Facebook RA
A day-long experiment spikes user interest, drives readers to great books, and fosters community online May 1, 2011Back in June 2010, John Warner of the Morning News took on the moniker “Biblioracle” and invited people to write to him with the titles of the last five books they had read so he could “predict” their next read. He was so overwhelmed with responses that he had to shut it down. The story got some press on library blogs, with many librarians pointing out that we’ve been offering this kind of service for years. True enough, but I also thought he was onto something. Like libraries across the country, Multnomah County Library (MCL) has looked for satisfying ways to engage with patrons in a medium that doesn’t allow for face-to-face interaction. I wondered if we could challenge ourselves the way Warner did by having a sort of “Stump the Chumps” campaign of our own.
I thought I’d try it first on my own Facebook page. My literate friends gave me a run for my money, but after seeing how it might work, I thought we could replicate it at the library. I took a look at other libraries’ Facebook pages and saw that when libraries of comparable size to MCL posted a compelling question, they received from 30 to 40 responses. That seemed manageable, so we plunged ahead.
Learning on the fly
Our marketing director posted a heads-up on MCL’s Facebook page the day before we posted the call for titles. The next morning when we, a team of four, arrived at work, we were surprised to find that there were about 30 comments already in the queue. We quickly tried to work through them but realized we were going to have to be a bit more methodical. We adopted a restaurant kitchen sort of approach: we called out the lists we were working on so we wouldn’t duplicate work. We also figured out that the best way to provide a quick summary was to use NoveList’s description of the title. We linked our recommendations to the catalog using bitly.com so the patron could immediately place a hold on the book.
Soon it became apparent that having people post their titles in the comments field under our original request was going to become unwieldy. We then asked people to start posting their requests on our wall so we could answer each person directly. People were very cooperative, and things ran more smoothly.
The social in social media
Social media really proved to be very...social! People were thrilled with the campaign, responded to our suggestions, and when we regretfully had to close things off for the day six hours later, the questions slowed down almost immediately. At the end of the day, we had answered about 100 readers and we’d seen MCL’s most successful day on Facebook ever.
We’re looking forward to riffing on this campaign in the future—perhaps focusing on different genres, advising on great summer reads for kids, or providing suggestions of what to read while waiting for a title with a long holds list. It’s obvious that people love to be asked about their reading, and they quickly become engaged in the conversation.
The Facebook Readers’ Advisory (RA) event was also an exciting challenge for us and a great way to flex our RA muscles. Now that we know what a great RA tool Facebook can be, we’ll be thinking of other ways to use social media to reach our patrons.
Here are verbatim excerpts of some of the exchanges we had with patrons that day:
Multnomah County Library Looking for a good read? We’d love to help. Send in the last three titles you’ve read and we’ll suggest your next read. Operators are standing by.
Cynthia A Village Affair, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, The Other
Multnomah County Library... I see some juicy small town, secret lives stuff here. You might try Driftless by David Rhodes. You can read a review of it on our Embarrassment of Riches blog here -http://bit.ly/ijIDfk
Brandon The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery; I Am Madame X by Gioia Diliberto; I Shall Spit On Your Graves by Boris Vian
Multnomah County Library... stumped us for a bit, but wondered if you might like Jean Genet - perhaps his Thief’s Journal - loosely based on his life wandering Europe in the 1930’s and his encounters with the law. http://bit.ly/gp3lWD
Tara The Help – Kathryn Stockett; Unbroken – Laura Hillenbrand; The Fortune Cookie Chronicles – Jennifer 8. Lee
Multnomah County Library... try Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell. This is Orwell’s fictionalized account of his time living hand-to-mouth as a dishwasher in the restaurants of Paris and...
Sarah The Widowers Tale - Julia Glass; My Abandonment - Peter Rock; The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery
Multnomah County Library... Yay! I’ve been waiting to suggest The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa. “A relationship blossoms between a brilliant math professor suffering from short-term memory problems following a traumatic head injury an...”
Mary If Death Ever Slept by Rex Stout; One Day by David Nicholls; Later That Same Day by Grace Paley.
Multnomah County Library Hi Mary - this one gave my brain a work out - I’m going to settle on The Final Solution by Michael Chabon. “An eighty-nine-year-old former detective in rural England becomes involved with a young refugee from Nazi Germany whose sole...”
Sarah Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann; Ahab’s Wife, by Sena Jeter Naslund, and The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday, by Alexander McCall Smith. You are awesome, MCL!
Multnomah County Library Hi Sarah - How about The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga? I see strong sense of place and history, strong women, love of books. :-) “In 1966, Margot Harrington, a book conservator, goes to Florence to help after the Arno River floods, a...”
Maryann Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, Confessions of a Teenage Sleuth by Chelsea Cain, and sTori Telling by Tori Spelling
Multnomah County Library Hi Maryann - those are some wildly differing titles! Though it was hard to land on one thing, we’re suggesting Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld. “During the late 1980s, fourteen-year-old Lee Fiora leaves behind her close-knit, middle-class Indiana...”
Jessica How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender, and Towers of Midnight by Robert Jordan. This is a great idea! And so much fun to read through everyone’s three books.
Multnomah County Library Hi Jessica - it is fun, isn’t it? May we suggest Skippy Dies by Paul Murray? After 14-year-old Skippy ends up dead on the floor of a local donut shop, a number of suspects emerge at Skippy’s school in Dublin. A hilarious, haunting, heartbre...
Kimberly Eat Pray Love -Elizabeth Gilbert, Without Reservation - Alice Steinbach; Under the Tuscan Sun - Francis Mayes
Multnomah County Library Hi Kimberly. It sounds like you enjoy true tales of women travelers that also include an element of self-realization, so you might check out The best women’s travel writing 2010 : true stories from around the world edited by Stephanie Eliz...”
Kimberly and even a link! WOW. I have to say you were right on especially with the short story piece of it (I love shortstories). Our library ROCKS!
Josh The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Thanks for doing this. I think this is awesome!
Multnomah County Library Hi Josh - I’m a bit torn here, but I think I’m going to say Don Delillo’s White Noise “A Midwestern family navigates the rocky passages of family life while a lethal cloud resulting from an industrial accident hovers over them.”
Helen Someone has their work cut out for them! I love this thread and as a side note I was wondering if anyone can recomend a good mystery for me. I need a couple of books to whisk me away for the holiday season.
Natasha Have you read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie? It’s good and a bit different from other mysteries I’ve read!
Multnomah County Library Hi Helen - Natasha’s suggestion is excellent - if you like period mysteries, you might also like the Maisie Dobbs stories by Winspear, set in England around the period of WWI. http://bit.ly/i6prUD
Helen Thanks MCL and Natasha!
Jennifer The Beet Queen-- Louise Erdrich; The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle-- Haruki Murakami; The New York Trilogy-- Paul Auster
Multnomah County Library Hi Jennifer - interesting combination of books! We’d like to suggest Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout, because of the connections between stories and people. “At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive...”
Jennifer Thanks! Looks like a good pick! Used to vacation in Maine every summer, so I have a predilection towards books from that region. :)
| Author Information |
| Alison Kastner, Librarian at the Popular Library in the Central Library, Multnomah County Library, Portland, OR, will discuss her library’s social media strategies at LJ’s Day of Dialog in New York City, May 23 (see www.libraryjournal.com/dayofdialog2011 for more information) |
Mission Connect
At Ohio’s Cuyahoga County Public Library (CCPL) we have made boosting reading levels, increasing our circulation of print materials, and raising our visibility as an institution dedicated to fostering literacy organizational initiatives. Over the past three years, we have made a tremendous investment in these goals, which collectively fall under a service priority we call Reconnect with Reading. It has become a kind of mantra that we use to focus our efforts and find creative and innovative new ways to connect our customers with books.
Multnomah County Library (MCL)’s very successful readers’ advisory (RA) day on its Facebook fan page fit right into this thinking. The number and high quality of the comments MCL received inspired us, and we quickly set a date to host our own RA event on Facebook.
When the forum doesn’t fit
A few years ago, we began experimenting with an online book discussion hosted on our website. Members of our Reconnect with Reading Action Group (RWRAG)—a committee of staff members that meets monthly to share ideas for connecting our customers with books—facilitated these month-long online discussions with and among library users. But participation was spotty. Why? We suspected that our customers simply weren’t used to interacting with us on our website and that the time that would often lapse between comments in the string dampened the feeling of interaction.
The event
To generate interest, we teased the Facebook event, telling our customers via Facebook and Twitter to start thinking about three good books they had read to share with our RA team. We assigned an RWRAG member who had access to our Facebook fan page as the point person and assembled a team of RWRAG members to give customized book recommendations in real time on the day of the event. This team of 16 worked in three four-hour shifts spanning 12 hours.
Since our RWRAG members were spread out among several branch locations, they communicated via email during the event. The point person sent our customers’ book selections to the team members. The team members then emailed their recommendations to the point person to post. We included a link to our catalog for each book to make it convenient for customers to check them out.
Prepped for book talk
RA is, essentially, the backbone of our Reconnect with Reading initiative. Our staff members have spent the past three years enhancing and exercising their RA skills. In 2008, Nancy Pearl, LJ’s 2011 Librarian of the Year and author of Book Lust fame, gave RA workshops designed to empower our staff to get proactive and use their own creativity to find new ways to connect our customers with books. She conducted these workshops in collaboration with our subject specialists, technical services, and collection development staff. Participants role-played typical customer interactions and explored techniques for starting book conversations.
As such, on the day of our Facebook RA event, we already had a skilled RA team in place to deliver customized, nearly instantaneous responses. When our customers’ book titles began pouring in, our team was ready and waiting. Most of our customers got recommendations back within just a few minutes. More than 200 customers participated, and we gained 300 new fans. It was so successful, we planned another one this April.
The right environment
Our first-ever RA Day proved to us that Facebook is an excellent forum for our Reconnect with Reading efforts. Facebook users expect an environment in which they can engage and interact. We have since migrated our online book discussions to Facebook as well. In February, we debuted Night Owls, an after-hours book discussion group facilitated by one of our RWRAG members in real time.
Facebook is becoming a powerful tool for engaging our customers and furthering CCPL’s priorities. It is also evidence of the value of the overall commitment we have made to Reconnect with Reading. Our staff members are ready and able to take the skills they use every day in our branches and translate them to the world of social media.
| Author Information |
| Robert J. Rua, Assistant Marketing Director, Cuyahoga County Public Library, Parma, OH |
