Building a Social Media Audience and a Bit of Environmental Scanning

Daily Hours: 4.5
Total Hours: 100.5

Today I worked from home, splitting my time between social media stuff and the beginnings of my Spanish Language services/collection project.  Tana had said that it would be a good idea to connect with our partner organizations to get the word out about our new social media presence.  I had already thought to search out and "like" our community partners, but since the "liking" process isn't reciprocal like the "friending" process, they wouldn't necessarily notice that the library had a page now.  Tana recommended that I write the text of an email for Chris to send out to her contacts at the organizations, so I started off the morning with that task.  I also created event pages for both Eat, Play, Art and my Fermentation workshop, which I figure will be a better way to advertise the events rather than linking to the MPL calendar descriptions in future posts.  One thing that has been frustrating for me with the Facebook page is the fact that we really don't have that many "likes" yet.  I thought that Tana's promotion post for the page would help, but we are still only at 9 likes (and one of them is me, and another my mom).  I remember specifically from readings from the social media course that building an audience takes time and patience.  Also, Facebook may just not be a very effective way of reaching the user population of the Goodman Branch: Tana said she usually uses the number of sign-ups for e-notification as a measure of whether social media would be an effective outreach tool, and she said the Goodman branch has the lowest number of all the branches, by far.  It's all an experiment!  So, today I also made a poster to put up in the library advertising our page.  We'll see if any of those efforts brings us a few more "likes!"

During the remainder of my shift I focused my time on thinking about my Spanish-language services project.  I started out by doing a bit of environmental scanning of the neighborhood, which I have learned through my outreach readings for my independent study, is the first step towards developing any sort of collection/services for a target population.  As with Job Mob, it doesn't make sense for organizations to "compete" with each other in terms of overlapping services.  So, I complied a list of the services currently being offered by Centro Hispano, the Literacy Network etc. and started thinking about the general recommendations I am going to make.  I also tried to play around with the Excel spreadsheets of the circ stats reports that Michael had run for me, but I ran into a bit of the proverbial Excel frustration and error messages when I was trying to sort things by total circulation numbers, so I will just have to sit down with the help manual when I work of the project again next week and go from there.