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Digital Presence & Online Outreach for Libraries :: What's the Buzz?

What's the buzz?

Keep up with what's being said about your library, organization and community. Hopefully people are saying lots of good things, but negative comments can be a good source of ideas about improvements to services and facilities.

Do read them with an open mind.  In some cases you may want to thank someone for a nice comment, respond to a suggestion or criticsm. Tread carefully and thoughtfully though. You don't want be intrude on someone else's "space" and start an online battle.  Here's some good advice on when to respond to negative reviews.

Read more tips:

• Social Media Capital - Summary of a presentation by Patrick Sweeney. 
  
• Have you Googled  Your Library Lately?

• Online Reputation Management: Who’s Talkin’ About Your Local Business?

• How To Use Social Media Monitoring Tools To Build Relationships And Links

• When To Respond To Negative Reviews (and not)

Tools for searching & monitoring: Do searches on variations on your library's name. And make sure to check for branch names as well. 

• Newspapers - Yes, the newspaper! Watch the print editions, and any online editions too. Check to see if you can get an RSS feed of search results. Or just make sure you do a search of their web site content frequently. 
•  Google News - Are your local papers included in Google News? Do a search there and get an RSS feed of the results. Add it to your RSS feed aggregator to keep up to date.
• Social Mention -  "Search results are aggregated from numerous popular social media sources, including Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube etc." "features email alerts and personalized RSS feeds for automatic and instant updates."
• Read how Topeka-Shawnee PL uses SocialMention
• Ice Rocket Big Buzz - Like Social Mention, searches lots of social spaces. The Big Buzz search will update every few minutes for essentially real-time search.
• Postling - Monitors the services you specify and finds responses to items you've posted and other mentions of your "brand". Opt to receive a daily email with all recent mentions. Comments are threaded, so it's easy to follow the converations. 
• flickr - check for photos of your library/community. Get an RSS feed for updates based on tags, but do a regular search now and then to pick up items that may have your library name in the photo titles and/or descriptions but not in the tags. (oct 2009 - I can't find the rss feeds in flickr anymore? But you can create flickr tag feeds at: http://www.degraeve.com/flickr-rss/)
• delicious.com  - Check to see if anyone is bookmarking your web/blog/wiki pages.
• Twitter - Is your library being talked about on twitter? Use the advanced search to find your library name. You can also limit search to a particular geographic area.
• Google, Yahoo, MSN Live  - search in the major search engines. From the Google Alerts page, you can opt to get updates of your search in Google.
• Who's linking to you? Do a Google or Yahoo search on: link:www.yourlibrary.org 

Monitor Your Buzz

• Google Reader - add all the RSS feeds for the searches above, then all your results will be in one easy place to monitor them.
• iGoogle - If you're using iGoogle, you could set up a tab for your "buzz" searches and add all the RSS feeds there. 

Responding to the Buzz

• 5 Tips for Dealing with Complaints on Twitter - good guidelines for dealing with complaints anywhere!

Create Some Buzz 

Are you blogging? Blogging is a free and easy way to put current information, news and thoughts out into the digital world. And a good way to get feedback from your community. Ask questions in your blog. Post opinions. Start a conversation.

• Then use the RSS feed from your blog to post your news directly to Twitter & Facebook.
• TwitterFeed, Dlvr.it, Ping.fm, HootSuite

Is your community blogging?

• Use blog search tools to look for your town or organization name.
• See if you can find some local blogs from other organizations, parents groups, schools, etc.
• Check your newspapers, they probably have some community blogging going on.
• Leave comments, answer questions when you can.
• Tread gently, you're sharing their space! 
• When you post a comment, make sure you include a link back to your library's blog or web site.

Encourage Feedback

• Invite users to leave comments on your blog.
• Encourage them to leave reviews on sites like Yelp, Yahoo Local, and other 'local search' tools (see list on Directories page) Read them and respond! And take action to improve services when needed.
• Use a poll on your website to get feedback 
• "get satisfaction" service - http://getsatisfaction.com/