Marketing Critique: Contra Costa County Library

The Contra Costa County Library website has a number of different Web 2.0 applications on their website designed to market and promote their library system, which includes branches in locations from Antioch to Walnut Creek. Access to these tools may be found under the Services menu on the left-hand side of the main page.

The first, and arguably the most useful, of these tools is a page of various RSS feeds:

RSS Feeds

These feeds are dedicated to new titles in a variety of literary genres; general library news, subject guides, and book sales; podcasts; and programs and events taking place at every branch in the Contra Costa Library system, as well as at their Adult Literacy Office. There is no information listed on the website indicating how many people have signed up for these links, but the variety of genres, events, and locations covered is impressive and well thought out.

Another marketing device on the Contra Costa Library website is the NextReads page, a series of email-based newsletters to which patrons can subscribe by checking boxes and entering their email addresses.  These newsletters provide recommendations for a variety of different literary genres, including travel, audio books, Christian fiction, romance, and New York Times bestsellers. Patrons have an option on the same page to manage their current subscriptions by clicking a link.

NextReads Mailing Lists

Although the NextReads page is an excellent option for those who prefer to receive alerts via email rather than via a news aggregator, the presence of both on the same website - not to mention different pages - seems somewhat redundant. The library might want to look into combining these two parts of their site in some way, to avoid any unnecessary overlap.

The library's social networking sites are congregated on one page, dedicated to library-related widgets. It is interesting to note that although the library has MySpace, Flickr and Wordpress blog sites, the majority of their social networking efforts are directed towards their Facebook site.

Their efforts in this area appear to have paid off: 1,481 people are fans of the Facebook page, as compared to 183 on their MySpace page. However, a closer look at the Facebook page reveals that the majority of wall comments are from either the site administrator or other librarians. Those contributing to the site are clearly making a concerted effort to promote upcoming events, but the lack of patron comments on the site appears to indicate a lack of targeted outreach efforts to those who could most stand to benefit from the announcements.

The MySpace page, although it contains several Young Adult-oriented videos, appears to be rather poorly designed, and in any case not widely frequented by library patrons of any age. There has been what appears to be a pro forma effort to attract younger patrons with the use of streaming popular music tunes, but the site takes an inordinate amount of time to load even with a 3MB DSL connection.

Facebook

MySpace

The library's other social networking efforts appear to be either underappreciated by patrons or neglected by the library itself. The Flickr page, for example, appears to have been recently updated with pictures of library events, but the various albums only have a few views each. The Wordpress blog has an interesting premise - each entry is dedicated to a different chapter of the same book - but has not been updated since November 2010.

Flickr

Wordpress Blog

 The Contra Costa Library system deserves credit for covering all bases in terms of Web 2.0 tools on their site; that said, it might have done better to focus on one or two more popular applications. For example, they might have considered creating a Tumblr page rather than a Flickr account, as this would provide more design and layout options, in addition to encouraging more patron interaction. They might also consider getting rid of the MySpace page altogether and focusing their efforts on Facebook, making active efforts at patron outreach and encouraging their feedback rather than simply trying to drum up interest on the site itself. The Wordpress blog has great potential, but also has apparent need of at least one dedicated staff member to create updates and drum up more traffic.

Overall, the library's most effective marketing effort seems to be the RSS feeds page. It covers a variety of well thought-out and organized topics and genres of potential interest to patrons, and is guaranteed to work with any number of news aggregating applications. If this page could somehow be merged with the email newsletter page, the library would have a truly effective means of providing their patrons with information tailored to their interests. However, in order to promote a truly effective online brand, they should take into account several factors: overall popularity of various applications, methods of proactive patron outreach, and dedicated staff to supervise and update all social networking applications used.

If I were hired as a social media marketing consultant for this library, I would make the following recommendations:

1. Following Lawson's (2007) example, find and target potential niche library users on Facebook, and contact them regarding the resources available for their particular area of interest.
2. Either eliminate the MySpace page, or assign a dedicated web design professional to redesign and update it.
3. Switch from Flickr to Tumblr, organizing pictures in such a way that a patron could view all items in an album behind a cut link for each post.
4. Update the Wordpress blog and make more concerted efforts to promote it on the other social networking sites used. Also, include an RSS feed for the blog on the general RSS page.
5. Make a greater effort to promote social networking tools on the library's main page, rather than burying them in the links of the Services section.

In the final analysis, this library system has made a decent start in using social networking tools to promote their brand. That said, the main issue for them seems to be following up on their efforts to make sure that they are up to date and reaching the right audiences.

References

Lawson, D. (2007). "Taking the Library to Users: Experimenting with Facebook as an Outreach Tool." (.doc). Academic Library 2.0.