We talk a lot about library marketing at Mosio. Being that marketing is one of the most important needs in the success and continuation of a business, we believe it’s the same for libraries. From what we’ve seen in the industry over the past few years, those libraries who are great at marketing are doing well, financially, in their communities, etc. There are always exceptions, but it appears to be the case. I was just speaking with someone in client services and they told me about a recent email conversation they’d had with a Text a Librarian customer.
Her question, which is a great one, was:
“Is there anything that you would like us to emphasize, that you wish everyone would do/get?”
His response:
“I think that the best advice that I can give a library is this: Focus on getting the info on how to text in on your patron’s phone as soon as possible. It doesn’t matter how much training you do, if your patrons don’t know how to text in or even that you provide the service, you won’t get any questions.”
Go Live, Make Updates
Nearly every successful company in the software as a service industry is known for pushing things live, then improving upon them after customers start using them. If you wait until everything is perfect, you’ll always be waiting, putting too much effort in areas that have nothing to do with getting it out into the world. We do our best to make responding to questions as simple as possible, within 1 minute of logging in you can figure out how to respond. It might seem like a hidden business pitch, but it’s really the truth.
Focus the “training” on how to educate and market your Text a Librarian service to patrons and you’ll have a great reason to learn the workings of the system.
I hate to waste great content, so I’ve pasted the rest of his advice typically given to academic libraries, below. Our biggest usage at academic libraries comes from libraries who show students how to text them during orientation, literally by having them pull out their phones and text for instructions.
In his words:
“So at academic institutions we’ve seen a lot of success with libraries that pull all of their students aside during orientation and say, “pull out your phones and text (keyword) to 66746.â€Â Obviously the library can substitute their own keyword. When a student does that they get the intro Text for Instructions message to their phone.
This makes sure that when that student has a question on their phone 2 weeks later they don’t have to remember the keyword or the shortcode (66746) because it’s already on their phone. That’s my 2 cents.”
