes to newer media? So remember that you as a library, you are Clark Kent. You are the reporter. You generate the content. You're really both Clark Kent and Jimmy Olson. You're the reporter. You're the photographer. You're also Perry White, the editor. You're also Superman because you're a librarian. You can do everything, passes, being bullet, et cetera, et cetera. But you are Clark Kent. You are the reporter. You can be everywhere. And that means if you engage improperly, soaking your library customer. I mentioned that author comes to town. Say James Patterson came to your town. You're backstage with James Patterson. He's sitting in your break room, taking a minute beforehand, writing his 18th book of the day. And you decide to take a little selfie with James Patterson. Hey, James Patterson, we take a picture together. Sure, bam, take a selfie with James Patterson. You put that out to your customer and say, hey, we're backstage with James Patterson, who's about to speak here at the super awesome library in the middle of Nebraska. How cool is that? Your community knows you're engaged. You brought a very famous author here. That's a check mark. The people who are there at the event are going to get excited because they may be looking right at their phones. Oh my God, he really is here. He's right backstage. He's not just a hand puppet of him here. Your community partners will think, wow, they got James Patterson here? Good grief. That's pretty cool. I need to get involved with that. You can get people involved and engaged without them being there. That's the coolest thing. And again, as Clark Kent with a cell phone, you can do all these things, almost all newer media, quote unquote social media, have the ability to post and share from cellular phone. So I'm not designed to do that strictly from cellular phone. Send a little video, have James Patterson do a 10 second Vine video about your library or about your town. That how cool is that? That's like what the radio stations do when they get all the people to say, you're listening to blah, blah, but I'm so-and-so and you're listening to blah, blah, blah radio station. It's like a five second thing. Yep, exactly how it is. You can broadcast that before ever and ever. They say, hey, it's James Patterson. And while you're on hold here at the blah, blah, blah, the North Platte Public Library, you should come in and check out our latest books, including my latest book, Fill in the Blank Here, written with Fill in the Blank Here a Person, because I come out with a book every week. You'll always be something new by me on the shelf. Come join us, something like that. So again, what do you do with non-social media? Again, how do you deal with television, radio, and newspapers? How do you deal with those reporters? Because you are the reporter. Each of those now traditional outlets, again, were new at some point. How do you as a library and how does your library staff engage with your local media? That's very important. And remember, your name is your faith. Try as much as possible as a library. This goes personally, too, to have a consistent and easy to remember name as organization's virtual news, social media, networking identity. This truly is your brand. We are HCPL online. That is our Twitter handle. That is how you can find us on the web. You just Google HCPL online and there, Hartford County Public Library pops up. Try as much as possible and have a very consistent, easy to use thing that people can remember. Because your name is your faith. Your name is your faith. I put a logo of your library up, too. And that's kind of cool. Your logo or your building, et cetera. If you're proud, you can have some sort of brand new building set up. Or show pictures of it. If you get a new building, that's a great deal of new media. You can put up proper supports. Just people are there watching a slow motion video of the building of your library. Now, social media policies, in my humble opinion, are redundant. If you already have a corporate communication policy, and we touched, Chris and I touched on that, of saying this is how we officially communicate across all media is a great first step. You probably have some weirdly informal one. Or you should have a formal one, but make it a very simple thing. Don't be a fill-in-the-blank. This is what Wheaton says about internet communication. Don't be an idiot. It's don't be an idiot. Okay. Now, values of idiot are different for others, but usually idiot is idiot. Here at HTPL, we have an official organization-wide, system-wide Facebook page. But we also have, for each branch, they have their own Facebook pages, so they can promote what they're doing in the branch directly. That doesn't have to come through multiple lines of corporate communication. We trust that no one's going to show people inappropriately behaving or have inappropriate communication. And again, I can't emphasize this more. If you already have people who are doing this in other forms of communication, and then it's just a matter of changing the delivery method when you're dealing with these newer types of engagement, and you're also ready for stuff that will come later. No one can predict the future. If you get me at ALA, get me talking about library futureists. That'll set me off, because no one can predict the future. We can prepare for the future, but we can predict some things about the future in generalities. But no one can prepare for the future. No one can predict the future. Yes. I hate that word. Yeah, I hate that. Library futureists. You couldn't tell the future was 18 months ago. Oh yeah, the way things are moving so fast now. I'm just going to say that these policies, if you write them vaguely enough, and I mean vague in a good way, that what you just said, when something new is invented next year, your policy already covers it. Right. Don't say, this is how we do things in newspapers and TV, and then say, ah, now we got to make a new one, but how we do things on Facebook. No, yeah. It's a simple, this is how we act when we communicate and represent the library policy. Make it as simple as possible, make it as broad as possible. So you were asking before, Chris, a little bit about, so how do you know where are you? Where are you going to do all of this engagement? Ask your customers. If you want to reach them, ask where they are, and if they're not there, that's okay. You can still be there, but you're leading the way. Sometimes you're ahead of the curve. Sometimes you're in the middle of the pack. As libraries, we're usually ahead of the curve when it comes to these things. But really, ask your customers, ask those digital customers, ask those physical customers. Again, remind them, why don't you network with them? Join with us, be with us. Here, this is how we, a new way of getting in touch with you. That's a little faster than before. You know, it's not a newsletter, we love our newsletter, but here, this is our newsletter ultra-like. Here's a great event coming up that's now open for registration. Here, did you know that our storytime is still open for two-year-olds? We're doing a baby's love of books storytime, or we're doing animal storytime this month in honor of Shark Week, I don't know, Monster Week. We'll do a Monster short storytime. But you can engage your customers that way. And where are you engaged them? Are your customers on Facebook? If yes, then you sure as heck should be on Facebook. So remember, if you do anything, a scattershot representing your library, it doesn't make any sense. It won't make sense. It wastes time and it wastes money. 20 years of technology training and consulting have taught this fact still eludes many people. And you say, oh, what the heck? Now, it's okay. You don't have to paralyze our perfection, but you at least have to have a little bit of idea of what you want to do. Just don't throw it out there. Okay, you throw it out there. Where are your people happen to be? Where are the people you want to reach? Where do they happen to be? That's where you reach them. That's where you start. If your folks are not technologically savvy, or if they're bandwidth states, and they can't get to a lot of these states, that's okay. Engage in where they are. If they're more tactile paper, then engage in tactile and paperly. It doesn't matter as long as you engage them. Who cares how? You just leave yourself in terms of new media open to it. It's okay if your community isn't there yet. You can lead the way, show them how to use it, show them great uses for it, and do the best you can. Don't be paralyzed by perfection. Okay, some people still use email lists. Some people use the good old hands. Here's our newsletter. Here's our bookmark to communicate. Remember, social media is about now. Social media is about now. It's not about five minutes. It's not about six months ago. It's about now. It is immediate. It's meant to be somewhat ephemeral. It's a browsing collection of information. It's boom. There it is. Great. Hey, that's a piece of information. Great. I may be able to use that later. Okay. Ooh, what's your sexy favorite information? Ooh, that's wonderful. That's really cool. Also, as a library, you should make sure to know what folks are saying about you out there. Make sure you Google your library. Google yourself. Google your staff in terms of the library, what people are saying about your library. You just never know. All right. So to recap, to review, remember, you have to have commitment and engagement. Usually it's an either or, but again, libraries who fail at social media who do not do it smartly, fail either with not being committed enough or not being engaged enough or both. Don't be paralyzed by perfection. Remember, it has to be immediate, relevant, and timely, not perfect. Remember who you are, who you are as a library, know thyself and know thy customer. Where are the people you want to reach? And that your social media policies are truly redundant. So you don't, if someone asks me, do you have a social media, do you have a copy of a social media policy? I immediately flip it back on them and say, do you have a regular corporate communication policy? Do you have a library communication policy? What's your policy? Well, it's X, Y, and Z. Well, then you have a social media communication policy. It's right there. You just said it. It's your organizational communication policy. And social media is about the now. It really is immediate, and it's a great way of engaging your customers and engaging your community and engaging other libraries. So with that, it is 11, oh, I'm sorry, my time, it's 11.49. So it's 10.49. And I want to thank you. You know time zones is good. Yes. Well, if doing T is for training, I have to constantly figure, okay, two o'clock is one o'clock is three o'clock. Who knows what. And someone in Alaska completely throws me off. Just set your where? From T minus one Pacific call. Okay. Really? So here, there's time for questions. I'm done. And are there any questions? Yes, we do have a one that came in. Anybody has any questions, comments, thoughts, type them in. If you have any cool things that you've done media-wise or show social media-wise that you want to share, like your success stories, type them in, or even maybe failures, people who can learn from those as well. You tried something and it just didn't work. One comment from someone here. We've got our Nebraska Library Commission staff watching our show from another room. It says, you know your presentation is going well and people are listening when they can anticipate your next topic or slide. That was amazing. Honestly, he did not send me any of this ahead of time. It just popped into my head. And I hope people believe me. But they do have a question, too. What is your opinion on Facebook advertising to promote your library? I assume they mean when you do the pay for the ads thing. I think is that what you're talking about, the question? I think it's a good return on investment personally. That's my opinion. I think it is. I've seen the cost of it is, yes, the money, the ones that you pay for, yeah. Yeah. If you compare it to what you get, it's really cheap, yeah. It's cheap. And Facebook has all faith. This is true. Facebook being a scary monster that it is. In turn, if I'm a business person, you think of this as a business person, not as a wonderful social action team as your library. As a business person, how much coin am I dropping to get my information from the eyeballs of people that are important to me? Who are the people important to me if they can isolate the people in Lincoln, Nebraska? And I am the Lincoln Public Library. I'm assuming it's just Lincoln Public Library. Lincoln City Library is actually what we're called. Lincoln City Library. Okay, I'm Lincoln City Library. If I know that Facebook can put my stuff in front of the eyeballs of people who identify themselves as living here in Lincoln, that's pretty cheap, directed marketing. And you know, with one billion, one seventh of the world on Facebook, someone in the community is going to be on Facebook. And you can reach that person. That's a way of engaging that person. They can become your Facebook ambassador. Again, I don't know price, but I know that if it isn't, that expensive, why not do it? And it's something that you're just... That's a big fundraising thing you're doing. Yeah, saying, even if somebody is on Facebook, it's like that TV commercial from back in the 70s. Anyone who remembers that, they tell two friends and they tell two friends and they tell two friends. So long. Yeah, yeah. Even if just some of your people or somebody sees it and they're going to tell somebody who's not on Facebook, well, then you've gotten an extra level of promotion. Yeah. Okay, you know, the Lincoln City Library is doing this really cool thing. How'd you find out? I found out on Facebook. Really? Yeah. What's Facebook? Okay. Hey, the library has a workshop about that coming up this Thursday. Why don't you go see it? Yeah. Exactly. If it's advertising for you, it is getting your message out. The cheaper, you can do it, great, but sometimes you have to drop a little bit of cash to do it. And that return of S, I think it's pretty good if you're dealing with some serious target marketing is Facebook. Look at all the folks who are on there. Regular, what you call mainstream company, advertise on Facebook. Why? Because it works. It puts your stuff right in people's faces. Yeah. And you have, I know it will vary from size of library to library, but you've got something where you've got some sort of money that's for promotion, for printing up the flyers you hand out everywhere, for printing out your newsletter, for getting that ad in the newspaper or something. Same kind of budget. You can say, well, let's take, I'm guessing like 20 bucks of it, and we'll do a Facebook ad for the summer reading program that's coming up. We'll target, pick a topic, pick a thing, do it. One can target parents because Facebook will collect the data. You know how many made you chat? Target parents are a particular age group. And if you're smart enough, I'm guessing because of just how these things work. Usually they're able to really target people. So you can have one ad for your baby's love books, sort of age folks, the read to me folks. We call the read to me. If you're part of the read to me's, then your next level up of elementary, then junior high and high school, you can target people with kids of those ages. Say, hey, we have this great program. Look, here is our team program. We have these 18 different events, including a game walk in, and you can get them out of your house for a few hours during the summer. Or if you want some volunteer opportunities, we also have that to help us help make some reading program great. You can do all of these things. I'm believing you can do this stuff. You could probably do some relatively fine, refined targeting. Mm-hmm, yep. Could definitely be done. I think what any of you have any other questions or thoughts that nothing new has come in. But you know, go ahead, type Ben in. We've got plenty of time here. I think one of the things that's going to wrap this up for me, and I'm not meaning to wrap up the whole show, just that kind of is the planning part of it, is that don't go in willy nilly. Don't go in. That is something we've said for years, just because it's the new shiny thing. You'll go in, you'll get either overwhelmed or you'll get bored or you won't know and your presence will die or people will get bored with it or you'll have no idea of, are we just putting out boring stuff? We need to have people that talk in-house about what are we doing? You've probably already had these conversations for whatever you've promoted before these things existed. So take those same conversations you already had, get those same people, your PR type people, whoever they are together, and say, okay, here's the new thing that we've got to do in addition to the stuff we've been doing. I always try and tell people, yeah, don't panic about, I've got to write a blog post, I've got to write a Facebook post, I've got to write a newsletter article. No, you don't. You have to write one and then send it to all those places. Right, and the Facebook thing, Krista, really, Facebook is about that. It's all about continuing a conversation. That's what you're doing. You're having a very short conversation on Twitter, you're having a slightly longer conversation on Facebook, but all you're doing is having a conversation. That's all. Do not tell me you don't have stuff to talk about. You have some program coming up. You have something coming up, something's happening in your branch, something's happening in your library, something's happening in your town that you're involved in. There is always stuff going on at your library. If there isn't, your library is going to close, and you want it to have a social media plan anyway, because you won't be around. You always have stuff to talk about. Even a small one, one room, school, house, size library, you're still doing programs, you're still doing story times, you're still doing programs for all age, you still have new books coming in, you still have new things coming in that you still have newsworthy things happening. I'm just putting those things out there that a lot of people know about. I think you said it's about having that conversation and getting the interaction and connections. I think sometimes the pressure of that can scare people off. Why didn't anybody comment on my post about the Summer Reading program? Why didn't anybody answer when I said, hey, it's a long weekend. For example, we got Memorial Day, we can come on up. What books are you reading? They get discouraged. You've got to realize it can be both a conversation and, I don't even know what I want to call it, just pushing it out there. It could be a conversation, it could be a billboard. Billboard, yeah, that's a good word for it. That sometimes you won't. I mean, think about how you personally may use your own Facebook and your Twitter and whatever. Do you click and comment and like every single thing? No. But you read it. You read it, right? I can recall it. Think about that just because only three people liked it, probably 5, 10 actually saw it. Oh, here's a good description of it from someone in our commission staff here. They may not respond to your post, but they can't respond if you don't post. Yep. That's nice. Yes, exactly. You get it to win it. Yep. Don't be worried that you don't get that conversation going. There may be a conversation happening about your library somewhere else, though, because you put that post out there. Yep. Yeah. And just like someone, we're full of analogies today. The worst life is going to beat up today. But someone walks into your library. They do not necessarily have to talk to a librarian. They don't necessarily talk to a circulation checkout person. They don't necessarily have to talk to a page. They don't have to talk to anybody, but they have engaged your library. Your signage is engaging with them. They find a book is engaging with them. Their self-check is engaging with them. The computers are engaging with them. You're always engaged when it's not necessarily a direct open your mouth conversation. Sometimes it's here. This is what we're doing. Here's our billboard. This is what we're up to. Or sometimes it's your shelver slash page is the only person who talks to someone who comes to your library. That person is your library to the customer. That person should be able to represent your library. That person should be able to talk about your library. And that person, it's like a social media. It's there. You don't expect it. Maybe you get some rich different thinking and things from that interaction. You're going to have to expand your definition of engagement and communication and things to think, oh, the cliche outside the box. The blow up the box. Blow up the box. Yes, I like that one better. Mary Hofstra, I think, has a question. Chris, at least, she has an unanswered question in the attendee thing. Oh, she had commented earlier. She's the one that commented earlier about, I'm awake. I just didn't have any questions. Oh, that's exactly okay. Yeah. Well, it looks like it's 12 o'clock. I'm sorry. It looks like it's 11 o'clock central. See, I go the big. It's at the top of the hour now. Okay. So yeah, it doesn't look if anybody has any more urgent questions. You do have Maurice's contact info there if you do any more questions about this. And the show has been recorded. So it will be available afterwards for you to go back and watch it all over again. And we'll maybe, I don't know if we're going to send your slides or put a link to them. Send a link to them to me. I can put them up as well if anyone wants to see them later and get some of those quotes. I guess I have to do that. Yeah, I'll put a little bit of slideshare or something. Yeah, wherever. That will be tomorrow afternoon. Not a problem. We have to be a bit bapoo crazy. That's okay. Not a problem. We'll get the recording up today and then other things will be added as we get them around. Excellent. So that was great. Yes, thank you very much, Mo. I'm so glad to have you on. That was an awesome meeting. Information. As you can see, obviously, I'm totally on board with you on all this since I can apparently do your presentation too. I will not take it from you then. Great minds. Thank you. You're welcome. Yes. You're welcome. Incalite. Yeah, so. Can I jump back to this? There we go. But five people are still there. There's my email address. Yep. Mm-hmm. Yep. I have my Twitter handle there. So there's my email address. If you want to email me, et cetera. A lot of this stuff comes from just I'm watching and talking to libraries and seeing what we do. And I'm not lucky enough to be in charge of it here, but I do it with ALA Learning. I'm the person who manages the social networking page of our state library continuing education group. It's just some, it's common sense. Mm-hmm. That's all it is. It's just common sense. When you think it through and get into it, it can be very much, yeah, just something new and people get a little nervous about it. But I think, you know, putting it in the context of stuff we've been doing helps a lot, I think. It's helped me and I know it's helped when I've spoken to people about it as well. Yeah. It really is just an extension of what you're already doing. It isn't something new. It's very similar to teaching someone how to do some new technological thing. It is the exact, it's a reference question. It is nothing different just because it has a power button doesn't mean it's not a reference question. Mm-hmm. And watching people get completely flustered. Oh my God, oh my God, they do. Danger will rob and it's in danger when it comes to those types of questions. It's in the whole of another webinar. But yeah, that's, it's, it's, you're already doing it. Yeah. Yeah, libraries and maker spaces. We've already done this. We do this already. Libraries are truly the multi-functioning battle club of information and access to say. We always do almost everything 20 years before anyone else. We just don't call it the hippest term. I don't believe it. Okay. I mean, people have made stuff in their library and bird houses. Oh yeah, we've been doing crafts and things. Yes. Right. Craft is making stuff, folks. That's a maker space. You know, it's a maker space. Let's just not call it a maker space. That's a work. So I'm going to stop the app in because it's after time. Thank you very much, folks who stood around for this whole thing. Yep. All right. Thank you. Oh, people got something out of it. Oh yes, I'm sure. All right. I'm going to pull back control, excuse me, now to my computer so I can get us going on for next week. We do have a comment on there. It says, thanks. Great presentation. Yes. Oh, thank you very much. Yeah. So that will wrap it up for this week's edition of Encompass Live. As I said, it has been recorded and will be up on our website maybe later this afternoon. If anyone wants me to come out, you're out there in Nebraska. Nebraska is one of the states I have not visited. I wouldn't mind coming out there if anyone would like to invite me out for anything. But in that out there, I do travel to speak about many different things. So right now I'm doing this on work time because it's free. But guys, I definitely travel and come talk to you about all sorts of things. Definitely. Check in. Yeah. Get Mo out to your library. All right. So that will wrap it up for today. I hope you join us next week when it is our monthly tech talk with Michael Sowers, who's the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And once a month, he comes on the show and talks about something that is more tech-related. And he always usually has a guest on. This week he has Cynthia Sajil from Fremont Public Schools here in Nebraska talking about Google Apps for Education. So something for our school libraries out there. So do sign up for that or any of our other upcoming shows. And if you are on Facebook, a Facebook user, we are also on Facebook and Compass Live is. So anything that we have coming up shows, announcements, things about recordings being ready, being able to log in on the fly to a show that's just starting. Here's my home announcement this morning. For Mo's show, you can like us on Facebook and you'll keep up to date on what we're doing there. And that will wrap it up for us this morning. Thank you very much. And we will see you next time on Compass Live. Bye-bye.