Engaging with Readers in the Web 2.0 era – social media, mobile devices &

eBooksClayton Wehner - Blue Train Enterprises

M: 0438 925 613 E: contact@bluetrainenterprises.com.au

This presentation is available at: http://www.bluetrainenterprises.com.au/plsa

A short video to start…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0EnhXn5boM&feature=player_embedded

PART 1 – BOOKS VS THE WORLD

Part 2 - Social Media…

Aussies going online…

28% of users are spending > 3 hours online a day

A further 23% spend > 1 hour online a day

Aussies going social…

8.7 million Australians visited a social networking site in June 2010

44.3% of Australians have a Facebook account (9.4m accounts)

Aussies going mobile…

2.4 million Australians accessed the web via a

mobile device in June 2010

So what? Time spent on online is time NOT

SPENT reading a book

Time spent on Facebook is time NOT SPENT reading a book

Time spent fiddling with a mobile device is time NOT SPENT reading a book

‘Amazonification’ of books The ‘long tail’ – make everything available and

help me find it (Chris Anderson)

Amazon innovations: 1-click ordering You might also like… Customers who bought this, also bought… Recommendations for you Frequently bought together

You can ‘amazonify’ your library too…

$24.70 AUDFree Shipping to

AustraliaDispatched within 24

hours

$96.95 AUDFree Shipping

Dispatched within 24 hours

$14.39 USDInstant Download(Wholesale price

$19.80)

Changing times…

In January 2011, Amazon sold

115

Kindle eBook Downloads for every

100Paperback Book sales

Pressures for Aussie book retailers! Aussie dollar very high Interest rates going up A slew of overseas buying options with cheap

shipping arrangements Big retailers up in arms about overseas operators

avoiding GST (thanks for promoting them, Gerry Harvey)

Universal access to fast internet connections Growing trust in the security of online shopping Greater complexity in life means that people seek

convenience Copyright protectionism on Australian books

Seth Godin – The Future of the Library

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/05/the-future-of-the-library.html

Pressures for libraries, too “Wikipedia [… has] basically eliminated the

library as the best resource for anyone doing amateur research…Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by?”

“And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbour. Five years from now, readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.”

Redefine the role of the librarian

Books today are not scarce, not expensive and ‘hardly worth warehousing’ – the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.

‘The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user’

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

A Paradigm Shift

Present Situation (?) Future Situation

Warehouse for dead books

Nerve centre for information

“We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.”

Renewed love for libraries… Hey, you can get books for free! My family has recently ‘rediscovered’ our local

libraries Anyone from Payneham or Walkerville here?

Love ya work! We love the ability to reserve books via the

web What percentage of the community really

understands what services are available at the local library?

PART 2 – SOCIAL MEDIA: ‘PATHWAYS’ TO CONTENT

What is Social Media? Social media is ‘media designed to be

disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques’

Blogs, micro-blogging, social networking, video/file sharing, wikis, social bookmarking, community sites and more

Today I am going to talk about 9 ways that you can use social media in your library…

1. Dip your toe in & join the party… Join the online book community – learn, discuss

and share info with like-minded people – authors, publishers, retailers

Get a Facebook account and become a ‘fan’ of book industry pages

Get a Twitter account and ‘follow’ book industry people

Get a LinkedIn account and ‘connect’ with your business associates, suppliers, clients etc

Get a feed reader (Google Reader) and subscribe to industry blogs and RSS feeds

There’s a conversationgoing on online.

What are you missing?

Do you have a voice?

2. Fix your website! Website is the

cornerstone of your social media strategy

Social media will bring visitors back to your website

3. Get bloggin’ How many bloggers here? Anybody can be a content publisher – not just the

media companies Establish yourself as an ‘authority’; build credibility Write interesting, provocative posts to engage with

readers Write short articles; write regularly – maybe twice

a week

Start at http://www.wordpress.com for free Transition to a domain hosted blog later – ie.

http://www.yourdomain.com/blog

4. Facebook it up

Over 750 million active users!

Has overtaken Google in US as most viewed website

‘Facebook Pages’ are for businesses/organisations (not standard profiles or Groups)

Set it up in seconds at www.facebook.com/pages

Extending your Facebook presence Claim your vanity URL at

www.facebook.com/username once you have 25 fans

Add custom tabs with your own content

Use check-in function with Facebook Places

Use apps to extend the functionality of the page – try North Social for sweepstakes, fan offer apps

Display a splash page for non-fans that asks them to become fans

5. Start Tweet, Tweet, Tweetin’ Micro-blogging; 140 character limit – basically ‘SMS on

the web’ (but best done via a mobile device)

You follow people, they follow you; your ‘tweets’ are seen by your followers, you see the ‘tweets’ of people you follow

Many people write off Twitter: who would be interested in this seemingly banal, nebulous information?

But maybe it has an application in libraries? – eg. tweet new acquisitions

What are those weird characters, man?

Hash tag # - designates a topic (eg. #abaconf11)

@ symbol – designates a Twitter user (eg. @boomerangbooks

Allows Twitter users to search for tags and to isolate tweets that contain that tag

6. Automate & centralise posting Posts on a blog, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc

can be ‘ported’ between one another using a variety of tools, removing the requirement to post manually on multiple sites.

Twitterfeed (www.twitterfeed.com) sends blog posts to Facebook and Twitter

Desktop tools (and mobile phone apps) like Tweetdeck and Seesmic can be used as a central hub for posting to multiple social networks at once

7. Integrate & enable sharing To grow your social media community, make it

easy to connect/follow by integrating social media elements into your pages and enabling sharing options Social bookmarking buttons FB Like buttons Google+1 buttons FB Boxes Twitter widgets

To implement, it’s normally just a small piece of code that is added to your page HTML – ask your geek!

8. Publish book event video online Video is the biggest growth area on the web as

bandwidth and online storage increases Over 24 hours of video every minute is uploaded to

YouTube YouTube is now the world’s second largest search

engine Video can be done cheaply with a handheld

camcorder

Copy the file to your computer and then upload to YouTube within minutes

Embed the video in your website or blog using the special code…

9. Start a wiki or group for collaboration Wiki = Hawaiian term for ‘quick’ A website created by a group of people who

have the ability to contribute and modify content

Often used to create collaborative and community sites – best known site is Wikipedia

Great for internal collaboration – think intranets, knowledge management, document sharing, reading clubs, etc

That’s it… Questions? This presentation is available at:

http://www.bluetrainenterprises.com.au/plsa