I thoroughly enjoyed this week's reflective Thing and was surprised at how strongly I agreed with the various posts that Andy had put up for us to peruse. Truth is, I had never given much thought to the difference between 'advertising' and 'marketing' our services before, aside from the fact that 'marketing' seemed more active than simply 'publicising' or 'advertising' what we did. Reflecting on the new opportunities at our disposal however, I found myself vigorously nodding at various sentences.
I wholeheartedly suspect that there will be a direct link in the next few years between how well libraries manage to merge the 4 Ps of product, price, place and promotion with the 4 Cs of content, context, connections and conversations, and the value our users will continue to place on our services, how central libraries will remain in our users' lives. In short, this could well make or break library services. It's not 'Out with the old and in with the new' though, but more a case of making room for the new ways of communicating with our readers alongside the more traditional ones.
I would very much like to point my readers back to my favourite SlideShare presentation discovered when dealing with Thing 11 (slideShare):
On a different note, I had not imagined when I embarked on the 23 Things programme, that even more than the Things themselves, and the content and contexts I started to master, it would be the connections between people I would grow to value so much. I have learnt as much from colleagues' blogs as from the official site and discovered a wealth of expertise I didn't even know existed. Add to that the unexpected comradeship and the professional thrill of connecting with colleagues I hadn't yet met, and I'll have to doubly cheat on this week's task: I can't limit myself to just one Thing . Despite all my reservations, blogging - or rather reading other people's blogs for the large part - will be one of the Things I'm hoping to keep up to date with.
Our Library had already decided to implement a Library Facebook page and a Twitter account, so it would be misleading to say that these were a result of the 23 Things adventure. My choice of tool to start will therefore be SlideShare, for the immediate opportunities it offers us right now.
Oh, and by the way - LOVED the Tweeting and Facebooking that's going on in the Orkneys, and pleasantly surprised at the Library of Congress - thanks for sharing these!
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