2012 Best Practices for Government Libraries

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BEST PRACTICES 2012
Can You Hear Me Now? Strategically Engaging Your Audience with
Social Media
By Chis Vestal, Government Consultant, LexisNexis; DC SLA Communications
Secretary
We wanted people to hear us. That was the consensus of the DC Chapter of SLA
(DC/SLA) Communications Committee meeting I was facilitating. I’d just started my
term as Communications Secretary and it was my job to find a voice for the
Chapter via social media. I was quickly beginning to see that I didn’t know what I
was doing. That’s why I was having this brainstorming session with volunteers and
other board members in the first place.
Our end goal seemed obvious, we really wanted to put ourselves out there on social
media so we could find our voice and engage the community. If we did that, we’d
be able to retain members and attract new ones. Because we had such a large
diverse group at the meeting we were churning out lots of new ideas. Our overall
theme that night was inclusion. Every time someone mentioned a social media tool
we decided we needed to have a presence on it; we wanted to saturate the web
with DC/SLA.
We decided to recruit a volunteer to act as a social media ambassador for each
account. No one person would be overwhelmed and it seemed like a great way to
attract new volunteers into becoming involved with the chapter. So, in addition to
our print and electronic newsletter, we’d recruit people to man our FaceBook,
Twitter, Flickr, and LinkedIn accounts while I managed a blog that was separate
from our website. Then we thought we should create even more accounts to tackle
more tools. The chapter puts on a lot of professional development programming but
of course not all our members are able to attend, so we decided to get a volunteer
to videotape our programs. Then the volunteer would edit the video and upload it
to our new YouTube account so members could still benefit from our programming
even if they missed the in person session.
I was so excited about all the enthusiasm and energy in the room that I didn’t take
a step back and ask any questions about our goals. I was focused on our desire for
people to hear us. So we hit the ground running and ran straight into some
concrete roadblocks right away.
Our biggest problem was that most of our tools weren’t widely used. Members had
a hard time finding our newsletter on our website. Most of our members preferred
going to our official website to view information but our blog was hosted on
Blogger’s platform disconnected from our site and began to seem like an orphan.
Our videos on Youtube weren’t racking up views even though we were marketing
them to the Chapter. In hindsight, convenience was probably a factor here.
Bandwidth limitations were discouraging some views and the videos were poorly
organized, since at the time YouTube only allowed up to 10 minute clips and there