I m pretty lucky as far as teen librarians

Transcription

1 feature Hot Spot: Teen Tech Week Onine Marketing Strategies for Reaching Today s Teens By Laura Peowski Horn I m pretty ucky as far as teen ibrarians go. The ibrary I work at is right next to the ony high schoo in town. I get between twenty and forty teens in the buiding every afternoon, and when I run a program I get between fifteen and twenty-five teens. That being said, I rarey see these teens so much as gance at the sheves. Many of these teens aren t big readers in the conventiona way. Or at east they don t see themseves as readers because they don t reay ike to read books, but some enjoy reading magazines or artices onine. Other teens have confessed to having enjoyed reading as a chid and subsequenty osing that passion as they grew oder because they fet that the options out there just weren t very interesting. What I ve Learned So Far When I first started as the Teen Librarian Intern at the Farmington Pubic Libraries main branch, I worked tireessy to promote the coection to the teens. I woud try to engage a of my after schoo reguars in conversations about books they had iked, or hated and woud then try to hep them find a book to check out. I got pretty discouraged when most teens simpy responded that they didn t ike to LAURA PEOWSKI HORN is currenty working as the Teen Librarian Intern at the Farmington Pubic Libraries, Main Branch in Farmington, Connecticut. She received her M.S. in Library Science from the Graduate Schoo of Library and Information Science at Simmons Coege in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the Chair of the 2011 Teen Tech Week committee and is serving on the Teen Space Guideines Task Force. readandthenturnedbacktotheir Facebook account on the computer. Okay, so what exacty are you doing hanging out in a pace fu of books? I didn t understand. I thought everyone who came to the ibrary iked to read. When I was a teen, I woud go to my pubic ibrary to checkoutbooksordoresearchforschoo, I never just hung out on the computers. I wasstartingtofeeaitteinovermy head. Yes, we had discussed teens just hanging out in the ibrary in graduate schoo, but honesty I just didn t beieve it was true. At the same time that I reaized many of my after-schoo reguars weren t conventiona readers, I aso noticed that there were different groups of after-schoo reguars. Some teens just hung out and taked, some just hung out at the computers and some payed Wii or did homework. I aso noticed that our teen circuation rates were pretty good. So, I thought there must be a group here that I m missing. Then I thought, we maybe I meet those teens when I run the Summer Reading Finae Ice Cream Socia. When the big day arrived, about twentyfive teens showed up at the ice cream socia. The funny thing was, ess than haf of them had even participated in our summer reading program. The majority of the teens who came to the socia were a group of my after-schoo reguars. At this point I had to concede to the fact that maybe there was a group of teens out there that just didn t see the ibrary as a pace for them to hang out. This coud either mean that they don t want to hang out at the ibrary, which is fine, or that they don t know that they can, which of course is not fine, or it coud mean that they just don t have the means to get to the ibrary on a weekday afternoon. Regardess of the reason or goa that motivate our marketing campaigns, those of us who serve teens know that reaching them isn t aways easy. And just when you think you have reached them a, you 24 YALS Young Adut Library Services Winter 2011

2 Peowski Horn reaize there is yet another group out there hiding in the stacks. Librarians need to constanty be on the ookout for those groups and open to adopting innovative ways to bring the ibrary and a that it has to offer to those teens. The most important things to remember when marketing to teens are: 1. Don t be afraid to try new technoogies. 2. Don t get discouraged when what you try doesn t work. 3. Know your audience. 4. Choose your deivery methods wisey. Book traiers and YouTube videos may be great posts on the ibrary s teen Facebook account, but they may be pointess posts on a Web site if your readers don t ook there. 5. Having a good foundation is crucia. A the fancy features and widgets in the word aren t going to hep if no one is reading your bog, Web site, or Facebook updates. Creating the Foundation I m ony going to discuss onine marketing of ibrary services to teens here, but the same woud go for print marketing. If teens don t use your ibrary teen space then posting fiers for upcoming events there woud be counterproductive. The first thing any ibrarian needs to do when she decides to ramp up her marketing to teens is make sure that an adequate foundation is aid. This can be in the form of a teen Web site, bog, Facebook account, or any other patform thatyoudeemappropriate.itcoudeven be a combination of the above or others not mentioned, but if that is the case, each patform needs to be updated reguary and needs to have a ceary defined purpose. If a teen visits your Facebook page and sees you haven t posted an update in over a week, he certainy won t be impressed. Teens post updates constanty, and whie ibraries don t necessariy need to post a new update everyminutewedoneedtomakesurewe are making the best use of the toos we have. The foowing are overviews of just a few of the options out there for ibraries who are ooking to either create an onine presence, or enhance their current presence to better serve their teens. Facebook Facebook is a natura pace to begin. According to insidefacebook.com, as of January 1, 2010, 40 percent of Facebook users were between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five, which amounts to roughy 38,676,560 persons between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five in the United States. Chances are, your teens areonfacebook.maybenotaofthem, but enough to make it worthwhie to start up a Facebook account. With a Facebook account you can create event invitations, share book traiers that you create or find on YouTube, post updates highighting new additions to the coection with inks to your OPAC, respond to genera queries incuding purchase or hods requests and maintain a constant presence in the ives of your teen patrons. There are severa of different ways to go about this depending on what exacty your teens need from you. 1. Create a Facebook Group. The group coud be private or pubic and woud aow you to share updates with group members, have discussions with members and post upcoming events or photos to the group. Having a private group may be the right option if your teens, or their parents, are particuary worried about privacy issues. A group might aso be beneficia to a smaer subset of your teen popuation. For instance, if your ibrary has a TAB, a Facebook group coudbeagoodpaceforthetabto share ideas for the ibrary and work with the ibrarian to pan upcoming events without having to meet in person. One downside to groups, however, is that new posts to the group aren t shown in your main news feed so members have to remember to check the group often for updates. 2. Create a Facebook Page. Pages aow peope to ike a certain entity. This type of account is reay an everchanging advertisement for whatever it is you or your business has to offer. With pages the entity can post upcoming events and peope who ike the page can add their comments to the wa. You can of course post photos here too. One downside to pages is that once someone ikes you, they ike you. There are no ists to put peope on or varying degrees of pubicity. Pages are pubic, period. 3. Create a Facebook Profie. This is where it a began. This is where friend becomes a verb. Creating a basicfacebookaccountcanmeanthat you are as pubic or as private as you want to be or anywhere in between. You can hide your profie from peope who you aren t friends with, or hide just certain parts of your profie. You can create ists that permit different groups of friends to have different eves of access to your content. You can send out event invites, post photos, videos, inks, and you can postupdatestoyourprofiethatwi automaticay show up in your friends feeds, uness of course they bock your updates. This is a wonderfu option for teen ibrarians who are ooking to have the highest eve of interactivity with their teen popuation. Winter 2011 Young Adut Library Services YALS 25

3 Onine Marketing Strategies for Reaching Today s Teens Teen-Focused Library Web Sites Having a page of your ibrary s Web site dedicated to serving teens is aso a wonderfu idea. With it you can: Highight ibrary resources geared to teens and ink to the OPAC. Host pictures of the physica space to entice teens to visit the ibrary. Link to other Web-based resources that the ibrarian has vetted. Link to the ibrary s teen Facebook account or bog. Maintain a resource for parents to find out what the ibrary has to offer their teen(s). Many ibraries use programs ike Dreamweaver that make editing HTML content fairy straightforward. This means that if your ibrary doesn t have a dedicated IT department and you, the ibrarian, wi be updating your own page, it shoudn t take up too much of your time. If on the other hand you are famiiar with HTML coding or if your ibrary cannot afford a program such as Dreamweaver there are a number of great free programs that you can downoad to assist you with coding your page. Beow is just a sma sampe ist of free editors avaiabe to downoad onine. TextWranger is a basic text editor avaiabe for Macs that wi automaticay highight your code in different coors that hep you to track your work. It can be downoaded from /textwranger. TheFreeHTMLEditorfrom CoffeeCup is a great choice for Windows 7, Vista, and XP users. The CoffeeCup Free HTML Editor is a fu-featured web design system. With buit-in FTP upoading, wizards for tabes, frames, fonts, and more, support for HTML5 and CSS3, and 100% vaid code output... ( Komodo Edit is the free version of the HTML editor that can be downoaded onto Windows, Mac, and Linux systems. It can be downoaded from com/komodo-edit. Bogs Bogs are a good aternative to Web sites because they are free, very easy to update and require no knowedge of HTML coding, whie at the same time offering users the option to fuy customize the ook and fee of their bog. For those who are famiiar with HTML coding, bog hosting sites ike Wordpress.com offer the abiity to further customize your bog using your own code. Another positive aspect of having a bog is that peope do not have to become a member, as they woud with Facebook, to access your content. This means that anyone who has access to the Internet can access your bog as ong as you make it fuy visibe. Sites ike WordPress do aow the bog creator to hide her bog if she chooses, ony aowing a sma group of users to view content, but this is not the defaut setting. Bogs aso have a mutitude of widgets avaiabe to hep you make the most of your space. Some usefu and popuar widgets or features avaiabe with many bogs are: Twitter feeds Caendars RSS feeds Search fieds Tagging Tag couds User comments Video sharing Image sharing Mixing it Up Once you have created your foundation it s time to get creative. Lots of different Webbased toos are free and easy to use. The probem is knowing which resource to use, when to use it, and how best to use the resource. Beow are some ideas for marketing your coection, space, and upcoming events separated into those three categories. Marketing the Coection Book traiers are a great way to market your coection. You can create your own for free using Animoto for Education ( animoto.com/education) or Animoto for a Cause ( cause), depending on your type of ibrary. Both aow you to upoad images, videos and music, and add text to create dynamic book traiers. YouTube is aso a great resource for finding book traiers. Both the Harper Teen channe and the PenguinYoungReader s channe offer book traiers and video interviews with authors. YouTube videos are easy to share on Facebook, Bogger, and Twitter. TwitVid ( can be used to share book traiers on Twitter. The four Shared Free Fie Sharing Web site has a section dedicated to book traiers. The book traiers are fied into different categories based on the approximate age of the intended viewer/reader ( ZiDT_kOV/Book_Traiers_for_ A.htm). Frequent updates about the coection are aso a great way to remind teens that the coection is aways growing and changing. 26 YALS Young Adut Library Services Winter 2011

4 Peowski Horn Having a Shefari account where you can add recenty acquired tites is great. You can create a widget that you embed on your Web site or bog that wi update anytime you update your shef on Shefari. Check out the Farmington Library s Onine Teen Space to see what the Shefari widget can ook ike. org/teen.htm. Using a Twitter widget embedded onyourwebsiteorbogisasoa great way to update content frequenty without having to update theactuacodeonyourwebsite. This makes posting frequent updates about coection acquisitions a breeze. Use a digita photo frame to dispay fiers for upcoming events or book cover images for tites recenty purchased. This is sort of a digita/ physica space marketing hybrid. RSS feeds are another great way to get coection updates to your teens in a timey manner. Many bogs have RSS feed options and there are Web sites that offer RSS feed services to pubic ibraries. DearReader.com offers new book aerts with RSS feeds to pubic ibraries. n/users/tempates2/mweb/path5-1. htm. Reader s advisory is aso an important aspect of marketing your coection. Creating ists and tag couds in your cataog or on your bog are great ways to hep teens find more books that they might be interested in. If you are ucky enough to have a cataog equipped with tagging capabiities and the option to create ists you are in a great position. If however, your OPAC does not have such features there are sti paces you can create these ists and tag books to be shared with your teens. LibraryThing for Libraries offers cataog enhancements such as tagging, tag browsing and book recommendations. QR Codes are another great way to deiver reader s advisory to your teens. You can create read-aike ists and post them on wikis, Web sites, or bogs and then attach the QR code to the inside of a book. If teens ike the book they are reading they can scan the code with their smart phone using a free QR Scanner app and they woud be taken to the page with the read-aike ist. QR codes can be created to ink to any number of Web-based ocations. Free QR code generators ike kaywa.com are avaiabe on the Web. Marketing the Space Havingteenstakephotosorvideosinthe teen area and then dispaying them front and center on your Web site, bog or Facebook accountisagreatwaytoshowcasethespace. Taking photos of the space when no one is in it makes it seem uninviting and unpopuar. If you have different areas, ike a quiet space, computer area, Wii or other gaming area, or a ounge, make sure to take pictures of each of the different spaces. You want the pictures to attract as many teens as possibe, so showing that the space has something for everyone is important. And remember, the teen ibrarian is an important part of the space; a photo of her interacting with the teens is aso great to dispay. Once you ve taken the photo(s) you can easiy upoad them to your bog or Facebook space. There are aso a variety of free photo editors avaiabe onine if you need to make any changes before pubishing your images. Picnik: Picasa for Macs by Googe: picasa.googe.com/mac Picasa for PCs by Googe: picasa.googe.com/index.htm## GIMP: Marketing the Programs Of course the best way to market your programs to teens is to get them to te you what they want, but even that isn t enough if you want to bring in teens other than those who gave you the idea. Here are a few ways you can use technoogy to market your programs. Create a Facebook event. Creating an event and sending an invitation out at east a week before the event to a of your friends is a great way to reach a ot of teens a at once. Foow up with status updates on Facebook. Foowing up the event invite with a coupe of status updates is a good way to remind teens when the event draws coser. Update your Web site. If you have a main teen page on your Web site ist a upcoming events there. With Googe Caendar you can dispay your caendar on your Web site or provide others with a ink to your shared caendar. More information on how to do this can be found here: en/googecaendar/event_pubisher_ guide.htm. Insta a Twitter widget on your bog or Web site. Post upcoming events on your Twitter account and automaticay update your Web site or bog. Use a digita photo frame to dispay event fyers around the ibrary. Some of these I use and some I do not. What works for one pubic or schoo ibrary may not work for another. You need to know your teens (a of them) and understand that different groups wi respond to different methods of marketing. You aso need to make sure that whatever method(s) you choose; you use them wisey and to their greatest potentia. YALS Winter 2011 Young Adut Library Services YALS 27

5 Copyright of Young Adut Library Services is the property of American Library Association and its content may not be copied or emaied to mutipe sites or posted to a istserv without the copyright hoder's express written permission. However, users may print, downoad, or emai artices for individua use.