Building a community creativity lab

In case anyone's been wondering what happened to me, I did not fall off the earth! It just feels that way since I've been wrapped up in beginning of the school year craziness and starting my second-to-last Marketing class before completing my certificate - yeah! While it's been insanely busy, I've still been cooking up ideas for the blog and I think there are some exciting developments in the works.

The next project I want to tackle is building on the concept of a community creativity lab as a model for library services. I got some fairly good responses to my previous post on the topic, so I decided to take the concept a bit further. I can't claim to be the first to come up with this general idea, and there's already a lot of outstanding work being done along these lines. However, I thought it was a little unfair to say that libraries should become creativity labs without giving any specifics as to how they could work in reality.

So, in a series of posts, I'm going to tackle questions like:

• What would the founding principles and purpose of a creativity lab be?
• What would it look like in terms of physical spaces, both public and non-public?
• How would the community be involved?
• What services would be offered?

You get the idea. Since there's already evidence of these labs taking shape, I'm going to start with examples I've seen and point out their key elements and build up from there. (I already have a guest post or two coming up that describe some outstanding initiatives). I have no idea how many posts it'll take to fully explore this idea or how long it'll take, but I'm just going to keep plugging away at it. At the end, whatever that may be, I'll assemble the posts into a document that you all can do with what you wish.

Care to be involved? I would really love it if you readers would contribute your thoughts and ideas as we go along. Please comment on any post of interest and I'll incorporate your thoughts into the final paper. If you want to be involved sooner, please send me examples you've seen in libraries or elsewhere that you think resemble "creativity labs." I'll feature them in my posts and use them to define this concept.

Final note: What does any of this have to do with marketing? Faithful readers will know that in marketing, the most important piece of the marketing mix is the product. This series on the library as creativity lab will essentially explore new product ideas for libraries that resonate with today's patrons and their increasingly sophisticated needs. Here's hoping it works! :-)

The art of conversation is a marketing competency

There's a must-read article at BusinessWeek called, It's the Conversation Economy, Stupid. In it, author David Armano of the popular blog Logic+Emotion discusses how marketers must now become conversation architects to be effective in today's economy. It's one of those pieces that should make us rethink how we do our jobs. I wrote about it on KnowThis, so I won't repeat the summary here, but I would encourage you think about one of Armano's main points:

"Conversation architects move marketing beyond the idea of one-way messaging. Traditional marketing efforts were founded on this tried-and-true format and are still prevalent within the industry. Consider the example of a typical creative brief template, which usually says something like, "What are we trying to communicate?" Can you see the old-world residue in the word "communicate"? It lacks the dimensions of experiencing something and having an ongoing two-way dialogue. "What are we trying to communicate?" implies a one-way conversation. Maybe we should ask ourselves: "How can we facilitate?"'

I can't think of a better charge for librarians who are in the business of helping people succeed. In this way of thinking, we allow patrons' goals to become our goals, rather than letting our idea of what we want to accomplish dictate how patrons should interact with us. Makes sense to me.

Read this second: Finding balance in library marketing

[Read this first]

It seems to me that most professional, personal, and social efforts concern finding just the right balance between competing forces. People must balance the demands of their personal and professional lives; their desires and their available resources; their opportunities and their existing commitments; their selfish impulses and the greater good; and that's just for starters. Librarians are no strangers to balance-seeking. We've traditionally sought to mediate opposing tensions such as the responsibility to make resources readily available and the duty to preserve materials for future generations. The search for balance is a hallmark of professional work, and it also raises some important questions about marketing libraries in contemporary society.

I often mention the fact that modern marketing is customer-driven. In many ways, this trend meshes well with librarians’ service ethic in that we strive to meet patrons' needs, preferences, and demands. For many of us, it's only natural to involve them in our marketing efforts and to seek their feedback. Patrons, after all, are the reason we're in business, and they can be incredible sources of insight. I do, however, have concerns about this open-source trend when taken to the extreme of giving patrons what they want, whatever that may be, without regard to our professional judgment and a larger vision of libraries' potential. Innovations that lead to new service developments - the most important marketing function – are the sole responsibilities of librarians. Patrons can give us a nudge in the right direction, but they can't be expected to carry the weight of advancing our libraries.

This point is described best by Marty Neumeier, author of the book on innovation and differentiation, Zag. In the book, he discusses the danger of relying too much on feedback in the form of focus groups saying,

"What stops most companies from zagging is the cloud of uncertainty that follows innovation. In an effort to remove the cloud, marketers often conduct focus groups, which, while helpful in some situations, are notably unhelpful for encouraging innovation. This is because radical differentiation doesn't test well in focus groups. When you ask people what they want, they'll invariably say they want more of the same, only with better features, a lower price, or both. This is not a recipe for radical differentiation. This is a recipe for me-too products with pint-sized profit potential."

I can attest to this based on a number of focus groups I've attended in which our patrons typically express their desire for things like more computers, better printing and photocopying, and more online materials. While these are important needs to recognize, they don't do anything to make our libraries more compelling places. Innovation simply isn't patrons' job. They aren't as invested in libraries as we are and it's difficult for them to imagine what's possible in a library context. If we want our libraries to continue to be transformative places, it's our job to envision and realize possibilities that inspire. Doing so requires restructuring our internal operations, confronting risk head-on, and staying ahead of trends in the marketplace. To put it simply, if library marketing is a two-way street, librarians still control the traffic signals.

Services require both patrons and librarians to perform important roles, but not the same ones. Here's a brief summary of how I see our service relationship:

Patrons' Job	Our Job
Communicating unmet needs and complaints	Listening and responding
Suggesting service improvements	Imagining and implementing compelling services
Actively participating in service creation/delivery	Making it easy and rewarding to participate in services
Helping to refine and effectively execute library marketing tactics	Providing meaning and context for participation
Spreading word-of-mouth	Doing something worth talking about and providing the means to pass it along
Involvement	Innovation

Today's marketing realities rightfully elevate the role of customers and the power they have over how marketers do business, but open source marketing implies more than just giving people what they want. Modern librarian-marketers must be innovators who dig beneath expressed surface needs to create libraries that delight users in unexpected ways.

Playing catch-up with MarketingProfs

MarketingProfs consistently provides some of the best and most practical how-to marketing articles out there. Unfortunately, I've been less consistent in passing along the highlights to you. The following are the MarketingProfs articles I recommend putting on your to-read list:

Marketing via Stories: The Selling Power of Narrative in a Conceptual Age
The author emphasize the importance of story telling to stand out from other marketing communications. She notes that stories provide context, common ground, brand intersections, increased relevance, and future chapters. Interestingly, she advises that marketers look for stories before they need customers' attention. I would have liked to hear more about this...

Twelve Tips for Conducting Effective Surveys
There's nothing earth-shattering here, but those of you who are new to survey methods will find this brief checklist useful.

Starbucks at the Crossroads: Disruption Junction
Insightful summary of how and why Starbucks became derailed from its core values. The author discusses disruption and how SBUX left itself vulnerable to the next disruptive innovation. It's a cautionary tale of what can happen when an organization loses its focus. (Note: Paul at Idea Sandbox has been writing great posts that suggest solutions to SBUX's problems).

Two Ways to Engage Prospects Online
Read this! And also read the LifeHack article it mentions to learn more about how to use the right social media for the right jobs - it's definitely an article to save!

How to Market on YouTube
Many librarians are dipping into the YouTube waters, and this article features lots of examples that are a great source of ideas on how to get started, even with a modest budget.

Eight Ideas for Revitalizing Your Blog
Sound advice.

Segmentation in a Web 2.0 World - And Beyond
Fascinating! The author argues in favor of more refined and detailed segmentation given today's social technology stating, "Giving a user control to tell you what matters to them will be the key in the future. Over the next 10 years, this will be the key source of marketing power-getting to the point where we can derive ways and means to let the customer tells us who they are, what matters to them, what features they want, what things they need solved, and how we can best be of service."

Creativity at Work: Why It's Important and What it Takes
Creativity is a crucial competency of the librarian-marketer. This article is a good introduction to what it's all about.

I hope this summary helps you keep up with the excellent writings from MarketingProfs by highlighting the stuff that's most useful to librarians. I'll keep pointing them out for your convenience in my Shared Items.

Spoof this!

Granted, I watch too much T.V., which is why I derive a lot of marketing inspiration from television programs, for better or worse. I happen to be a big fan of the Discovery Channel, and I particularly like the shows Dirty Jobs, It Takes a Thief, MythBusters, and generally anything narrated by Mike Rowe. Last night, I watched a Discovery show consisting entirely of viewer-created videos called You Spoof Discovery (also hosted by mikerowe!). What I liked about this special is that Discovery could poke fun at itself (as the ads state, "Discovery Channel discovered its sense of humor"). The shows are the Discovery's bread-and-butter, but it still allowed viewers a forum for having some fun with them. There's also a message board where viewers can chat about the spoofs. Even the individual fan sites like this Dirty Jobs one, for example, allow viewers to get involved by talking to the host, posting programming ideas, and reacting to episodes through their discussion boards. Discovery leads off the discussion board with this statement:

"Discovery Channel is a huge fan of message boards — it's not only your chance to talk to us and each other, but it's also our chance to communicate with you and to hear your ideas."

This is a good example of open-source marketing in practice. Here, Discovery lets viewers have a say in the product (the shows), facilitates community-building (letting viewers talk to each other in a company-sponsored forum), and builds relationships between viewers and the talent (mikerowe! - Did I mention I was a fan?).

Librarians can learn a thing or two from this example. Our profession is rife with stereotypes and misperceptions. Why not make fun of them and get patrons in on the act? Rather than try to ignore or get huffy about the things in our profession that are irritating, let's engage those nuisances through our patron communities and open discussions.

Update: I wrote a post on the KnowThis.com Marketing Blog today on the topic of social media and marketing that fits with this discussion. I propose some ways in which marketers can interact with customers in these venues. You may also be interested in the free social media PR templates I mention offered by Shift Communcations. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how, when, and why we librarians should use social media marketing.

Stuff worth reading (in brief)

I'm sorry to be so silent for much of this week. It's been a short week full of meetings and getting ready for my trip to Seattle for Midwinter. There's so much juicy marketing reading out there though, that I just have to pass it along, but I will have to do so in list form:

Making relationships work: MarketingProfs outlines Five Ways to Develop a Dialogue with Key 'Influencers'. Influencers are those hubs of product/service information who have a knack for guiding others. The article points out ways in which we can best interact with these important people and build an influencer program. On a similar note, Knowledge @ Wharton reports on study that reveals people are more likely to purchase something if they are "network neighbors" with existing customers (Network-based Marketing: Using Existing Customers to Help Sell to New Ones). Finally, another MarketingProfs article suggests that there's no such thing as a one-size-fits all online community, and that "microcommunities" are much more successful. The article concludes with a handy list of 5 questions people should ask themselves when building these communities.
Update: It's All Good has more to say on social networking.

Open-source soft drinks: Pepsi sent out a press release outlining its revamped marketing strategy that aims to increase interaction with its customers. Here's an excerpt from the release with some examples of what they have in mind: "Examples of the upcoming packaging designs and promotions: In the U.S., the first can, titled "Your Pepsi," will link to a website inviting consumers to help design a Pepsi billboard ad which will run in New York City's Times Square in April. Consumers in the U.S. will also have a chance to design a special paint scheme for NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon's car that will race later this year. In many international markets, designs will link to websites that enable consumers to create music and video that they can share with others. Consumers will also have access to packaging designs by some of the biggest names in sports and music." It'll be interesting to see how this works out and if there might be some inspiration here for those of us in library land.

Book of interest: BlogCritics Magazine reviews the book, Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing by Ron McDaniel. What interests me most about this book is that the author counters the traditional logic that only amazing, out-of-the ordinary products generate buzz. Instead, McDaniel believes that word-of-mouth can be generated by dedicated, front-line staff. If anyone has read it, I'd like to get your take, so please leave a comment.
Update: I've wanted to mention this for a while: Paul at the Idea Sandbox has an outstanding series of posts on being remarkable. The posts highlight books on the topic of differentiation, all of which are going straight to my ever-growing "To Read" list. This topic is one of my absolute favorites in marketing, so I'm excited to dive into these reads.

Marketing on a budget: Once again, MarketingProfs has a great article, this time on the topic of online marketing on a small budget. Some of the examples include using surveys, forums, and e-mail management sites.