 Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Pinterest for Libraries, Building Community through Social Media. My name is Crystal and I'll be your host. Today we are joined by a guest who has many great tips to share to help you build community through library-related Pinterest pages. But before we begin, I do have just a few announcements to share. We'll be using ReadyTalk for our meeting today, and please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We'll be tracking your questions throughout the webinar, and we'll answer them at a few designated Q&A sections. All of your chat comments will only come to the presenters, but if you have any comments or ideas to share, we'll forward them back out to the entire group. You don't need to raise your hand to ask a chat question. Simply just type it into the chat box at any time. 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So thanks again for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar, Pinterest for Libraries, Building Community through Social Media. We'll be sharing examples of Pinterest pages, tips for success, and ideas to help your library create an engaging online space for your community. We hope you'll learn a few new things from our guest. Our guest today is Lauren Drittler, Assistant Director with Arkansas River Valley Library System centered in Dardanelle, Arkansas. Lauren manages all the social media for her library system including a Pinterest page that has generated a lot of community interest. My name is Crystal Schimpf and I'll be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat and Twitter, we have Becky Wiegand and Jenny Mies from the TechSoup team. And we'll be on Twitter using the at TechSoup for Libs handle. We'd like to know a little bit about you too. So tell us what your experience has been with Pinterest. You can choose your response and click the button to submit. Once you've submitted your response, you will see a graph showing the results of the poll and you can tell us more about your experience in chat. Maybe you've used Pinterest a lot or maybe just occasionally. Maybe you have an account but never use it. Or maybe this is your first time learning about Pinterest. Whatever the case, we hope you pick up a few new ideas today. I can see that you're sending your responses and we've gotten quite a few already. And most of you have used Pinterest at least occasionally. Some of you use it every day. But I can see that a few of you are newer to Pinterest so hopefully this provides you a good introduction. And for those of you that have more experience, I hope you get new ideas to add to your arsenal. And I'll go back to that. I meant to close this poll. So you do have just a few more seconds to respond. It looks like we got most everybody in though. So go ahead and close that now. The other thing that we did want to know though is does your library or perhaps you're joining from a nonprofit today. Do you already have a Pinterest account? Tell us your response and click the button to submit. I'll give you a few seconds to respond to these as well. Already I'm seeing that so far the majority of you do have a Pinterest account. But some of you don't have one yet or are perhaps looking to start one soon. And this is of course for your organization not for your personal account. The answer might be different if we were to ask it for that. I'll give you just a few more seconds to respond here before I close the poll. You can see that some of you in the comments are saying that you are managing a Pinterest account for your library already. Some of you are saying you're not sure if you have one. And that's okay too. It might be something to take a look at. Sometimes an account was created a long time ago but has never really been used. All right, I'll go ahead and close the poll in 3, 2, and 1. I'll close this. And so we get a good sense of who's joining us today. Well for those of you who are newer to Pinterest, or maybe this is just a nice refresher if you're more experienced, I just want to give a brief overview. Pinterest is an online visual bookmarking tool and it can be accessed using a computer via the Internet or on a tablet or a smartphone using an app. And Pinterest exists to allow you to discover new ideas, save favorites, and share them with others. There's definitely a social component with this platform in addition to the finding of ideas. And if you are new to Pinterest, we won't be giving a tutorial today on how to use Pinterest. We'll be talking more about ideas and applications. But if you need to learn how to use Pinterest in general, I have these two sites to share with you where you can learn some basics. And these will be included in the archive of the webinar so you don't need to write them down right now. I'll include the actual links to these sites. And you'll get that email again within a few days with the archive. But with that, now it's time for me to turn things over to Lauren who's going to tell us and show us with a little bit of demonstration all about how libraries can and are using Pinterest. Lauren? Thank you, Crystal. I'm really excited today because this is a topic I dearly love and I could tell a lot of you are really adamant users of Pinterest. One thing that we started when we came up with our Pinterest is we kind of focused on our staff but we realized really quickly it wasn't just for staff. And so I kind of started looking around at some of the libraries that are on Pinterest. And I came across to the Sacramento Public Library and I absolutely loved how they had their Pinterest boards arranged and the topics that they covered. And so I contacted them and I came across one of the ladies is Amy and she was very helpful and Desiree was very helpful. And they are the two that are the administrators for their Pinterest boards. And so I got some really helpful tips but Amy gave me this quote. And it kind of is what we as a library here want to reflect on our Pinterest boards as well is because you want to be entertaining and engaging but you also want to be educational as well. And that's what the library does every day when you have books and information available and you have programs and services that you provide. Now a little bit about our target audience. First I had said that we created it just for our staff. We went through and I noticed I saw some comments about we do this for bullets and board ideas and things like that. And we noticed as we did this for our staff that we had other individuals following and pinning what we had available. Our school teachers, daycare workers, babysitters. And so we kind of had this other audience that we really wanted to work with and so we kind of created specific patrons boards for them to have on Pinterest. But then we also noticed when we created those boards our staff was pinning things and using those for programs. And so you can kind of see where it kind of flows back and forth even though we designate it as a patron board, a staff board, or a board that I would use for myself, others are using those boards as well. So with that said I'm going to actually switch over to a live shot of our Pinterest page and it's going to take just a minute to switch over. So while that is doing that also make sure you write in the chat box not only questions but ideas for boards, things that you may have on your Pinterest account, and everything like that. And I believe you should be seeing our Pinterest page right now. As you can see we have everything that we've got up at the top with our name, our verified web address, our about section which has just simple information that you need and our logo. And these are kind of important things to have if you do not have a library account, if you do have one, make sure all these are in there. Profile picture is number one. You've got to have a logo or a picture that you use throughout social media and on your web page that helps people identify with what you have as a library and they know that you specifically. Now let's get to the fun stuff because that's all the boring part. Now let's get to the fun stuff. We have our boards and what we've done is all of our patron boards are at the top of the page and then we go down to our staff and then the boards that are more for myself and the administrators are down at the very bottom. So our patron boards, we have our seasonal boards appear at the top which is the Take Me Out to the Ball Game at the end of the World Series that's going to disappear and go to the bottom and everything will shift over. Then we have our football board and we have cute little pumpkins. We've got two libraries doing pumpkin contest so we've created boards like that for our patrons. We also have others, slip over here, to the next set of boards that we have and this is just scroll down a little bit onto our page. We have Play Date, Lego My Lego. These are extenders from programs we actually offer. So you can kind of see where you can go with your boards. It's not just necessary informational but it also can be an extension of a program that you're doing at the library. Then we also have Nerd Nation which I actually stole this one from the library and I totally recommend that you follow them. This is the Glen Carbon Library in Glen Carbon, Illinois. I don't know if anybody is from there but they have nerd heard and I absolutely love this concept and one of the things that as Pinterest as a whole is there's a very shortage of men using Pinterest and with this board especially I think this would appeal to men in general and so that is a way that we can get more men following us on Pinterest. Another board that I absolutely love is from the Plainfield Public Library in Plainfield, Illinois. Illinois has it going on with their Pinterest. Take a literary trip and I like what they did with this. They just kind of pinned a bunch of books that are destination books. So you can actually go there to these places but what I think would be really cool and this is an option is you can actually pin locations in Pinterest and what I mean by pin location is when you go in to create a board you have the option for a map and this is what a map looks like when you go in and to create a board. This is our getaway vacation-vacation idea board. Not all of these pins that we have on this board can be pinned on the map because they are not necessarily a location. They are more informational for how to pack for a road trip and that sort of thing but then there's also actual places like we have Bentonville, Arkansas, War Eagle Mill that you can actually pin on the map and I think that would be cool to take that literary board and actually make it a destination map as well and so we are working on developing something similar to that so we can have that available for our patrons as well and you can even get as specific as doing a YA. Take a literary trip, juvenile fiction, or just general reading materials. And then we are going to switch back over to our slides. Sorry, this takes a minute to get back and forth. Something else that you can do with your Pinterest, I'm trying to get my slide pulled up here. Something else that you can do with Pinterest is that you can actually house it on your Facebook page. So this is the way you can kind of cross promote what you have. This is through an app called Woodbox and you just go create an account with them. And as you can see on Woodbox you can also add others like Twitter, Instagram, your YouTube channel, anything like that. And that way that will link people over to your other social media sites which I really recommend doing Woodbox. We did the free version so we are kind of limited on what we can do. But if you want to put the money in you can really go and check around and see what other social media aspects you can add just into Facebook itself. And now for tips for your patron boards. We kind of went through those really quickly but some things that we look at when we create our board is we look at circulation stats. What items are being checked out from your system, from your library? Those are the what people are interested in and those are what's going to be your more popular boards that you can create. Also look at what you are buying. You might have the best seller that's come out and you can look and see how many people have requested that book before it even comes. Kind of go from that book title, the subject, whatever relates to that item and you can create boards off of that. And then also look at your newspaper and I know that's kind of maybe outdated for some but being in a small rural area your local newspaper really gives you some local information and that's what you need. But you can also look at other media sources as well. Look and see what people are commenting on Facebook about. Look to see what people are tweeting about. Also watch your news channels and things like that just to kind of see what the hot topics are. And then you can kind of go from there on what kind of boards you want to create. And with that we can take a break and answer some questions because I know I've seen some come through. Yeah, Lauren. So that was a nice dive right in to look at some of the boards. And I think with some of the questions we have it may be nice to go back into the share while we do it and highlight some of the areas. But before we do that just a couple, the biggest question that has just come in so I want to make sure we address it right away is can you talk more about the app, what it's called, and we will make sure to get the link for those of you who have asked and we will include that in the archive. But what is the name of the app and can you tell us more about what you know of how it works just to give us a little bit more detail? It's called Wood Box. And basically I was – when I first started looking into ways to do this there was another app that you could get and it was discontinued. So I kind of did some Google searches and looked around and I came across Wood Box. And basically you just go in and you set up a free account. And then we selected Pinterest. We just went with that. And basically they have to have access into your account and you have to have access. They have to access to your Pinterest account and that sort of thing. And then that way it will appear and you notice there's our take me out to the ballgame. It's pretty accurate. If you move things around it does need a little bit of time to cycle through to notice those changes. What you can do is you can see all of our boards. You can actually open that board, take me out to the ballgame and it will show you all the pins. And you're still in Facebook the whole time. But once you click on that pin it takes you out of Facebook and into Pinterest. Great. So it's basically just a tool that allows you to link the two together. It sounds like a really great tool. It looks like they also work with other social media platforms. I think Becky has found the link to this and has put it in the chat. And it is Wood Box just as if you had a box that was made of wood. Or Woo Box, Woo Box it looks like. So we will verify what the spelling of that is and get back to you before the end of the webinar as you can tell we are even not totally clear on what it is but we will make sure we get the right app for that. And it looks like Becky has perhaps found it already. So one of the things I wanted to go back to actually was if you can go back to the page and share with us the very first Pinterest page you shared where we see the information you have to put in at the library because I think there is a couple of things I wanted to go back to there. And we've got the time to do it. And one of those is just about some of this basic profile. I know it's not the most interesting thing but it's also something that will be really helpful for everybody that might be creating a page. And I know you had mentioned something to me about the name of the library. And in this case you don't have necessarily your whole library name listed. So can you tell us about that? Well when they first started with Pinterest you had the ability to put whatever name you wanted and they kind of went in and shortened it. So we kind of adapted our name a little bit because our full name is Arkansas River Valley Regional Library System. And obviously that does not fit because we really had to chop it up. And I know a lot of people have libraries that are named after individuals and so it just really makes it long and dragged out. So what we did is we looked at the best way that we could shorten some of the words that still keep our name as simple and easy to read as possible. And so that's what you have to do. And I really don't recommend shortening library to LIB because you've got to realize in our world, yes, we understand LIB stands for library. But in the world as a whole they may not understand that. And so we really wanted to keep library on as the full word. Great. So finding a creative way to shorten the name if your library happens to have a very long name that fits within that character limit. And then you also talked about, you quickly mentioned that you have to verify your web page. Can you say any more about that? Verifying your web page just allows for the patron or whomever is following your account to know that you're a legitimate sign. And basically all it does is it will actually, you can see the little hand up there now. You can click on it and it will take you to our actual website. So it will link people over to see what else you have going on at your library as well if they're interested. But this just kind of gives them that little extra credit knowing that you are who you say you are. Great. And then some of the other questions we've started to get. We've had a couple of questions about if you have to have a Pinterest account to be able to look at the pins that you've posted and if you've had any challenges. And I'm actually going to read one of the longer questions from Nono. I've been very frustrated by Pinterest fairly recent changes where you cannot see pins unless you're logged in to Pinterest. I feel like you're losing a huge section of your target audience. If they don't have a Pinterest account you won't be able to see our boards. So they've pulled back from using Pinterest because of this and wondering what your thoughts are if you've experienced any challenges with that. So basically use the app that we have on Facebook they can see those pins from there. They can search through on that. So if they can't log on to Pinterest if they don't have the Pinterest account. If they have Facebook they can go in and view it that way. We haven't seen a slowdown of who is pinning from us and who is following us. So I mean we haven't experienced that problem. I haven't heard anybody complain. But that doesn't mean that they are not complaining about it. But I think most people that want to look at Pinterest they are already on Pinterest anyway. They already have an account. Right. And of course it is free to join Pinterest as an individual user. There's no cost there. So it's becoming like other social media platforms or sometimes you have to have that account in order to access and view the content. And interesting to hear that you haven't had any issues with that so far. So then another question that's come in is how much and how often do you need to post to Pinterest to keep your board from getting stale? Well sometimes I get carried away myself. But you really need to post one or two pins a day and it can be to whatever board you want just to keep it relevant to what's going on. But just remember we work in libraries and we have to weed our material and so you need to weed your boards and you need to weed your pins as well. Some of them are a little easier to kind of go through and clean up because they are dated. You will find people that will do boards specifically around World Cup Soccer or the NFL Super Bowl or anything like that where that you can just kind of wipe it out within the next few months after the event is over. Some of these are a little harder to do because you've got so much content in them. But it's always good to just go in and just make it a roll of thumb like each week, take a board, and kind of go through and see what's still relevant and what's not. And so it sounds like you actually do delete boards sometimes when they become outdated or are no longer relevant. Is that the case? Yes, that is. In fact, Sacramento Public Library when I first discovered them they actually had a board that was called Pink and Gold. That was the board and anything on it was Pink and Gold and it's no longer on there. The Plainfield Public Library, they actually had a board that was called Cookie Swap. And so I'm assuming that they were doing a Cookie Swap at the library last year and created a board for that. Well it's now gone. And that's what you want to do. That's a way to keep it fresh. It's just to kind of get rid of things and cycle it through and have new come in all the time. Great. Great. Now you have talked about some boards that are of interest to the community, some that relate to library programs or just interest in the community. Are you a part of any boards in your community run by other organizations or agencies or individuals? Well what we've done is we've actually created, let me see if I can pull one of them up. I might have to kind of scroll through so bear with me as I look for it. Here it is. This one right here saying I do, we actually got with a local business that they host wedding events at their farm just outside of town. And the lady that runs it, I went to school with her and I said, hey do you want to go in and do this board together? And so we've gone in and she's pinned some things and I've pinned some things. But what's really cool about this is when you do this is now if you go to her account for her business this board pops up and so this will automatically, if people see that and they click on it they realize that there's someone else in collaboration with her and that can lead them to our boards as well into our page. I spoke to one of our garden club ladies last night. We had a meeting and I asked her if she would start pinning into our garden, our green thumb board that we have. And she was all excited about it. And so what is really great about when you do these collaborative boards is the fact that there's other people pinning so you don't necessarily have to pin all the time to those. So those come in really handy especially for people who aren't as interested in Pinterest. But if you get out there and find a lot of different collaborative boards that you can be a part of then it just makes it look like you've got a lot of boards going on and there's a lot of information kind of flowing through for your patron. Great. So I know Lauren that you have another section you want to share with us where you talk about the way you're using pages internally. We've gotten a lot of questions that are on a technical side about the way you're doing things so we'll see how many we can get to those at the end of the session. But I want to make sure we don't miss your section on the staff and kind of personal professional development boards you might want to participate in. But before we leave this idea of creating boards for community, for the patrons or customers of your library, can you speak to maybe one advantage to using a Pinterest board for that or a couple of brief advantages? Well, one, you're creating kind of a network of people within your community. It's also a way to share ideas. And it also gives you something to talk about when you go to a meeting somewhere and you can say, oh yeah, I saw that you've pinned this. And so it just, it kind of creates this different levels of community that you can have either with businesses or with organizations or even with your school or individuals who might have the coolest thing on upcycling ideas. You may have seen them at the county fair and they are all gun-ho with that. And so it just kind of creates this whole little network of people that have all these different ideas, hobbies, and things like that that you can really utilize just within Pinterest itself. Great. Great. And then one last question because it really, it just came in and it really does pertain to this concept of the patron boards. Do you let patrons actually pin to any of your boards? Or are their pins moderated? How do you handle that? We do not actually have any of our boards open up to the general public as a whole. There is one library and they are actually in the links at the end of examples. They actually have what they call the community board. And so if you follow them they will automatically invite you in to pin to this. And the disadvantage of it is it can get really overloaded really quickly, but they do have a disclaimer at the top. And there is the option that if you do have boards that are open to people you can actually have email notifications set up and that's in the settings and you can go to the help center and it will tell you how to do that. And then that way anytime someone pins into your boards that you created you will get a notification. And so you can kind of see who is pinning what where. So you can kind of go over and kind of check on it and make sure it is what it is supposed to be. And I rarely have a problem with the ones that we do have open for people for businesses or individuals within the community and staff. Great. Great. Well that certainly gives us a lot of ideas to start with as far as the way we might use Pinterest boards for our community for our library users or customers. Now I think how about we transition into talking about the way you are using them for library staff and how people might use them for yourselves. I will let you take it back from here. Okay, let me switch over here to our next tab. These are some examples that we have geared more towards our staff. And within this is our display and other cool looks, the bulletin boards. That's one of the original ones that we came up with. Our program ideas for teens and adults and then we've got one for preschool and school age children up above. But those are kind of where we started and then we came out with summer reading. And from that we kind of developed into the patron aspect of it. But this is where our beginnings are right here. But what I really liked about our staff boards is we kind of developed it into more of a collaborative board. And I was lucky enough to go to PLA in Indiana in 2014. And I sat in a session that talked about interactive spaces for children at your library. And one of the speakers was Ryan who was really helpful. I emailed her later. But what they did is the staff, they had this board created for the staff. And the staff got to make suggestions, comments of things that they wanted in this new renovation that they were having in the children's room. And I thought that was a great way to use Pinterest to collaborate with staff. So with that said, we go back to our staff pages and we have our summer reading boards. And I had a staff member come to me and ask, why aren't we sharing this with other people? And it just didn't, you know, it didn't click until somebody actually put it in front of your face and said, here. And so what we actually did is we opened up our summer reading boards to any librarian in the state of Arkansas if they want to pin, they can pin to it and have access to all this information. And it's been slow going getting those Arkansas librarians because not all of them that were on the list are not all of them attend certain meetings. And so it's really hard to get that information out there. But it's a slow process and we're getting there. And we get a lot of pins from our branch managers and from those that are on our collaborative board here. And so it's really just a great way to kind of get with people and share ideas with what is coming up. And you know summer reading is big. I don't care where you're from, it's a big topic. And you've got to have a lot of content so you can kind of fish through and see what's going to work for you. And so that's what we've done with our summer reading boards. But I don't necessarily get rid of them once summer reading is over because I think it's important to have some of those ideas still available because you're always going to have superheroes stuff going on at the library. You're always going to have science experiments at your library like last year's theme. And so we put those to get, we put those and we change the wording so they can find it easier because who's going to remember what you did in summer reading of 2015, 2014, 10 years from now. But you will have your superhero board that you can kind of utilize. So that's what we've done with those boards is we kind of just made it more of a collaborative group. Now what I have also discovered is the Prince William Public Library, they have a board specifically for coloring pages. And I know coloring is big right now. We've actually started a program here. And so now I've got to go create a complete board on coloring. I was just pitting to our program ideas but now I've got to go create a whole board just for our staff to have access to these. And this is kind of that line of it's not just for staff. Your patrons are going to want this too because there's a lot of people that are interested in coloring as well. But this is a great resource to have for my staff who's working on this new program. And I know I saw a few people on the chat too that they do coloring as well for their program so they're going to want to try to do a board like this that's just specific to that. This is one of those hot topics in the news popular that you want to have available for your staff and your patrons as well. Then we're going to switch over to yourself. What do you need for yourself as far as boards that you can have for information? Pinterest came out with secret boards and I love secret boards. This was like the best gift ever from Pinterest. And we have a lot of fun with this one because we can actually work on programs together with the staff. A few years ago we were asked to decorate a tree downtown and so we came up with this decorating board. It actually was just Christmas and we were just putting ideas for a Christmas tree on there. But then we kind of morphed into things that we want to see in the library but we don't necessarily want to pin in the display board yet because we want to do this in our building first before they see it on our Pinterest page. So we created this board and we've allowed some of the staffers to come in and they can pin things and we can kind of go from there of what we want to do as far as projects in the library itself. Then you also have like staff appreciation if you're an administrator and you want to find ways to thank your staff. If you're not an administrator you can come up with volunteer appreciation board and come up with different ways to thank your volunteers that come in or thank board members or anything like that. I mean you don't have to be an admin to have this board. You can come up with other options. Then there's the admin help which that is specifically for me. These are things that I want to learn how to do or things that I need to better myself at. I hate to say this because I know Crystal will probably take a deep breath. But I'm not a fan of Twitter because I don't understand all the concepts of the hashtags and everything yet. But I found an article that I wanted to read about and so I pinned it in there so I can go back and actually learn something on my own and try to figure out and understand Twitter a little better. Then I got this great idea from the ladies at Sacramento Public. What they do with their secret boards is that's where all their boards start from. Any board that they're going to put up into public view, it starts in the secret board and they just pin things in it until it gets probably 20 to 30 pins in it and then they actually make it public. So it looks a little fuller going out as opposed to like my summer reading board where I have nothing on it, it's just sitting there. That doesn't look as good as actually having a board with stuff in it. And it's a great way to kind of keep things going and you can kind of work on things and when you see a board get to where you want it to be then you can push it out and you're always rotating that new out without actually having it out there for people to see before you get it where you want it. And then something else too is the presentation helps. We all need, we all do presentations whether it's at your local rotary or at school or at a conference or anything like that. You can always have a board like this with just some helpful tips and where to find those free images and that sort of thing for your presentation. So that's where secret boards are very helpful but I've also made some of my secret boards public. Here is my Pinterest help board and it's at the very bottom and this is really more for me but when I worked on my presentation for Tacoma last year I was like, I want to have to make this public so everyone that attended the session could actually access this information. And so it's actually out there for the public to see and there's a lot of people that do follow it and there's actually people that pin from it. So it is helpful to have some of your boards that would be more for you actually out in the public or if you want to keep them private you can. Just a little word to the lies even though if you're using a library account and you say it's a secret board it is still subject to SOI. So just because you think no one can see this you can be funny and do some things on there that you wouldn't necessarily post. I wouldn't recommend doing that, save that for your personal. But with that said we're going to switch back over to the slides and just a few little tips on your staff boards. If you don't know kind of where you want to go with your staff board if you want to kind of expand off of your bulletin board ideas and that sort of thing you can always follow your staff and see what they're interested in on Pinterest and you may get a program out of the deal too because you may be surprised at what they are interested in and what kind of craft or hobby they may be working on at home that you didn't know. Also look at conferences, workshops and webinars and especially the ones that your staff is attending or your coworkers are attending because that's where their interests are and so they're looking for information and so if you have boards like that related to those they're going to be really interested and it's going to be even more helpful for them in the long run of what they're looking for. And then also check your library calendar of events. You may have a program coming up like a Lego program have a Lego board so they can kind of prep and get some ideas from maybe what they want to do. You know you may have like we did the Paddington Bear release party when it came out in the movie theater. You may want to have a program and have some boards like that. That way not only you can kind of share with what you're doing at the library for those people that can't come they might want to do some of that activities at home with their kids as well. And here are a list of the examples of who I used for the original presentation I did. I didn't get to talk about we didn't go to two of them but the Ontario Canada one is the one that has the community board that you can go look at and see what their wording is on the topic where the about section of that specific board. So with that we'll turn it back over to Crystal and she can go through questions. All right great Lauren thanks for sharing now the staff or personal side of how you might use Pinterest for your library. Since we're still on this slide here with these Pinterest examples this also will be coming out in the archive where we have the links directly to them. Of course you're welcome to search for them but know that you'll have a way to access them very easily from the slides themselves. And Lauren we've had quite a few questions coming in and so I just want to jump right into this to talk about how copyright, how you thought about copyright as it comes to repinning these materials from other places. And I don't know if you have anything to share from the way Pinterest addresses copyright. And of course just to start this by saying this is not any type of legal advice it's just what your experience has been so far and how your library has addressed it. Well with the copyright issue I mean that's kind of our big topic in libraries anyway. Pinterest is very good about staying on top of those. Every once in a while I will actually get an email from Pinterest stating we've had to remove a pen due to some copyright issues. Please note this is not a reflection of you and blah blah blah because most of the stuff that we pen are not our own pens. This comes from other people. And a good tip to kind of look at to make sure that you're pinning things that are more legitimate is just look at the website and check that website and make sure that it is coming from some blog or more of a legitimate website. If you're not sure about where it's coming from I wouldn't pin it. Or go back and find that original source. The original source is going to be your best option. But on our library account I rarely get an email. I usually get an email on my personal one from the ones I pin on my personal page. We haven't really had a lot of issues with our library account. Great. And I think one of the specific examples of that that you shared so maybe you can go just a little bit deeper is with the coloring pages which are works of art that were created by somebody. And I had noticed on one when you went to that page that it said that the name of the page said free coloring pages. So is that the sort of thing when you go back to the source that you're vetting it to make sure that it is okay to share it? Yes. We like to go find coloring sheets all the time for library programs in general. And so we try to go and find, make sure if we do a search or anything like that we put free in front of it because we really want to make sure we're using our best judgment here and getting things that is not going to go against what libraries stand for as far as copyright issues. And so just make sure you look for those free items. Don't go and just pull whatever you can find. If anything it kind of gives you some ideas of what to look for. A lot of times I know I've seen some people actually post, please note this does not reflect our library because you know you pin something because you see an image and you like that image. But if you don't go actually look to see what else is on that page, people may think you're promoting that as well. So it's always good to just double check that link and make sure that it's more from a legitimate site. Great. Good advice there. And then maybe we'll switch over to some of the technical aspects of having staff involvement. So first off is it necessary, you know obviously staff need to be able to access Pinterest to be involved in this. Do staff have their own Pinterest accounts or does each branch have an account? How do you manage that? And have you had any staff who maybe are frustrated by that? Staff have their own Pinterest account and they just use it. I haven't heard any complaints from the staff. We've actually created boards for each of our branches. And within those boards are pictures that we actually post at events and that's all that we put in there. So they have access to pin into that as well. So that allows me to get access from those photos to post on Facebook and our other social media sites as well. But I've never heard them complain. They're usually pinning whatever we pin out there to their board. So we haven't run into that problem, but that doesn't mean other people have. And you just started to get into one of the next questions. And actually I should say it's good to hear that there's been enthusiasm. I know it isn't always the case in libraries that people are enthusiastic to cross over with their personal social media into the workplace. But it sounds like that's not an issue that you have had and that people have been generally positive about it. Who is doing the contribution? Maybe not naming them, but as far as the branches, are there many people contributing to the library Pinterest boards or is it just you? Well, we have at least one person in each of our branches that are accessible to PIN and some of our boards. So it's not limited just to me. And I think it's always important to allow other people to pin in just like with Facebook or Twitter, anything like that. Having one person be responsible for all that all the time is not – I don't think it's a good reflection of your building, your library. I think if you have several people, it kind of gives it a little bit of variety. And then how much time do you estimate it takes per week or per month that you're spending on Pinterest? Well, I notice when usually I'm preparing for a presentation on Pinterest, I'm on it a lot more than normal. But usually, I mean, I try to get on here about five or ten minutes a day just depending on what the project is. And I know like sometimes I can sit at home on my personal and I can be on there for two hours and I realize I was on it for two hours. But I know that I've had people ask me in the past, well, how can you do a time limit or whatever. That's why using those secret boards to start off with instead of having a board out there is that the secret board you can kind of manage it a little easier for your time. And always you can set a timer. And once that timer is up, it's time to get off. Right. Because it could easily take a lot of time you could kind of suck it in, right? Oh, yes. You know, you kind of get lost in it and realize, oh, I've been on here for an hour. So I mean, it's just easy time management. We all have phones or you can set an alarm on your computer or you can tell somebody to call you in ten minutes or whatever you need to do to kind of give you that time frame of being on Pinterest. Great. So also we're getting some questions about what type of content you post. And it sounds like you have a mix of things related to library programs and related to just general interest in the community. So how do you think about where that content is coming from and how do you think about the collections relating to the library? Well, a lot of times what we do is we look at those dark stats, we look at what is trending and kind of go from that. You know, we in the South, I live in SEC territory and we have the religion called football down here. And so that was an automatic, we have to have football. I mean, you can't go wrong with that. So you kind of have to look around to see what other people are doing. I've gotten a lot of ideas just from going to other Pinterest boards from other libraries and seeing what they're doing. But we really try to relate it back to things that are going on in our building like our Green Thumb. We have Garden Club. We have Master Gardeners that are around town. So we're trying to appeal to that audience specifically. And that's one reason why I'm trying to get one of them to kind of join in and kind of pin to that. So maybe I can get a bigger audience from that group into our Pinterest account. It just depends, you know, you have to really look at your community and see what your community is doing. If you live by the ocean, so you're going to probably have, if you do a zombie apocalypse, that is going to be your preparedness, your storm preparedness. It's going to be more for hurricanes and tropical storms and that sort of thing. Well, we are focused a little bit more on tornadoes. So you kind of have to really look at your locale and see what people are interested in. And that's where you go with your board. I have some that people don't want to look at. And so sometimes those are going to have to just disappear because no one is interested in those. And that's just the way it is with anything when you buy a book and put it on the shelf. Sometimes people just don't check it out so you've got to weed it out. Well, and I think that's, you know, we're talking about how Pinterest might help build community. And so of course, you know, really thinking about what community interest exists out there, what people are going to respond to and then perhaps seeing the results. And one of the last questions I think we'll be able to take right now is, you know, what do you have in terms of engagement steps? Do you look at those and say, wow, a lot of people who are actually in our community are, you know, repinning or engaging with our posts in some way, what do you use to take a look at that? Well, the analytics that they provide at Pinterest are not up to par where Facebook is, but you've got to realize Pinterest hasn't been around that long. And so they've got to develop some things. And their issue is that they only measure what you pin originally, what comes from your website or from your blog or wherever you're pinning from. It gets those analytics. It doesn't actually show who's pinning this or anything like that. I do get an email notification once a week. This is your most popular pin. And so I can kind of look at it that way. And you can also see on your board, you can kind of look to see who's been pinning what. And you can see those people that you know, and you can see that they're pinning. All right. So you get some information, maybe not as detailed as you like. We can hope that that might come down the line, but we don't know at this point. And actually that leaves me, maybe this will be our final question before we wrap up. For those of you who have questions we haven't gotten to yet, I do want to assure you that we'll respond to you via email within the next week. So we'll get back to you with those answers. And we always appreciate all of the questions you have. If you still have questions, you're welcome to send them in before the webinar ends today. So Lauren, one person asked earlier, is there perhaps a justification you could offer if people are looking at starting a Pinterest board and they've had some resistance from their library board or their director or whomever, do you have any advice who would give them as far as justifying why a Pinterest board would be worthwhile to spend the time to do that? Well first, it's the number three social media site around. You know you've got Facebook and Twitter ahead of it, but that's how popular it's gotten in such a fast time. And it's also a way to extend your services, your programs, and your collection. And there's so many people out there and there's so much that can be done with that. And then always go back to Amy's quote about the library being engaging, entertaining, and educational. And that is what Pinterest is. I mean that is kind of the whole concept of what a library is, and that's what Pinterest can be as well. All right. So it's an excellent social media tool, a very popular social media tool to engage and build community through the library. Lauren, thank you for sharing a lot of great information today. We will follow up on all those unanswered questions and also have an archive email that will go out within the next couple of days. I also wanted to share some additional resources before we sign off. These resources will be in the archive as well. And show some additional ideas, maybe things we didn't cover today. And in fact the second item on this list is actually from somebody at Pinterest who is a real fan of libraries. So that's an interesting presentation to watch if you have the time. I'll include the links to each of these. I also saw in the chat that several of you are interested in Pinterest boards for libraries that are not public libraries. So I'll try to include a few links in the archive as well for you. I did see a few things as we were working on this. But our focus today was mainly on public libraries. Now before we wrap up I have just a few announcements and I hope that you'll stay on the line to take a brief survey and tell us what you thought of today's webinar. I did want to let you know about two product donations we have here at TechSoup that might be helpful if you're working on a Pinterest page. Adobe Creative Cloud has products like Photoshop and Illustrator that can help you edit images. And another tool is Tint which is a platform that allows you to display your social media networks including Pinterest on a display screen or on your organization's website. And both of these are available through the TechSoup product donation program. So visit TechSoup.org and click on Get Products and Services for more information. We also have a few upcoming webinars that may interest you. Tomorrow we have a webinar about the new Microsoft Office. This one focusing on Windows. There's another one in a few weeks focusing on the Mac environment. Of course it's something we're all interested in in our libraries. And also mark your calendars for another webinar for Facebook in libraries that will take place on December 16. And you can register for those webinars and view archives of past webinars at TechSoup.org. Be aware that the Facebook webinar is not ready for registration yet but it will be posted soon. Also if this is your first time attending a TechSoup for libraries webinar then I just invite you to join us. Visit us online and learn more about what we have to offer. Maybe join our email newsletter list and check out some of the blog posts and library spotlights that we have. We gather stories from public libraries about how they're utilizing technology and share them out. So again please stay on the line for just a moment longer and take a brief survey about today's webinar. I would just like to thank Lauren again for sharing her experience and her presentation which she formally shared at the Association for World and Small Libraries Conference. It was great to have that here in the webinar as well. And thanks to ReadyTalk for being our webinar sponsor. ReadyTalk can help you collaborate and share information and is available as a product donation on TechSoup.org. Thanks to all of you for joining us today and have a great afternoon.