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10/30/2009

Friday’s Thought

It must come from my many years of creating and building presentations that whenever I stumble upon a great quote that moves or inspires me, I immediately grab it and dump it in my misc_slides file.

Although the contributions to this file have grown significantly over the past few years, many of my favorite quotes/slides actually have never been incorporated into a talk. So rather then just leave those slides hidden in my flash drive, I’ve decided to post the collection over the next few weeks, one slide every Friday.

Here’s the first:



If you have a favorite quote related to this thought, please add to the comments. I’m always up for a little inspiration.

10/29/2009

10/23/2009

eReader Race Continues

There's so much happening in the ultimate eReader race these days, that rarely a week goes without some significant new development is announced. In just this past week alone, Barnes & Noble unveiled the Nook, Plastic Logic revealed it's new Que reader and Entourage announced it will begin selling it's new dual screen eReader, named the eDGe, in February.

In fact, there's so much going on these days, that Fast Company has finally added a permanent e-reader topic page/tag to its site to help you stay on top of all the developments.



The race is really heating up. It looks like 2010 will indeed be the year of the eReader.

Related post: Trendwatching: The eBook Device Race

10/13/2009

Social Media Strategy Framework

I don’t do nearly as many presentations and talks about social networking as I use to, but I am always interested in new ideas and strategies that fit into this area. Ross Dawson founder of Advancing Human Technologies has developed the best overall strategy map that I seen for understanding how to utilize the social media space. The key (& critical first step) to both developing a strategy and in engaging your customers, is quite simply, Learning!


Social Media Strategy Framework


As I spoken on the subject of web 2.0 technologies and social networking repeatedly over the last four years, I always been amazed by the number of CEOs and Directors that express an active interest in helping their organizations shape strategies, policies and practices in this space, yet see no benefit for them to learn or engage in it themselves.

Whenever I come across this, I’m reminded of a point that I’ve often heard Stephen Abram share with folks, paraphrased in my words here --- You can’t have informed opinion about the use and application of social networking tools, if you haven’t gained some knowledge yourself based upon personal exploration and experience.

Stephen actually posted some more great thoughts related to this in his recent post, Facebook is no fad. Here’s a quote related to libraries, that really resonated with me.
“information professionals have a professional obligation to learn and evaluate all major new technologies and determine when and where these might be useful in the service of learning, community and the social good.”

In order to learn and be knowledgeable about social media, quite honestly, you have to try it out and live for awhile in the space. The typical rules of engagement long formed by corporate growth and policy don’t apply to social media. Social media is all about the engaging individual (& their scope of personal influence) it’s not about extending your organization’s traditional marketing approach and techniques out into new channels.

Take a look Ross’s framework, I think it does an excellent job in supporting the notion that you need to learn and gain experience in order to understand the full capabilities that social media can offer your organization.

10/12/2009

Quick Access Kiosk

It's been awhile in the making, but I couldn't be more thrilled to see the results. This week, all of our branch locations will be coming up on the new Quick Access kiosk, which is designed to overlay on top of all our dedicated branch catalog PCs and centralize several key functions (library card sign-up, easy access to electronic resources, my account, etc) for our customers.

What I love about the kiosk is not only it's design and strong alignment with our other marketing materials, but it's also customized to deliver branch specific information (control by script that detects the IP range assigned to the location) to highlight upcoming programs and hours of operation. It also utilizes this script to display a friendly face from member that works in that branch. :)

Here's a preview of the Shepard branch kiosk. To see what the versions look like, check out this Flickr set.



A huge thank you to Mike, Limin, Macrina and the all the members of the DS & CRD teams who pulled together on this one. The results look amazing!

10/02/2009

ACLA Talk - 24th Thing

In Pittsburgh this am to do a talk for the Allegheny County Library Association (ACLA). My talk is titled the 24th Thing in part because many of the member libraries just completed 23 Things. But it's also titled this because I'm often asked the question "what's the next thing?" For me the "thing" isn't a specific technology. It's a shift in mindset that we need to begin applying 24/7 to our thinking about library services.

Here is a link to my slidedeck that helps outline my thinking, The 24th Thing