What’s new for loan?
Spydus New Alert Profilescascading through social
media on autopilotto Twitter and beyond!
The problem
Comments like:• All your books are old!• You should buy new DVDs.• Where’s the list of your new stuff?
How do we promote our new stock?
We started with a couple of ideas:• Create a New Books display• Promote Spydus Profiles to customers:
We called it Read Alert.
Spydus New Alert ProfilesJust login and fill in the search details here
And get emails like this
Online, the most obvious thing was to
• Promote the Read Alert customer set up profiles
• Provide a PDF with instructions
• That was in November 2007
But we wanted more
Instead of asking our customers to set up Read Alert profiles themselves, what if we could do that for them and enable
one click access?
What if… Read Alert profile emails went public?
So, we made our emails public,literary
We created a blogSet up profiles Got the emails
And copied and pasted the emails into Blogger!
We were already familiar with Blogger
• We’ve been blogging with Blogger since August 2006.
• It started as a web 2.0 pilot project and it’s still is.
• We even run AFL footy tipping competitions on it!
Where we started: January 2008Read Alert Live
• Set up Spydus profiles for collections
• Used existing Read Alert branding
• All collections on one blog but posting separately
• Combined some collections into one stream, e.g. Kids includes Picture Books, Big Books, Early Readers, Young Children's DVDs
The experience
Difficulties• Poor library website design with most
customers accessing us via the OPAC rather than the website homepage, where the link was
• Link was hard to find on the homepage• Negative staff view of the website, so
reluctant to promote it
Wording the link
We did an experiment.This was our 1st link:• What’s new for loan
This was our 2nd link:• New books, CDs and DVDs
Key stat:up to 90 visits a month
Key stat:up to 150 visits a month
It was manual but it worked
• We were able to copy and paste, clean up and publish each profile email as a blog post in less than a minute
• We got the occasional feedback comment (all good)
• But then…
Spydus upgrade!
• In October 2008, a Spydus upgrade saw the profile emails become sporadic
• We limped on until November, then called it quits
Under review
• We wanted a blog for each collection and collection group
• Wanted to make it accessible via social media• We wanted to automate the posting of the
Profile emails• We wanted a new library website!
How to automate?
That stumped us ,until we
discovered that…
You can create Blogger blog posts
via…
email!
Don’t panic!
• Each profile email has a link directly back to the Profile
• This works without logging in
• But only inside the library• Outside, it doesn’t follow
The steps to a new what’s new
• Create a blog for each collection or collection group
• Create a separate membership and profile for each collection and collection group
• Give each profile the Blogger email address• Promote to staff • Link from website and Blogalogue• Created the page as a Blogalogue post
We re-launched in March 2009
In January 2010 we went even bigger
We went live with our new website!• Integrated Spydus within the website• What’s new page now linked under homepage
search box• Added canned OPAC searches of new adds
Linked from every page
Blog links
Canned search links
Key stat:between 600 and800 visits a month
Canned searches
Canned OPAC searches• By collections, e.g. Adult
Fiction, Films, Teen• Combine various kids
collections into one stream, e.g. Picture Book, Big Book, Early Readers, Young Children's DVDs
• For current month and all of previous month
Access your way
Along the way, we have broadened the means of access to include
• RSS feeds• email updates• Twitter alerts• Facebook posts• Library toolbar access• and to your mobile gadgetry things
On autopilot to social media
• We take the Feedburner RSS feed into Twitter via Twitterfeed
• Twitterfeed aggregates the feeds from all our blogs, including the Blogalogue
• We then take our Twitter’s RSS feed into our Facebook page via the Social RSS app and onto our Conduit toolbar
Sample blogKey stats:62 RSS feed subs18 email subs
There are statisticsKey stats:Pageviews September 2010sourced from Blogger Stats
622 young children’s592 kids461 teens138 talking books310 graphic novels392 films312 adult fiction267 large print
And there are statisticsKey stats:Pageviews September 2010sourced from Google Analytics
124 in total
On TwitterKey stat:267 followers
On Facebook Wall and..
Key stat:121 followers
FB RSS feed subscription..
Conduit toolbar
Key stat:65 downloads
Also from Conduit: an OPAC search app for browsers
Also from Conduit: a library Twitter app for browsers
It goes something like this
Profiles emailed to RSS feed and email subscriptions by
blog RSS feeds aggregated and sent to Twitter
Twitter’s feed sent on to
Social RSS app
Twitterapp