Courses: Marketing the Virtual Information Service

A very interesting day, even though it started badly with over-running engineering works that meant missing the introductory session and coffee.

How best to market a library service has always been a debatable question and with the 'virtual' (or should that be digital or online or 'e'?) dimension it becomes even more difficult to answer.

Something that came up in several sessions struck me as potentially the way we need to go. That is segmenting our market and tailoring our marketing to different groups. How to segment though? By subject? By level? By mode of attendance? And how to find out what those groups want so that we can market effectively to them?

There's also the question of Google. Google has something our customers value highly (ease of use) and we're trying to sell them what we value highly (quality of information.)

Of course we're just lucky, in the business area, that we have so many high quality and easy to use resources like ABI Inform, Mintel and (oops, I seem to have slipped into marketing mode!)

Whatever did I do without Bloglines?

Not so very long ago a colleague suggested I might like to use one of those newsreader, newsfeed thingies to keep up to date with all my news alerts, blogs and so on. I said that I didn't really see the need, as I was quite happy to visit my favourite web sites and do searches to check for news updates. I agreed to give it a try though, and set up a Bloglines account.

Just recently Bloglines hasn't been alerting me to updates reliably, and I've been surprised to find how much of a loss this has left me at. Somehow, without my really noticing, it's become something I rely on. I just expect it to be there, working properly, and I get quite indignant when it isn't or doesn't. I don't have time to go chasing around the internet searching out things that should all come to me! Maybe it's a shrewd marketing ploy on their part?

[Today it told me I had 95 new updates on one of my feeds - I think it's finally caught up!]

Another enquiry

I usually enjoy enquiries, but I'm not so sure about this one. I was asked for help in tracking down a *book that I recognised as being one that I had read on my own degree course. Up to this point I was quite happy. Then I found the following note on the catalogue record. "This edition published on the 30th anniversary of its original publication." Hmn. Where did those 30 years go?

[*Folk devils and moral panics by Stanley Cohen.]

Unsuggester

A funny thing happens at this time of year. Terms starts, the clocks go back, and time accelerates at a lunatic pace.

Anyway, I just found a spare 5 minutes to say how much I enjoyed LibraryThing's Unsuggester. You can type in the name of a book you disliked and it'll tell you which books are most unlike it! What a good idea!

Enquiries

I enjoy a good enquiry. I thought I might share a couple of my latest favourites, suitably anonymised of course.

The first was 'I've got to read chapter 10 of a book by Jones, where can I find it?' What I enjoyed most about that one was that I managed to find the answer. It makes you feel almost useful when you can answer questions like that.

The second was about how to decide on a brand name for a new product. I suggested the WARC database which has loads of information about such things. I can't help but wonder what the people who decided on this name for their new product were thinking of, but I'm sure they know what they're doing.