In CILIP ,Future of librarians ,Information Professional Stuff ,Marketing / Tags: #echolib, cilipfuture, echo-chamber, future of libraries, Library Advocacy, Library marketing, Newsnight /
But first: a correction…
I’m keen to move on from the whole Newsnight thing now, but there’s one thing I need to state here. In my previous posts, I said that as I understood it, Newsnight offered CILIP the slot and CILIP didn’t take it up. I now understand that in fact CILIP contacted Newsnight in the first place – although they ultimately couldn’t make it happen. For me, even though the end result is the same, there’s a huge difference between those two scenarios – in one, CILIP is shirking a fabulous opportunity, but in the other (in actuality) they were tryng to MAKE an opportunity offf their own proactiveness… Which is great. Shame, obviously, that it didn’t work out, and I stand by the idea that hevean and earth should be moved in such a scenario, but the most important thing to take from this new understanding of the events is that it shows CILIP is already moving in the right direction.
______________________________________
Broken Record
So, back to the point of this post. I don’t want to sound like a broken record but I need to repeat something important for the purposes of this post: I believe one of the major barriers to marketing libraries and the information profession in general, is that people outside it do not know what we actually DO. If we can achieve that, then people can make an informed decision as to whether they want or need libraries in their lives (or, indeed, whether they’d like to come and work in one!).
CILIP1
CILIP have responded well to the recent issues of media representation, and part of what they’re doing is asking us, the library community, to provide 1 minute messages about our value. Nicola Mcnee has taken this concept a step further, and asked for one line tweets explaining what we do – crowd-sourcing our skills set, as she puts it. Her first tweet as an example was: I’m a librarian and I teach students how to use information sources on the Web #CILIP1. I came up with I’m a librarian and the difference between Google and me, is like the difference between overhearing a conversation and participating one. Not sure about that though, really - librarians are doing a lot of Google-bashing of late, with perfectly understandable motives and good intentions. The message is an important one. But people LOVE Google – trying to present a positive image of ourselves via a negative image of Google might end up being seen as us just whining or bleating on about stuff. We can learn a lot from Google (not least in our library catalogues) so if we are going to make the point about finding the right information with a librarian’s help, perhaps we could just say ‘search engine’ as the comparison? Anyway, I digress.
I think both these initiatives are great, and reflect the current way people digest content online – one minute is quick, one line in 140 characters or less is REALLY quick! You can see an archvie of all the CILIP1 tweets here.
Providing the same information or message in different formats increases its chance of breaking out of the (fricking) echo-chamber. Phil Bradley has set up a space online to record audio 1 minute messages, which is great – I’m going to add one of these, and you should too if you feel you can. It would be nice to have something video based too, which is what this post is leading to.
Pastiching the Zeitgeist
A great way of getting a message across effectively is to frame it in something people already know and understand. Of late there’s been a couple of examples of librarians or libraries taking something zeitgeisty and pastiche-ing or parodying it – some I like and some I don’t. The famous Librarians do Lady Gaga vid was admirable in many ways, although I wasn’t a big fan – in fairness though (and I actually mean that phrase, I’m not using it like a footballer would use it, ie vapidly!) they were making no claims to be representing the profession as a whole, they were just advertising their services in a fun and novel way – and 500,000+ views on YouTube is brilliant.
The iPad advert spoof, on the other hand, I thought was absolutely ace:
Only 5000 views though, shows how hard it is to reach people. (I say “only” – 5000 is pretty good, but not compared to half a million.)
I’m a PC / Windows 7 was my idea
I keep making the connection in my head between the cilip1 tweets, and the recent Microsoft advertising campaigns. In the ‘I’m a PC’ one, loads of people said really quick things about who they were and added “I’m a PC” to the end or begginning - as a badge of honour, in response to Apple’s campaign, featuring Mitchell and Webb as a cool, chic Apple and a geeky nerdy PC. The Windows 7 ad campaign is also quite quick-fire, with the ads typically lasting 30 seconds, and someone talking about a new feature of Windows 7, in isolation, and adding at the end that Windows 7 was their idea. Both nice ideas for ads, I find them slightly annoying but nevertheless, they’re both suitable for ‘I’m a librarian’ pastiches, no?
I’m a librarian
I’m imagining a series of extremely quick-cut pieces to camera, of Information Professionals in various visually arresting situations, saying their CILIP1 tweet lines out-loud. So all the cliches that typically denote exciting and dynamic people could be there – someone Sky-Diving shouting “I’m a librarian & I connect people with questions to people with answers!” (@alanfricker) then maybe someone in a school surrounded by fresh-faced pupils saying “I’m a school librarian and I train teachers to teach using new technologies,” (@stormfilled), then someone striding towards the camera in an office saying “I’m a librarian and I save taxpayers money” (@twistedwillow) then someone in a hi-tech looking modern computer lab saying “I’m a librarian and I don’t just point you to a resource I also show you how to get the most out of it” (@ekcragg), then Phil Bradley in maybe wearing some headphones in a studio saying “I’m a librarian and I like helping to make things better by providing timely, quality information to people who need it” (@PhilBradley) etc etc – and finally a close up of a librarian, who whispers “I’m a librarian..” then it pans out to her/him in a library and they shout really loud up at the camera “…and I make people’s lives better!” (@MarianneBamkin). Then it could all close with some url on the screen which would give people more info if they went to it, and a voice over saying “Libraries. It’s what we do.”
The Libraries. It’s what we do. slogan could be an umbrella for all sorts of efforts to explain ourselves, via all the different media we could employ, and across several countries.
What next?
Is this a good idea? Should we actually try and DO this? They don’t actually have to parody the Windows ads – they could just be stand-alone vids. If so, we could set up a wiki and do some more crowd-sourcing – people could send in decent quality vids of themselves saying their cilip1 sentences and I’ll edit them together into a short, sharp ad – maybe we can get some viral marketing going. (Actually, it only takes a second to set up a wiki; I’ve done so just in case: http://librariesitswhatwedo.pbworks.com/ And incidentally, I tried to create a mock-up of this with Xtranormal but they’ve started charging to publish the animations online…)
What do you reckon?
- thewikiman
18 ResponsesLeave a comment ?
It’s important with this kind of promotion that it doesn’t look cheap and corny like this: http://io9.com/5573513/saturday-matinee-the-post+apocalyptic-library-education-show-tomes–talismans
With suitably high production values and genuine enthusiasm, it could work well.
Yes yes yes yes yes. Let’s do it! But, let’s makes sure it does look good.
Some thoughts from the non-librarian:
I’m not sure I agree that people not knowing what librarians do is such a problem. I don’t really know what lots of professionals *actually do*. I don’t know – for instance – what accountants do. If I thought about it, I’d probably deduce that there must be a fair old variety of accountants out there. But I don’t think about it. Nor am I much interested. I DO know, though, how an accountant could help me.
(Assuming I had some money.)
Anyway. My point: isn’t the problem more that people aren’t convinced that librarians are relevant/useful to THEIR lives? That people don’t know how librarians might be able to help THEM.
Perhaps this is what you meant. But I think it’s much more helpful to think (and orientate your language) in terms of telling customers what benefits you can offer them, rather than informing them about your profession.
Because no-one particularly cares about your profession. People care about their own needs and desires. Why should they care about what librarians do?
I work in design and copywriting. And nobody cares what I do. What people care about is that I can help them say what *they* want to say. That I can help them sell their product. That I can help them feel proud of their company. It’s all about what they want, not about what I do. And that’s exactly as it should be.
So if I were designing an advertising campaign to promote my profession, I’d certainly not focus it on telling people what designers do. I’d focus it on telling them how design can make their own lives/businesses/jobs a hell of a lot easier/better/more satisfying.
I can’t think of a single successful advertising campaign that features a company or organisation telling its audience what they do.
Because it’s boring as hell to anybody outside that organisation.
(Sorry, I don’t mean to sound harsh with that, as I think you are genuinely doing interesting and worthwhile things — but designing an ad campaign is a very big, very complex undertaking that an awful lot of very clever people have devoted their working lives to mastering. So you either have to be very good or very *very* lucky to break through the noise as an amateur. And by break through, I don’t mean in the way of that Lady Gaga thing — because I bet most of those 500,000 views on YouTube were either librarians or people (like me) watching it for the comedy/cringe value — because that was a terrible video and did the profession *no* favours at all.)
WAFFLE WAFFLE BLAH BLAH. Bed time.
No need to apologise, you make some excellent points! And a non-library perspective is always really valuable…
I agree, we should be orientating your language as you suggest. As the CILIP1 and one-minute-message campaigns are all about what value we have, it should be inherent in any campaign based on it that we’re telling users what we could do for them – but it never hurts to make that more explicit, and indeed to have that as the main driver rather than telling people what we do per se. Although as you suggest, I did kind of mean this anyway – if people knew what we did, they’d know what we could do for them, and that would be great for us to successfully get across.
I’m not really suggesting that we could make that much difference doing a little self-made campaign, but for me there’d be three reasons why it’d be worth trying anyway. Getting proactive and focusing on how we benefit communities are worthwhile endeavours of themselves; if we make something that successfully showcases the value of libraries it could be picked up and remade properly by a higher power (not sure who); and you never what’ll happen if you try and make something happen yourself.
Thanks … Yeah, last night I missed out saying what I thought was *good* about this idea: the mobilisation of ‘grassroots’. And I think your idea would probably galvanise people within the profession, which I’m sure is useful. You’ll also get a good welter of links out of it, which won’t do your online profile any harm either …
I guess I’m not convinced by the parody/pastiche aspect of it. I don’t think the Windows ad campaign was adventurous or particularly noteworthy — certainly in any way timeless — and I think generally a pastiche-type thing either needs to ape a really strong, distinctive ad or otherwise needs to take the piss out of something and expose its mediocrity through parody. Not just imitate the format of a not-particularly-remarkable, MOR ad.
I think the problem with lots of the ‘I’m a librarian and …’ statements is that they could come across as either a bit abstract or a bit glib in the context of a montage. ‘I connect people with questions to people with answers’, for instance, doesn’t make me think, ‘Oh man, yeah, librarians rule!’ — not because it’s a bad statement, but because it doesn’t really seem to relate to me.
What I think is strong, though, is the idea of involving lots of people and educating as to what librarians can offer that people might not realise.
But I think a better way of doing that would be through stories, not through a series of short, not-so-easy-to-absorb-at-speed statements. To go back to that ‘I connect people with questions …’ example, how much more powerful and convincing would this be if the person told a 30-second story about how they helped one customer find the answer to a difficult question?
I think the idea of collecting a load of videos of librarians all over the world telling stories about how they’ve helped people would give you a very strong bank of ad-friendly material.
Just watched the iPad thing and I don’t think it works.
It’s not terribly executed, but the reason it hasn’t got many views, I’d say, is that it’s just not funny, unexpected, clever or entertaining enough. No wow factor, no laugh. It just seems like a lot of shoehorning has gone on and I can’t really follow it enough to work out why I should care or be impressed.
Apart from people who work in libraries, who’s going to watch that video and think, ‘Wow, ace video, I want my friends to see that’? Or ‘Wow, they took that iPad ad and totally gave it a new spin’.
At least the Gaga thing had some viral value — even if that viral value was basically, ‘Hey, look at this video that tries to make libraries look cool and fails hilariously.’
I’ll stop clogging up your comments now. Don’t mean to keep sounding negative and scathing, but advertising is hard to get right, easy to get crushingly, bone-jarringly wrong. And it’s easy to lose sight of what the average person (who has no interest in libraries) will think, if you’re watching something from within the bubble of a profession.
(Er… didn’t mean to suggest with that that you specifically are within the bubble of your profession, just that *everyone* is, to some degree.
Realised it came out a bit insulting, potentially. Ha.)
Hey, I appreciate your feedback. It is mightily important to see things from outside the bubble, so thank you for commenting as you have done – I try and step outside the bubble as much as I can, but it’s hard…
I have to say that while I like the idea of the 30 second how I helped vids, I can’t see them having an impact in quite the same way. People just have short attention spans – a series of 7 or 8 second statements at least sort of re-sets their interest level over and over again; a full half-minute tale of helpfulness might cause them to switch off quicker. People do know people in libraries get helped by librarians; the danger is, they’ll see the video and think ‘but I don’t need a librarian’s help’. But that could be true of everything we’re discussing, I suppose.
Thing is we could do all of these ideas, and have a whole arsenal to choose from.
As for the online profile thing, I know you weren’t being serious but I’d happily let someone else take this idea on if they could do it better than me, and have no further part in it if that ensured it actually got done! I’ve only been blogging for 11 months, but even in that time my interest in getting credit for things / increasing my profile has noticably reduced compared to my interest in things just happening anyway.
I’d say that, if you want to keep someone’s attention, a single good story is a WAY better option than a montage.
In fact, if you want to keep someone’s attention, a single good story is just about the best means open to you. Full stop. That’s my opinion, anyway.
If you compare any one of those mediocre Windows ads to something like the brilliant recent(ish) John Lewis spot ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMtyOCoqHTk ), I dare you to tell me that storytelling isn’t more powerful than collage.
And I’m not even in John Lewis’ target market. But it’s about the most obvious, simplest, most predictable ‘story’ in the book. But it’s still compelling. For a whole 1.30.
(Obviously this is straying rather a long way from your brief … But I like an interesting wee debate …
)
Okay now I really disagree with you..
The biggest difference between libraries and John Lewis (and there are, surely, many) is that John Lewis can do an add like that precisely because people already know what they do! That’s an ad’s whose success is predicated on a brand being so strong, you can essentially present an idealised version of the life of a member of the chattering classes, and be confident that the viewer will infer that it was the furnishings, sofas and white goods that made her so happy for such a sustained period…
What it comes down to, for me, is achieveable goals. It may be that none of this is achievable, but the modest aim would be to take some of the cilip1 messages and try and increase their scope for dissemination by presenting them via a different medium. If a clip is 7 seconds long, then the fact that it is poorly lit and poorly mic’d is relatively easily to see past – if you have 30 seconds of an earnest librarian telling the camera how they helped someone, surely any inadequacies of the recording would be brutally exposed..?
(Digression FTW!)
Didn’t mean for a second to suggest you should aim to do an ad like John Lewis’s.
No indeed!
Merely to illustrate the point that a single, simple story can be compelling over way longer than just 30 seconds. It was in response to your point about needing to change tack every 7 seconds to maintain attention.
Obviously your goals and audience are TOTALLY different from John Lewis’s – which is why I make the comment about straying a long way from your brief. It was just the first recent ad that came to my mind that made a single story compelling for a long spot! Not in a million years was I meaning to imply that you should model your libraries marketing strategy on JL’s. Yikes!
(Though I’d love to see the results if you did …
)
Yep, I see your pragmatism. Useful stuff, pragmatism, and probably not my strongest suit. So excuse my unremitting charge for the pastures of idealism.
And you’re right: ’30 seconds of an earnest librarian telling the camera how they helped someone’ would potentially be apocalyptically crap. But I didn’t say that. I said telling a story.
Off the top of my head here: what if you asked people to talk for 1 minute (you’d cut it down) about the most bizarre enquiry they’d ever had, and how they solved it. You’d get stories. Stories that gave a real-life insight into how libraries *actually* help people. There’d probably be funny stuff, maybe even moving stuff (eg. helping an old guy trace his long-lost buddy or whatever). That would be GOLDEN MATERIAL. People loosen up when they tell stories. They become naturally very charismatic. I conduct video interviews as part of my job, and without fail the questions that yield the best responses are those that get the interviewee telling a story (and these are videos with 16-18 year old students, not celebrities or actors).
But just asking people to say what they do? WAY less engaging material.
My opinion, obviously. But stories kick the ass of statements EVERY TIME.
I really like that idea of using real life stories. The most bizarre enquiry and how we solved it is a great start. I got an email asking me what should be done about a broken toilet seat from one of our library users once…in fact it is one of several examples I used last week to illustrate to our director what a wide ranging role we play. He was surprised and We both laughed
p.s. I just directed them to maintenance people…maybe not so funny.
Can I respectfully suggest that you both look at http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/vw-golf-ad-focuses-on-classic-values/3003483.article
I’m a musician, and if I could afford it I’d have a fleet of Golfs just on the strength of this ad. It’s subtle, funny, understated, and totally convincing. Just try substituting ‘librarian’ for ‘Golf’…
Ah that’s interesting, because I personally don’t like that ad (the car in the work-shop actually IS a Golf, I’m sure of it, which really winds me up, plus the whole idea of why settle for less than a car that costs ÂŁ15k offends me as a public sector worker
) but you’re right, that would be a good to do a version of. Person using a search engine, says “It’s like asking a librarian!” – person asks for help in a bookshop “It’s like asking a librarian” – etc and then that tag line of “why ask someone like a librarian when you could ask a librarian…” Hmmm.
[...] I should point out that, according to the thewikiman, CILIP apparently asked to be on Newsnight in the first place: I now understand that in fact [...]
Awesome idea Ned… so when do we start filming the video?!
I had a thought this morning that kind of combined your original idea of quick messages in “visually arresting” surroundings with the idea from Billications about stories – how does this sound?
Use a series of quick “I’m a librarian and I. . .” but put the librarians in real life places with real life stuff going on around them. E.g.
Librarian in a hospital with patients and doctors – “I’m a librarian and I connect doctors with medical information”
Librarian in a school with a load of kids reading “I’m a librarian and I help educate the nations children”
Librarian in a science lab surrounded by equipment and people in lab coats and safety goggles “I’m a librarian and help researchers find chemical information”
Librarian at a castle ruin with a couple of members of the public “I’m a librarian and I help people research local history ”
and so on (with better wording).
The location of each librarian would provide the “story” and show how we are relevant to real people. But you keep the scope and the quick-moving feel. It would also be cheaper! What do you think?
@JP32 That’s a good ad. Quite funny and well tied together. And the meta-narrative is CONFIDENCE. The whole ad exudes it, which is why it’s appealing: confidence that the Golf is the car against which others are compared. The benchmark, the reference point.
It’s effective because it alludes to a truth.
And because it entertains us, the audience, into the bargain.