Anyway, along the lines of podcasting, I stumbled across this find this week. The Lansing Public Library (Lansing,IL) is running short podcast promos all week long for National Library week -- Neat! Listen ...
Don't you just love the energetic introductions and endings? Talk about fun. :)
PS: Podcast feeds found on Lansing Library Teen Blog
Technorati Tags: Public Library, podcast
2 comments:
These are neat. I like the enthusiastic opening!
How does the Lansing Library get people to download these? I'm thinking about traditional podcasts, which people usually download for entertainment or educational purposes. The user usually seeks out the content they want.
It's not like advertising, because with podcasts we rely on the user to download our podcast. So when we're "selling" them a message, before they can buy into the message, we need them to download it in the first place. That's two hurdles.
I wonder if there's more of an advertising approach to this, where, like on the radio, the message we want them to hear is sandwiched between content they want to hear. Just some thoughts.
This brings to mind an old episode of "The Daily Show." The story was about John Edwards offering speeches as podcasts. The visual was one of those iPod commercials with the dancing silhouettes. The dancer was trying to dance to Edwards' podcast, which was droning on and on, and the dancer finally gave up and stormed off.
That's certainly not what we're striving for! :-)
Hi from Lansing!
We're promoting downloading our branded, preloaded version of Juice to keep up with any of the podcasts we offer. (info page: http://www.lansing.lib.il.us/podcast.htm)
By Friday this week, I was thinking, gosh, we should have added a little more content highlighting some of the specific resources at Lansing PL. The content we used was the "radio scripts" from the ALA website. At any rate, these served as a good way to introduce my coworkers to the ease (and fun) of podcasting. I actually had more people interested than promos to record. People who would be petrified to stand in front of a small group were happy to record one!
The water cooler chatter was, so did you download Joan? Who is on today? Which day am I on? :)
Then I thought, maybe a bi-weekly podcast highlighting an online database or tips & tricks, etc.
We did have at least one patron call this week and ask how they could volunteer at the library. That was one of the topics of the podcast.
We had many many many downloads of the audio files. I was truly shocked. Whether the patrons were truly subscribing to the feed, or just clicking on the link in the blog post, they were exposed to something new without a lot of anxiety or tech-speak.
We have also offered some instructional computer podcasts, and will offer more of those. We podcasted our first outside presenter, Don Lundquist, a local author, who read his poetry this week. That post will probably continue to generate traffic, as he'll mention it to other libraries who want to hear a preview before booking him.
He was very entertaining, have a listen!
But to get back to Cordelia's question, we're meeting the users in their space. If they are browsing iTunes for local content, we're there. Yahoo? We're there too. I was surprised a local church in town is podcasting too.
We're offering a class later this month in podcasts & how to subscribe. We're handing out brochures at the programs we're podcasting, that say "did a friend or neighbor miss this program? pass this on to them and they can download the podcast!" The brochure explains podcasts, and what they need to do!
One co-worker mailed copies of the brochures to her grown daughters out of state!
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