Essential reading for emerging technology librarians

If you’re like me and responsible for using new technologies to connect with patrons or if this is just a topic you’re interested in then I have a book recommendation for you:

Groundswell : winning in a world transformed by social technologies.

Written by Charlene Li of Forrester Research and Josh Bernoff, Groundswell is geared towards marketing types and other corporate employees interested in and responsible for using social media to connect with customers. But I’ve long contended that librarians have much to learn from corporations, startups, and marketers, and Groundswell might be the greatest example of how this is true.

The most important lessons boil down to:

1. Knowing your audience
2. Knowing the social technologies
3. Using the correct technologies to target your audience

While this sounds simple, as many of us know it can be very difficult and corporations and libraries alike have failed in implementing social technologies to connect with users.

Where Groundswell excels is in breaking down how to evaluate the target audience. In Chapter 3 the authors introduce a social technographics profile, a way of analyzing target audiences by types of online social behavior the audience engages in and comparing those behaviors with societal averages. Those behaviors allow people to be divided into groups such as Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. Based on activity in those groups in target audiences librarians can use appropriate social technologies with maximum effectiveness.

Examples of social technology profiles for various age groups can be found at the Forrester website: http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html.

Groundswell goes on to explain different ways corporations can tap into the power of social technologies, and includes case studies of successful ways corporations have connected with users. There are also useful chapters on using social technologies inside your organization (something I think is very important) and how social technologies may change your organization.

As I said at the outset Groundswell is geared towards corporations. And some of it’s suggestions, for example investing hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring outside consultants to monitor social media, and build customized tools, simply are not feasible. One of the challenges for librarians will be how to apply the lessons from Groundswell in an era of increasingly tight budgets. But there are ways to accomplish these goals and Groundswell does have a few tips for this. For example, the authors suggest that if your target audience has already built a community around your product/brand/company then you should focus on connecting with that existing community rather than building your own.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: Groundswell is not written for librarians, but we have as much to learn from it as anyone else. The framework the book provides for how to connect with people online is crucial for using social technologies in libraries. I look forward to implementing the lessons learned in Yale’s use of social technologies and hope to see other librarians learn from it as well.