“How many people with short attention spans does it take to screw in a light bulb-wanna go on a bike ride?”

An article from Ryan Lawler on GigaOm the other day, the ubiquity imperative and the economics of attention shines a bright light on the importance of ubiquity among content companies clamoring for the attention of consumers. It struck a chord with me in the context of libraries from the simple fact that patrons are always customers to companies, in and out of the library.

While the post speaks specifically to video content, the message is clear:
“…consumers are now in charge of when and how they [consume] content. No longer content to be stuck to someone else’s schedule, consumers expect to be able to access their favorite content whenever they want and on a wide range of devices. As a result, the media companies that will win are those that recognize the need to be everywhere.” Full GigaOm Article here

Libraries have to be everywhere, on every device, to compete for patron attention. More time and money to spend, more technologies to sign up for and support. Not great news, but also not entirely true.

The strategy many libraries are implementing to solve this: Pick and choose your battles by choosing ubiquitous technologies rather than trying to be everywhere. For example, in mobile technologies, if you want to reach the largest amount of patrons on their mobile phones, you have 2 great choices: voice calls and text messaging. All mobile phones, smart or not-smart (aka “feature phones”) have both capabilities and are used by nearly everyone. At Mosio, we say “texting is the new talking”, not because we don’t enjoy talking to people, but because people are texting more than they’re talking on mobile phones. It’s simple, more efficient and enables time-shifting for busy schedules.

There are some amazing mobile technologies in the world. If we had unlimited resources and time, I’d have a developer working on as many as possible, but I don’t know any organization that has unlimited resources. With mobile messaging utilized twice as much as voice calls on mobile phones in the U.S. and around the world, we happily have our hands full offering solutions available to the largest amount of mobile users.

SMS FTW,

Noel

We are finally back into the swing of things after an incredible conference. We’ve been going to annual and midwinter for the past two years, but took a break from exhibiting to focus on meeting personally with clients and partners, deciding to ship the booth and try a new approach. It was so nice meeting new people, existing clients we’ve only spoken to on the phone and we even got stopped randomly on the street in the French Quarter. The food, the food! Definitely one of our most memorable conferences for the dining experiences alone.

We got the opportunity to show off our new SMS lists functionality, enabling libraries to use text messaging for outbound alerts and announcements and gave away 250 “<3 Libraries” QR Code buttons which everyone seemed to enjoy.

Thanks to everyone who stopped by to say hello and to those who have been following up since. We look forward to continue serving our customers and working with those who are soon to be.

Sincerely,

The Mosio / Text a Librarian Team

The hype surrounding QR codes is T–H–I–C–K! In libraries and even more so in marketing and advertising. It makes sense that everyone is excited about them. QR codes fairly easy to create, time making them is the only cost and even though one cannot track how many times they’ve been scanned (a big bummer in my opinion), there has to be some success with them or the excitement wouldn’t be there.

People with smart phones are pulling them out and scanning them when they see them, right? Do you have a QR code scanner on your phone? Did you scan my code above when you saw it? So are they worth it? I’m still not sure. Some would say “it’s better to have them so people have the option” and others would disagree.

Here’s what I definitely know: on my iPhone (3GS), I have 3 QR code Scanner apps. After being frustrated with two others because they wouldn’t read the scan properly, our CTO told me to get Optiscan because you start scanning and it just stops when it gets a scan rather than making you take a photo that might not be a good read. I’ve scanned less than 1 dozen QR codes total.

Here’s a presentation from this year’s SXSW about QR Codes and how they are everywhere. Below that I’ve embedded a cool Pet Shop Boys Remix video using them. Enjoy!

The full presentation is embedded below.

Reasons to Use Mosio’s Text a Librarian

Mobile Carrier Approved Text Messaging Reference Software
Currently used in over 800 U.S. Public, Academic and Health Science Libraries

Connect With More Patrons On-the-Go

Mosio’s reliable and carrier-certified text messaging solutions for libraries.

Patrons Text Questions. Librarians Type Answers.

Receive and respond to patron text messages on a secure website, backed by a dedicated support team.

Affordable, Efficient, Reliable & Secure.

Pricing plans to fit all libraries with dozens of features to automate, collaborate, archive & report.

Easy to Implement. Easy to Use.

No hardware to buy. Nothing to install. No mobile phone needed.

Buzz and Testimonials

“Text a Librarian is a great way to expand library services and provide mobile patrons answers to simple questions.”
— Tracey Ray, Free Library of Philadelphia

“Answering questions was easy. I just sat down at the computer and when I saw a question come in, I clicked on the big red ‘Answer’ button and started typing.”
— ALA Ambassador at ALA Annual

“Mosio’s Text a Librarian is a great solution for us!”
— Emilie Smart, East Baton Rouge Parish Libraries

“Texting a librarian is no longer a myth thanks to TextaLibrarian.com, which is easy to implement and actually keeps patron phone numbers private.”
— Mirela Roncevic, Library Journal

Advantages & Benefits of Using Mosio

• Easy to implement, simple to use and IT-friendly.
• Free Inbound Text Messages.
• Free Custom Auto Responders.
• Patron privacy is safe. Your data is secure.
• Run reports, gather stats and analyze usage.
• Efficient for one librarian working alone or many working together.
• Text a Librarian is not a hack. Hacks = Problems.
• Competitively-priced. Feature-rich. Always improving.
• We are technology compatible, perfect for Library 2.0.

We Offer Tools to Get You Started

We have training manuals, but you probably won’t need them.
Librarians are usually responding to questions within the first 5 minutes of logging in.
Our patron marketing materials make it easy to promote your service and have a successful launch.

Plus, our new Text For Instructions feature makes it easier than ever to explain how patrons can text you.
Text for Instructions encourages patrons to interact with Text a Librarian the moment they find out about it, maximizing your success in promoting the service.

Contact Us

For more information about how Mosio can connect your library with more patrons on the go, take a tour on our website, sign up for a free webinar, view a Text a Librarian webinar video, see our pricing and plans or contact us to discuss your needs.

Thanks and we look forward to speaking with you.

www.textalibrarian.com
877-MOSIO-99 (667-4699)

As we gear up for another ALA Annual the company has had some interesting discussions on new announcements and our directions in the world of library software.

A couple of weeks ago I had a great meeting/conversation with one of our partners and the discussion of library customer service came up. At the end of our partner meeting, someone said “we can give patrons access to all of the data in the world, but if we aren’t there for them from a customer service standpoint, it won’t matter.” Very true. Andy Woodworth’s blog post “Why Closing More Public Libraries Might Be the Best Thing (…Right Now)” [link below] came up in an internal company meeting, specifically his two points about customer service and advocacy (from the comments it seems the post got a lot of people talking).

The idea of improved customer service, whether at libraries or businesses in general, will continue to be a significant function of an organization’s success in the information age. Aaron Tay’s recent blog post about regularly scanning Twitter and the web for feedback is great (he gives some tips on how to do so) [link below], obviously taking a page from what many companies are doing as part of their customer service: listening to social media mentions for good and bad comments. Neither are the first to talk about the ongoing need for pro-active/reactive customer service in libraries, but both are current and relevant.

So what does this mean for Mosio and Text a Librarian?

We’re still very new to libraries and we LOVE working with them. Frankly, we’re just getting started. While we have friends who are librarians and have a handful of amazing people advising us, we’re not librarians ourselves, nor have we ever pretended to be. In many ways we see this as a distinct advantage to building our product: we cast aside any preconceived ideas of how things should be done and focus instead on simplicity, usability and feedback from our customers. We also know the inner workings of mobile technologies, enabling us to offer reliable (and certified) mobile services to libraries. We recently made an announcement that Mosio’s Text a Librarian is being used by over 500 academic and public libraries. It’s something we’re very proud to have accomplished in such a short amount of time, but we could not have done it without listening to the people who matter most to our success, the librarians who use our software with the benefit of communicating with more patrons on-the-go. The combination of our expertise and passion about creating an amazing library service will continue to be the keys to our ongoing success.

Text Messaging: It’s Not Just for Reference Anymore

In the same announcement we also mentioned that Mosio is now offering our full list of mobile services to libraries. Text messaging can be used for so many things beyond virtual reference and we’re set up to offer additional services to the benefit of our customers. We’re thrilled to be able to continue working with new and existing customers in offering technology solutions that will help us fulfill our vision for our library software: Patron Relationship Management.

Patron Relationship Management

We truly believe this is going to be one of the key tools libraries will need in the future to maintain great patron relationships and relevance in the community. Two comments we hear often are “I wish we could answer all patron questions this way” and “I wish everything could be in one place.” One of those comments we take as a compliment, the other we are taking seriously as a wish list item. Our goal for Text a Librarian was always to start simply, create web-based software that’s easy to use, reliable and certified by the mobile carriers, then grow additional features, elements and uses to continue giving more patrons access to libraries on their mobile phones. You can expect to see more from us in the mobile technology space, but every new product or service we add will have patron communications and relationship management in mind.

Links

Andy Woodworth: Why Closing More Public Libraries Might Be the Best Thing (…Right Now)
Aaron Tay: Why libraries should proactively scan Twitter & the web for feedback – some examples
LISWire: Mosio’s Text a Librarian in Over 500 Libraries, Announces Add-On Mobile Services

Use the Buzz to Build One

Google’s new microblogging service, is getting a lot of, well, buzz. “Hello World!” has literally been replaced by “Buzz! Buzz!” by new people trying it out. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s the best way to explain it:

It’s all of the elements that one could think of getting out of Twitter (more than 140 characters, the ability to post videos and photos) packed neatly into your gmail account. While there are still some kinks to work out (you get an email every time someone you’re following posts or comments, which could get really annoying fast), Gmail’s built-in active user base of 176 million users is making it a clear force to be reckoned with.

In comparison, Twitter claims to have 75 million users and about 25% of accounts are reported to be inactive. Foursquare, known by some as “The Twitter of 2010″ is similar in that you “check in” using GPS on your phone and has been building momentum in it’s growth. David Lee King recently had a great post about it called “Foursquare and Libraries – Definitely Something There!” And I would agree, but it seems Buzz might be hot on the trail as it has the same built-in GPS/Geo-Location features and it works directly with Google Maps. Granted, it’s currently missing the fun “Mayor” game element Foursquare has, but this is a numbers game and Google definitely has numbers.

Library Marketing Tips for Using Google Buzz

If you have any other ideas or thoughts, post them in the comments.

Happy Buzzing!

Update: Someone just Buzzed me this great post from AEXT.net entitled 12 Undocumented Tricks for Google Buzz, worth a read.

A Year of Mobile Reference Simplified

The past year has been an incredible one for Text a Librarian and all of us at Mosio are excited for what’s on the horizon for the year ahead.

What a year it’s been?!

When we launched Text a Librarian at ALA Midwinter in Denver last January, we set out to provide libraries with a new, socially-relevant communication tool to reach more patrons, keep the user interface clean and easy-to-use and encourage ongoing feedback to make Text a Librarian the most useful mobile reference technology in the industry.

We continue to challenge ourselves each day to meet and exceed these goals by designing new features and functionalities (like RefStart) to increase efficiencies and improve user/patron experiences, and by showing how Text a Librarian can be used beyond questions and answers to add value to the service by presenting opportunities to utilize text messaging as a way to gather feedback, collect data, market libraries and engage patrons on a mobile technology that most of them own.

What we never expected?

Mosio was built on the notion of “helpful people helping people” via mobile questions and answers. We felt that Text a Librarian would be a welcomed service in the library industry. What we never expected was that the library community is one that encourages the open-flow sharing of information, ideas and technology that serve for the betterment of the whole. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense.

It is refreshing and inspiring to be a part of this community. It motivates us to listen, learn and want to contribute more.

What’s next? More Mobile Technologies for Libraries

It is now very clear that mobile accessibility and services are must-have components of every library to accommodate on-the-go patrons with on-the-go technologies. Text messaging use continues to explode at a massive rate, and the mobile web is also sharply on the rise. These two mobile technologies individually provide efficient access to information and resources, and when offered in combination, ensure that every patron with a mobile phone has mobile access to your library.

We are dedicated to help you reach your mobile goals in 2010 and beyond by extending all of Mosio’s mobile solutions and services to libraries.

• Mobile websites
• Mobile systems integrations
• Mobile marketing (text message announcements, notifications, alerts, newsletters)
• Mobile web development

If your library is considering ways to mobilize beyond text message reference services let us know how we can make your mobile goals a reality.

Thank YOU!

We want to send a big THANK YOU to everyone who continues to support Text a Librarian in various ways. We greatly appreciate your ideas, suggestions and feedback.

All of our best in the year ahead!

Sincerely,

The Text a Librarian Team

Questions, comments, feedback? Text us!
Text asktal + your message to 66746.

“Here is the prime condition of success: Concentrate your energy, thought and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged. Having begun on one line, resolve to fight it out on that line, to lead in it, adopt every improvement, have the best machinery, and know the most about it.”
- Andrew Carnegie

My favorite thing about working at Mosio is that every day we get to come into work and improve ourselves, our product and our relationships with customers. Aside from the positive attitude and action from those who work here, our business model, offering on-demand mobile reference software as a service for libraries, enables us to create, test, launch, listen and then improve upon our product in an ongoing fashion. Text a Librarian is better today than it was yesterday and it will always be better tomorrow.

What Does it Mean? Ongoing Improvements and Progress as Promised.

Since we launched in beta almost a year ago, we have added literally dozens of features and improvements to the service, all of it based on feedback from our customers and those who have commented or offered ideas for improvements. All have been taken into consideration in our ongoing development of the service. We welcome constructive criticism and feedback and in fact, we live for it. Ideas and feedback from librarians enable us to make at least 2 major feature updates per month plus a handful of user interface, usability and back end improvements to the system.

Ultimately what this means is that if you read or send a comment about our product, chances are we have too and are looking into it. Truthfully, not all ideas and suggestions are feasible: for example, we have heard “why can’t the page auto-refresh when a new question comes in?” In theory this suggestion sounds great, until you are in the middle of answering a question and the page refreshes, quickly making your answer box a moving target. Other improvements, such as RefStart, have been made based on listening to the wishes of librarians and coming up with our own solution.

Why We Do It

The simplest answer is “because we can.” Compared with any other options libraries have for mobile reference solutions, we strive for ours to be the best. Being the best means always improving, always making the system more secure, scalable, more collaboration-friendly, easier to set up, easier to use and more robust with reporting. What it means for you and your library is that by signing up for our service, you’ll always have a product that gets better and better, built by people who love hearing what you think as you use it. The biggest compliment we hear is “I wish we could answer all reference questions this way.” Our standard response: “We’re working on it.” =]

One that you can always bet on with Mosio/Text a Librarian is that in pursuit of our goal to be the best, we’ll always be looking to out-perform and out-service any other mobile reference solutions available to libraries. We’ll always be doing this through listening, taking great notes and offering a little bit of personality with our customer service. What this means for libraries is that in their pursuit of being the best, once they sign on with our technology, they get the benefit of ongoing updates and feature-adds to make their services more robust and user-friendly without having to buy or license additional services/software.

You can see a standard list of Text a Librarian features on our website, or if you are a current Text a Librarian customer, click on the New Features link inside your Quick Links module when you’re logged into the system.

A new study shows 2/3 of marketers are using social media. Indeed, it is a very important element of promoting products and services, but what about getting back to the basics?

Word of mouth is, and will always be, the best form of marketing.

Qualified referrals from trusted sources play a vital role in customer decision-making. There’s nothing like a recommendation from a friend, family member or associate to help introduce and endorse new products and services. These recommendations increase consideration and participation across the board.

New services at your library are no exception. Adding text messaging to reference services  means harnessing the mobile channel to increase outreach by connecting with patrons wherever they are. This is a cool concept and a useful service. Why not reach out to those people in your circle to let them know? Maybe they will find the service helpful. Maybe they know others who will too.

Word of Mouth 101

A great introduction to Word of Mouth Marketing 101 can be found at the Word of Mouth Marketing Association website. For this post we’re going to focus on two of the five basic elements they highlight:

* Educate people about your products and services
* Provide tools that make it easier to share information

For years, the Faberge Organic Shampoo commercial has been a great example for how word of mouth marketing works. In the commercial, a woman talks about loving her shampoo and telling 2 friends, who tell 2 friends and so on – this is Word of Mouth Marketing 101 in its simplest form.

Start Internally

When we make major announcements or launches at Mosio/Text a Librarian, everyone on the team is encouraged to tell friends, family and associates. Usually, a single email is sent internally to give quick “copy/paste” info. That way, everyone has the information bullets and can pass along in their own voice. Depending on the context of the announcement, in addition to emailing, it may also be encouraged to post online (Facebook, blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, etc). It is never required and always optional, but whether or not someone chooses to pass the information along, s/he has the tools to make it easy. At the very least, now everyone knows.

Email Still Works

This isn’t to simply say “send out an email to your list and the world will show up at your door.” An effective email, even sent to your personal contacts, must have a compelling subject line, easy-to-digest content and clear main points, thus making it a quick read with defined takeaways. Those elements will not only help tell your story but will allow the recipient to easily share with friends and colleagues too.

Adding “Please forward this email to anyone that you think will find it helpful.” or something similar can work really well to extend the reach beyond your address book. It’s not pushy and lets everyone know that it’s ok, and welcomed, to forward along if they choose.

Contextual Contacts

They may not currently be in your virtual Rolodex, but establishing relationships with local teachers, student union representatives, education professionals, before-and-after school program instructors, community center staff and other contextual contacts can go a long ways to spread the word about library services. The wider net you can cast, the better.

If these groups are already on your contact list, continue to keep them updated. It can be as simple as asking them if they want to sign-up for a library newsletter to get news and information that could benefit their students, members and patrons. They might also be willing to distribute or place library marketing materials at their information desks.

Encourage the Social

Of course, the importance of word of mouth marketing through the sharing utilities of social media cannot be overlooked, but must taken in context based on any number of factors that would consider a recommendation as truly qualified. That said, the more exposure a product or service has as a result of social media sharing, the greater the likelihood that individuals will take the time to investigate to determine their own level of interest.

There are a handful of ways to make it easy for people to share information…about anything. These services give you a little bit of code to copy/paste onto your website, blog, etc so readers can easily share the information via email or a handful of other social media services. We’ve listed 3 below and use Add This simply because we have for awhile. All seem to work well and Add This claims to be the biggest. If someone is excited enough, they’ll figure out a way of telling others, but you might as well make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

Here are a few to consider:
Add This
Add to Any
ShareThis

Other Ideas

* Email Signatures - These make every email a marketing tool, are simple to update and can have mass reach from lots of sources. They can also help spark conversations with contacts that you communicate with, but would not normally send an announcement email.

* Add Footers on Your Reference Answers - You can add a footer to reference emails if you’re responding to patrons via email, or manually type out a footer at the end of an IM conversation (using a ” * ” symbol helps delineate a footer message from the body of text). Text a Librarian has an SMS Footer option that lets libraries add a small message at the end of a response.  If your library offers SMS reference, you can try something like “Tell a Friend to Text Us!” in your SMS Footer.

There are certainly many other ways that companies and organizations have successfully utilized word of mouth marketing not mentioned here, and we look forward to trying some out ourselves.

Thanks for reading. See you next week!

Ps. You may see the “Share” button at the bottom of this page.  If you know anyone that might find this post helpful, please share it with them.

How Important is Patron Privacy at Your Library?

I’ve never ever had a librarian tell me “we do not care about patron privacy or security at our library.”  And come to think of it, I haven’t had them even say it’s not that big of a deal. Security breaches stink and they can be harmful as the news of Twitter’s secret information exposed shows.  But they’re also embarrassing and ultimately very time consuming for those involved.  What’s more, there are simple things that can be done to avoid them, keep things secure and keep patron (and librarian) information private.

In the past 2 weeks, I have seen or read about 3 serious instances of security/privacy issues that could have been avoided if people within organizations would have been a little more careful or at least aware that their actions were viewable by others:

1) A user id and password posted on a blog by a library. We notified them to let them know.
2) A user id and password tweeted from one twitter user to their client, unaware that their @reply could be seen by others.
3) Twitter getting hacked by someone guessing an employee’s password on a Google Apps account.

I had a quick talk with our CTO to find out what he would say are 5 helpful security tips for libraries, or any business for that matter, to consider.  He gave me 6, the nice guy.

1. Whenever possible, don’t share user ID/logins between librarians.
Every time a login is shared, you’re creating more of an opportunity for a security breach.  The same as trying to keep a secret: the more people you tell, the more chances of it not being a secret.  The idea here is that if something happens, you can delete that user without disrupting everyone else.  Sometimes you have to share log-ins.  Understandable, so if you have to share, make sure the password is VERY unique but easy for everyone to remember.  Consider changing it regularly.

2. Assume that blogs, wikis, websites, Twitter, Facebook, etc, are viewable by the public and that everyone can read them.
It’s actually not the case, many of them can be hidden behind passwords, but as long as people second guess what they’re posting and thinking it’s possible for someone to see, you are creating a more secure environment.

3. Use or create systems that don’t show or store private patron information.
This is the one we see the most, unfortunately.  It’s done using hacks and work-arounds in the name of simplification, cost cutting, etc.  One of the librarians who advises us said “many people are using hacks because they want to be able to offer services to patrons, but I’m seeing more people understand it is simply not worth the risk.”  We believe if you can see a patron’s information, others can too.  If you’re using Google products, you have to delete information 3 times: inbox, sent box and then the trash (information is stored in the trash folder).  Sound a little paranoid?  Ok, but understand this is a blog post about security tips.  We care about security and hope you appreciate it.

4. Use Google Alerts for your library name to ensure that information posted about your library is what you want it to be.
These are easy to set up and easy to manage.  You can set them for select words/terms (the name of your library for starters) and control when they’re sent to you.  If someone is posting information about your library, you may not be able to get them to remove it, but at least you’ll know what it is.  Besides the security element, they can be pretty fun and you’ll be able to see when people are tweeting about how much they love you.

5. HTTPS: The “S” is for “Secure”
This is something you might not be able to do on your own, you’ll have to speak with IT or ask any web services you’re using if they offer it.  Simply stated, if you’re on a Wifi (most libraries are), or any sort of LAN network, and you login to a page without HTTPS, anyone in the network can sniff out your password.  HTTPS is what banks and/or credit card companies use online.

BONUS TIP (thanks Jay!)
6. If you only have one strong password, make sure it’s your email password!
Password “reset links” all work via email.  If someone can log into your email, they can get into anything.  Make sure your email password is used ONLY for your email and that it’s hard to guess.

So there you have them.  If anyone thinks of any more, please feel free to post them in the comments section.  There are obviously various ways hackers can cause harm, recently some experts found that they can get private information from an iPhone security flaw through text messagaging.  The difference is that some security issues are things hackers are going to find ways into.  The others are choices people can make to be a little more secure.