Jenny Levine, The Shifted Librarian

Introduced myself to Jenny as the person who schlepped Michael through Minnesota. There may have to be some coordination of Tame the North t-shirts for IL, so we (Aurora, Jenny and I) can arrive as the Stephens Fan Club…

Talking about creating community on library web sites. Online tools help the library. Blogs help by allowing comments - involve the community. Ann Arbor District Library has integrated the blogging software with the library catalog. Post on new catalog elicited posts from patrons on system, and helped debug the system. Board member responded to patron post on the blog with a post addressing the issue. (Cool!) One blog post with an expletive was edited for publication with strategically placed **s. Another patron took that one to task for using inappropriate language. The community is self-correcting. AADL has gaming tournaments, and kids can comment on the tournament on the blog. One blog post had 461 comments posted - how many comments have you gotten from teens at YOUR library?

Blogging levels the field. A small public library, Flossmoor Public Library, has a blog. Blogging isn’t something that requires a huge IT staff. It will make you more efficient and will bring people into your website.

Western Springs History.org - historical organization in Chicago area. Photo of one house has a comment from the granddaughter of the people who lived in the house, along with one from the current owners.

Photo blogging with Flickr: shows the vibrancy of the library, humanizes the library, and puts the library community online.

RSS & community: syndication of your library’s website allows it to be seen by people that might not normally see it…

Web 2.0 means the web is more interactive - things come to me instead of me going to them.

Library content in RSS: teen events, library catalog for new items, materials by genre or type (for instance, new DVDs), programs, classes, books by subject matter.

ProQuest is offering an RSS feed…sometime. Academic library - site lists ProQuest feed for accounting news, headlines by field.

Ebsco also has feed, though getting it is clumsy. Note to EBSCO - please make this easier!

Your library needs to provide an RSS feed! Display headlines, partnership with schools, work with local newspapers. School libraries - use RSS for class projects, pathfinders, etc.

Community Hub. “Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.” Collaborate with community agencies - parks, Chamber of Commerce, schools - and create a community blog. All contribute. (What a cool idea!)

LaGrange Public Library uses del.icio.us and syndicates to their website. Uses Flickr for library photos. Has a blog through Blogger. Uses localized news service topix.net. Grabs feed from local newspaper. Uses SuprGlu to coordinate. Voila! Community website created.

Be a buddy and offer live help. Instant messaging and chat - patrons are using. People can add the library as an IM buddy. “Quick answers to simple questions.”

Meebo - IM aggregator. Meebo Me: Allows someone to ask an IM question without installing Im software.

6 things you can do now:

1. Read Blogs
2. start a what’s new blog for your library
3. appoint a trend reporter on your staff who watches and learns
4. train your staff to use RSS aggregators
5. advocate for RSS built into products you are paying for - like the ILS systems, etc.
6. learn about library 2.0

Getting Clued in to Experience Management  Lou Carbone, President & CEO, Experience Engineering.  Author, “Clued In.”

[Really bad lighting - the poor man is on a stage, in the dark.  What the?]

Firm based in Minneapolis.

At Experience Engineering, “we live, eat.,sleep, breathe, and unravel the riddle that is human experience for a select group of clients who want to manage experience - and the value that experience can create.”

Fabulous ad talking about creating “Once Upon a Time” experience, using movie scenes and John Williams’ moving music.

“What a wonderful world we live in when we recognize the value we bring to people’s lives.”

Working with Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain changed his life; as a kid, would visit HoJo on trips.  Worked with them for their final 6 months of existence.  Would be in meetings discussing minutiae to save money.  Talked about dropping 3 flavors of ice cream to save money.  Realized company was so driven by short-term goals that they had lost sight of their mission and value.

Second client that changed his life was Disney - one of the most clued-in organziations on the earth. Very in tune with the customer and the experience created.  Main St was designed out of forced Hollywood perspective, so it looked on entering like it went on forever….but at night, leaving as you’re tired, the street looked very short.

Disney embedded clues in each frame of the cartoon.  Looked at things from customer’s perspective.  What are they feeling?   Parks have millions of these clues.

Realized “the power of the mouse.” Trip to Disney costs more than a trip to Europe, yet we go back again and again because of the way it makes us feel.

Organizations create experiences.  People become satisfied, loyal, committed, become apostles, and ultimately take ownership.

What organization comes to mind when we think of people becoming so part of the organization that it brings people to North Dakota to celebrate?  Harley Owners Group.   Went to a HOG rally in SC.  People were tattooed everywhere.  (Photo of guy with tattoo on the top of his head.)  People of all ages, shapes, sizes.  Emotion bond and feeling of ownership was incredible.  HD has created extraordinary value.

Experience preference model:

• rejection - negative differentiation
• acceptance - no differentiation
• preference - positive differentiation

Delightful story about his experience with barber Truefitt and Hill.

[Finally someone got a clue and turned the lights on so we could see the guy...]

How we feel in experiences is so powerful and is becoming more and more important.  The world we live in has changed.  Our economy and skill sets, what we learn is built on an old model of “Make and Sell” - how do we become more efficient at making and selling?  The world has moved to a world of sensing and responding.

How to create agile organizations that are building value for communities?  Critical factor is understanding the role that experience plays.  The value that an organization creates is based on the experience.

The poster child for experience lately has been Starbucks.   Very sensory experience - sounds, smells, etc.  ‘

Traditionally in experience management we look at behaviors - travel patterns, shopping time, etc.  What drives that is attitude - am I loyal to the company, do I like the experience, etc.  What drives the attitudes is the emotions - do I feel respected, valued honored when I come to your place?

How often do we ask, “How does our library make you feel?”

The experience is linked to the brand.

Everything starts from customers’ deep emotional needs and desires.

If we want to know more about customers, we need to know how they think.  “The tangible attributes of a product or service have far less influence on consumer preference than the sub-conscious elements derived from the total experience.”  95% of our processing takes place on an unconscious level.

Customers consciously and unconsciously filter a barrage of clues and organize them into a set of impressions.  Some are rational and some are emotional.   Functional clues - functionality of the good or service.  Mechanic clues - physical stimuli - sounds, smells.  Humanic clues - people - body language, tone.

How different does “Exit Only, Please” feel as compared to “Do Not Enter” ?

It’s impossible not to have an experience. The question is how do the clues you’re sending make the customer feel?  We can systematically and purposefully design clues to create feelings that emotionally engage and bond the customers.

Five disciplines in experience mamagement:

• exeperience assessment
• experience audit
• experience design
• experience implementation
• experience measurement or stewardship

An experience motif is what our customers will feel about themselves and the experience.  Do not fall into the trap of how they will feel about us.  How they feel about themselves they will associate with how they feel about us.  How would people describe an experience with you?

The Minnesota Library Association conference has officially begun. I arrived Monday afternoon, since I was one of the presenters of a Spanish Language Outreach workshop as a pre-conference session on Tuesday. The rest of the gang from MPOW arrived this morning.

The conference is in St. Cloud, Minnesota at a lovely spot on the Mississippi River. The river starts just north of here, so it’s still a relatively small river. Downstream a few hours near LaCrosse, it’s a mile wide. Amazing.

This afternoon Jenny Levine is speaking….I’ll be live-blogging that one, for all interested. Stay tuned.