We are at the top of the hour.  I will welcome
our presenters for today.  I'm so excited to introduce to you, Lisa
Bunker.  And Cesar Garza is the reference librarian and the chair of their social
media team at the Austin Public Library in Texas.  They have inspirational work going
on at their libraries.  Welcome to the both of you.
>> Hello.
.  That was Lisa.  Let's see.  Yeah, for some reason I am a little shaky right
now.  So bear with me.  Lisa, looks like you just got muted.  I will let you unmute
yourself.
>> Okay.  Well, that's odd.  Okay.  So I'm going to say a little bit more about how
we work Pima county library.  Our training is focused on why we are there and on
writing with authenticity and I'm not a manager.  I'm a
librarian.  I work in the communications and systems office with our PIO and website
team and try to get to libraries as often as I can.  I coordinate loosely with our
PIO and content planning calendar, but I tend to write my own copy and tailor it for
social media.  For the last three years, I've taught local businesses and nonprofits
about effective social media with two monthly classes, one own strategy and the other
a Facebook lab where we get in to the guts of an organization's page.  I highly
recommend that libraries share their expertise this way.  It is a great community
service.
>> Cesar is next.
>> Hello, everyone.  This is Cesar Garza.  I'm from the Austin Public Library in
Austin, Texas.  To give you a little context of how I am involved in the social media
in my library.  All of the social media in our library is centralized in a social
media advisor I have team.  It sounds official.  It is a committee of library staff
across the library system.  On this team there are reference librarians, such as
myself, youth librarians, branch librarians and librarians across the system.  We all
get together and as a team we govern the social media strategy of the library.  We
govern the pages you find listed on the library's website at library.us a
dintexas.gov/social.  Today, Lisa Bunker and I, will we will cover four topics.  They
are going to be -- the first is one what is content curation and how can you fit it
in to your work day?  And the second will be how can you use your strategic plan to
use posts for social media.  And the third topic is how to amplify your library voice
with the help of ambassadors and the fourth topic will be how to add the spice of
life broadcast on Facebook.  We will turn the ball over to Lisa.
>> I want to talk about curation.  It's used in a description here, but because it's
a word that comes out of the museum world, I want to spend a little time talking
about what it is and isn't.  So this webinar is about taking it deeper, right?  One
way to deepen what you offer is to articulate, as a team, why you are there.  Meaning
there in social media and who you are speaking to.  The mind set can unleash
creativity and spontaneity.  It can't a straitjacket.  It is not strict rules
on what you can and cannent post.  It is like a good collection development policy. 
In real life, in realtime, picking and choosing things that you know are of interest
to the people who are your audience on social media.  Basically it helps you focus so
you can plan ahead.  In a spontaneous way recognize opportunities as they, in
realtime as they happen.  I believe it saves time.  Curation would give you useful
parameters for content that you always have this kind of voice in the back of your
head, which is what I think of as a mindset, where you are picturing what you want to
post and keep an eye out for social media.  When you know why you are there, you will
see stories all around you.  Further more, when you do it in a conscious way
it can align with your library and community goals.  And I
guarantee admin folks will be supportive when you do this.  It is a mix of collection
development and storytelling.  And you are basing it on what your community needs and
what its aspirations are, as well as the library's strategic plan.  There's a lot of
overlap there.  As with our physical collection of books and movies, curation is only
successful when you listen to what your users or commerce or patrons value, what they
find useful.  If you are only pushing out messages about the library, you are not
using social media to its fullest and taking advantage of its unique opportunities. 
If all you do is broadcast you are not inviting customers to participate.  I think
you are sabotaging yourself because participation is how your audience grows.  You
can broadcast.  You can put and paste from your website or calendar, but you are
going to be unhappy on social media with the results.  True curation hits the sweet
spot between what you need to convey about the library and what your readers will
find useful and interesting.  The highest compliment is when they share something you
have posted with their friends.  So the good news is you are already doing this at
your public service desk and have for years.  We know storytelling.  We know how to
hold an audience's attention.  We know how to listen to our communities' needs and
aspirations.  If your workflow is to copy and paste from a website, you are not going
to capture the energy of what is going on at the beating heart of your library and
you are not going to take it deeper.  I'm behind the slide.  So there.  The green
area is the sweet spot I mentioned.  It shouldn't be too much focusing on just what
your customers want.  And it shouldn't be too much talking about yourself.  What you
want to find is that space in the middle where you both meet and what you post is
interesting and useful.
You have been story telling forever probably if you have been in libraries as long as
I have.  I think we have kind of -- I have been in libraries for almost 40 years.  I
think we do a lousy job of telling our own story.  Social media gives us a chance to
tell that story in a deeper way, and focus on telling the story of what we are doing
and not other people's stories.  So here's some examples of curated content.  This
may help illustrate what is meant by curation.  So you could link to an article about
a neighborhood's history.  You could post fun and games about books, reading and
libraries.  Realtime video of the child that came in to read you a poem, report on a
big program you just had or post spectacular photos of where you live.  What we will
do is reverse engineer some posts and go from a real post and talk about how they
illustrate these different kinds of content that you can do in the library.  How do
you decide what to curate?  What topics and messages do you focus on?  This is part
of a handout that is in your kit.  I have this graphic on it above and a space below
for you to make your own version of it.  This is a personal chart of what we are
doing at Pima County.  It gives you an idea what is in the back of my mind, what I am
always looking for.  What stories I'm trying to be attuned to around me so that I can
get them on social media.  So having a chart like this is a great brainstorming tool.
Not just for you but for your colleagues, with your admim and marketing folks.  It's
a list of the things we want more people to be aware of in our library.  One would
be -- I have several -- but we are a welcoming space for everyone and we are busy. 
That's one of the messages I want to convey on social media but I'm not going to say
that.  I'm going to show that.  Underneath our examples of some of the things that
I've posted that illustrate that message we want to send, without saying
explicitly.  We understand what Tucson wants and needs.  And I hope when you come to
our social media account you get a sense for Tucson.  That it feels like Tucson.  It
feels like it could not be anywhere else.  This is a very conscious goal we want to
convey how much a part of the community here in Pima County the library is and the
third is we are a place where people get surprised and inspired.  This is where
social media gets really fun.  The more you can surface the stories that are about
experiments you are doing, about new things you are trying, yes, story time, of
course, of course job help.  But so these are three statements of purpose
for us here in Pima County.  They can come from your strategic plan but can be how --
it can be a message where you are trying to work against a negative perception. 
Let's say the negative perception is that people think the library is out of touch.  
Make a list of things you can share on social media that counter that message and
share how really relevant you are in today's world.  Next slide is a sample of our
content strategy calendar.  We review this in our meetings for the communications and
systems office.  We once a month share the highlights of this with staff because we
are encouraging them to write book lists and blog posts that fit with the kinds of
content that we are emphasizing both on the website and on social media.  You know
what?  This calendar is super helpful.  I actually pay more attention to what people
are talking about that morning on Facebook than to the library angle.  I'm curious
when I log in to social media, what's the mood of the day?  This is curation, too. 
It is a commitment to listening what people are concerned about at that moment.  Your
version of it could be going to the public desk and listening to what people are --
what the buzz is, what people are talking about at the desk.  This is real research
for social media because it allows you to curate in a way that is timely and just
real.  It's real life.  Some of these are huge reach posts, but I want to show some
of the posts that are really good, ordinary posts so that you could see what I'm
talking about.  This -- I told you that we have a very distributed system here where
branch staff has autonomy to post and curate what they know to be of interest in
their neighborhood.  So this is one of our libraries, Wheeler Taft Abbett senior
library.  You can see on the left, it is a regular series and it was today's act of
kindness, donate food to the Community Food Bank.  She as links so that everything
you need to be successful at this challenge, this activity, is there for you.  The
graphic is what's most needed at the food bank.  Let's reverse engineer this.  Why
was it successful?  Why did it work?  Honestly, the photograph is boring.  Gurus will
tell you, this is way too much text for a Facebook post.  She has more than one link.
At the time, this page had about 400 likes.  If you look at the reach of over 1200,
she's definitely beating the Facebook algorithm, and reached 300% of the number of
people who like the page.  That meant there was a lot of sharing and a lot of
interest in the post.  I think this one boils down to knowing what people are talking
about, timeliness.  This was -- you can see, early December, and 2016 after the
election when we know a lot of people were looking at ways to give back to the
community and the time of the year when people are focused on that.  Just how -- I
think the completeness of the text worked for her in this situation.  So, yeah.  So
post your own reasons why you think it was successful.  I'd be curious to hear what
you think about it.  Here's the next slide.  Oh, by the way, we are working on a
year-long kindness project that will start next year.  Very excited about that.  All
right.  So this is kind of silly and geeky.  This wasn't as huge reach as what Lupita
did.  This is our main page and this page at this point had almost 10,000 likes.  So
this isn't 100% resembling the number of likes but beats Facebook algorithm.  If you
are curious what I mean by that, take the number of likes on your page and divide it
by 5% to 7%.  This is the worldwide average of the number of people who see a post. 
And there's all kinds of reasons for that.  But if you are beating that 5 to 7% you
are beating Facebook's algorithm and doing a very good job indeed.  Let's reverse
engineer this one.  This was to illustrate our history of innovation and our decades
of experience providing new things that are needed by the community.  It's also very
hyper local, which is something that is a high priority of ours.  I thought people
would get a kick out of it.  The huge CPU.  Where are the women?  What, no internet? 
This isn't our highest.  One branch had a post that went over 1,425,000 in reach. 
And I'm -- but that gives you an idea how big something can get even from a small
branch library.  This is an example of something that went viral for libraries, but
the credit goes to the Carole district library.  And the regular series she
was doing for the library.  She was surprised it took off the way it did.  It is a
fabulous example and a rare example of direct library messaging really working on
social media.  If you are familiar with the library's Transform campaign, you know
there are beautifully designed graphic that come from in the American Library
Association and they are excellent.  But she didn't use those here.  The library put
one of the phrases on their Marquis.  She went to the front of the library and
instead of using a polished wonderful graphic she made it real and she posted a
picture of the phrase on there marquee.  It went viral and made a bunch of major
blogs.  Any way, it really made a big splash and it was so excited for her to do
that.  I think the key here is timing.  It's clarity.  It's Kim policety.  The
message is -- it's a combination of message and something hype local that makes it
real.  It took the marketing message and made it real.  Part of the context at the
time is it was March 2017 and fake news was being discussed everywhere.  This post
really did hit a nerve.  This is a real simple one that I've used twice now.  It was
simple to do.  I took a picture of my hand with a pen in it and put the text over it
and invited customers to share what their two words would be.  Here what curation is,
it's the simple challenge that I hope would be irresistible to respond to.  Hopefully
as soon as you read that, what the text was, you yourself were thinking of those two
words and thinking how fun it would be to share them with other people.  That's kind
of what I mean by irresistible.  This post -- I reposted it recently and it got 188
comments, which was very fun.  Again, it was super simple to do.  You could reuse my
image if you want or take your own.  Challenges like this can produce some fabulous
participation with your readers.  They are a risk.  Here's what I have learned about
doing these participation challenges.  You need a decent following for it to work. 
If you have a small number of likes on the page, not enough people will see what you
post to -- for it to really catch fire.  You need to make it super easy.  You can't
make it very complicated, like asking -- having a two-part question or challenge. 
Just make it one, super simple and something people can do quickly but also, as I
tried to do here, also sort of touch the emotion, touch things like people's
aspirations and wishes, and reflections on their life.  This works with social media
behavior where a lot of people use social media to define themselves.  To define
themselves to friends and the public.  That was another sort of reason I posted this
is that it helps with that -- it lets people shine on-line on social media by
posting something about themselves.  So, yeah, make it emotional but icky privacy
wise.  This was another challenge.  I think a lot of libraries did in this summer.
I did redid the graphic.  I picked a graphic that was a gift that I found.  Here's
some other examples of challenges you can do.  What book was so scary you refuse to
read it again.  Write a haiku about something that everybody is super excited about. 
For us in the desert, it may be a rainstorm.  We have done that.  We have invited
people to write a haiku about rain clouds and summer rain in the desert.  It did
really well.  I think we had 45.  Submissions.  Speaking of rain, one of the things
I've wanted to achieve on social media is to be the library in realtime.  That's what
this one did for us.  Again what's curation is that it is hyper local.  There's no
direct association with the library here except to convey the message that we live
here, too.  We are fascinated by what you are fascinated by.  And hey, you know, boy,
rain and our normally dry river beds full of water.  I'm looking for examples of what
it is like to live here.  The beauty, the weather, the history.  In this 30-second
video, I took over my lunch hour of a normally bone dry river bed.  It had huge
reach.  You could see the numbers here.  But what I adored about this was actually
the conversations we had in the comment.  People shared stories about past floods. 
They wondered about the history of the river.  I kept up with these comments, and the
library in realtime posted articles answering people's questions and posting
historical photographs and sharing links to other amazing articles and helpful things
and amazing storm photography.  So, yeah, the message here is we, the library staff,
live here, too, and we get Tucson.  We are family.  And the library makes everything
better.  And last reverse engineer is -- I'm always looking for things that I know
customers would be interested in because they ask for them at the desk.  This is
another way of sort of doing collection development, but on social media for social
media, looking for the kinds of things that are web examples of what you buy for your
physical collection.  So part of curation -- you can't curate unless you know why you
are there.  I want to quickly go over some whys and how to support getting deeper
on social media.  When I train staff, I start with brainstorming session of why we
are on social media in the first place.  What happens is they learn through this
exercise that they know more than they think they do, and it gives me a chance to
share real examples of their suggestions for possible drawbacks if there is a
misconception.  So here's some examples of actual whys for social media.  We want to
draw people to our library website.  We want to build loyalty with our customers.  I
have a lot of customers on-line and I want to provide customer service to them.  We
frequently have news we want to get out quickly or we have programming that taxpayers
should know about this is never advertised.  I'll bet you do this, too.  You do
programs in the refugee community, or for teen moms.  Kind of things where you are
not worried about attendance and may not talk about them in the media and you should.
They are great stories the public should know about.  And the other final why I will
talk about here is we have customer outside of our immediate area that
haven't been to the library for a long time and we want tone Thys them.  Really,
social media is the best tool we have for sharing the deeper story of the library in
realtime in our own way.  And that is the genius of social media.  I will skip over
these quickly.  They are samples of handouts that are in the kit that you have that I
hope complement the kind of things that we are talking about.  I also have a
challenge for you.  That's another handout, that may help you rethink your work flow.
If the kinds of things I have been talking about as curation you are thinking, oh, my
God, I don't have time to do that, or where will I find my time?  I hope this
homework challenge will help you think differently about how your workflow happens
and how you use social media.  All right.  Turn it over to Cesar.
>> Thanks, Lisa.  Hi, everyone.  This is Cesar Garza again from the Austin Public
Library.  I have returned to tell you a short story.  Our partners, our social media
ambassadors and in sharing the story I hope to illustrate or to give you an idea of
what you can do at your own library if you want to amplify your library's voice on
social media.  To get started, we need to ask who are the ambassadors?  The
ambassadors are citizens of Austin or Austinites for short who love the library and
share the love on social media.  It is as simple as that and it is simple to sign up
because you don't need to apply to be a social media ambassador.  Just go to the
library's library at library.Austintexas.golf/ambassador.  And you add your name and
E-Mail to the E-Mail list for the ambassador and once a month you will get a short,
personal E-Mail from the Austin Public Library and I would emphasize it is short
because it is not a news letter.  It is actually just a letter from a library staff
member to the ambassadors, as a group.  In that letter, the staff member will
encourage the ambassadors of the group to use a certain hashtag to promote certain
library events or just to help promote the library in any way they can.  If you were
an Austinite, citizens of Austin and a social media ambassador, you would either use
the hashtag that we E-Mail you about or you could use the permanent hashtag, that is
the program hashtag, hash #APLambassador.  We are encouraging you to promote the
library, whether it is posting what you are reading, what you checked out from the
library, what your favorite branch is, what you are looking forward to t. almost
anything having to do with the library you can share it.  Use the hashtag
#APLambassador.  That's how you become an ambassador.  I am happy to report as of
December 2017, we have 1100 ambassadors and the list seems to be growing.  So we are
excited about that.  So now I want to talk about why we did this.  Why we organized
the ambassadors.  I think we need them now more than ever one of the reasons why is
on the next slide.  This is a screen shot of an article from the blog of a blog.  It
is entitled "Organic reach on social media is decling and here's what to do about it
."
Lisa did address it in a previous series.  It is basically free sis ever advertising.
It is the number of people that see any given post that you publish on your social
media page without you paying for it.  It is free advertising.  Unfortunately, the
organic reach we have depended on for so long is declining.  One takeaway from this
article is organic reach from Facebook pages fell 52% in 2016.  That's 52%.  In the
next article I'm going to show you on the screen, it is an article from the website
social media today.com.  It finds Facebook reach has declined 20% in 2017.  I just
showed you an article that said the reach declined 50% in 2016 and further 20% in
2017.  Clearly these networks are trying to move us away from getting anything for
free.  I'm sorry to say, but one of the takeaways from this article is where it says
organic reach on Facebook has been in decline since late 2013.  I've managed a
Facebook page for a library since 2010.  I have seen firsthand how the organic reach
has changed over time.  How indeed this is true.  It is really hard to get your
content in people's newsfeeds and I can tell you this decline is one of the reasons
why at the Austin Public Library we organized the social media ambassadors program. second reason, decreasing emphasis on ads, which cost money.  A third reason
is increasing demands on staff time, and, as time goes on these networks evolve. 
They become more sophisticated and the more sophisticated they become the more time
they require from staff to be effective at using them.  As you have seen, especially
on Facebook.  Facebook is more ad driven from the page perspective.  They want you to
pump money in to ads so you can get in to people's news feeds, but perhaps the
biggest reason why we need the social media ambassadors is reality.  It is the
reality of library land.  We have no formal social media budget.  We descrobt social
media staff, which is to say library staff hired solely for the purpose of managing
social media.  When I introduced myself earlier in this webinar, that indeed I am but
all of the social media I contribute is in addition to what I was hired to do and
that is true for my co-workers on the social media team here and my hunch is most of
you in this webinar right now are probably in the same situation.  We devised this
ambassadors program to basically share the responsibility and the fun of social media
with our ambassadors.  Because I think that in a very literal way these social media
ambassadors embody the organic free reach that now eludes us.  I'm going to show you
an example of how this is true and how this has played out for us. 
In Austin we opened a new library, the library on the slide here and we mobilized our
social media ambassadors to help us promote the New Central Library. 
Use the #new central library.  I would say the way we mobilized the ambassadors
happened over the long term.  It didn't happen right away.  It didn't happen
overnight.  We launched the ambassadors program in November of 2015.  Knowing the New
Central Library would be built.  And when we launched it and the opened occasionally
we would E-Mail the ambassadors to give them an update on the New Central Library and
we knew there was a lot of interest and excitement about the new building and usually
there is in a community where you open a new library.  Anytime we E-Mailed an update
we'd say use the hashtag #newcentrallibrary and just by doing that they would reach
free organic reach for us.  I suppose you could say the peak of the efforts to
amplify and mobilize our social media ambassadors to amplify the New Central Library
happened when on October 28th, 2017 when we allowed them to get a sneak peek before
it opened to the public.  So the way we did it, we used a website called
EventBright.Com.  And we issued free tickets.  Getting the ticket is free but you
have to be a social media ambassador to attend and each ticket allowed an ambassador
and three guests, including children to come to the sneak preview.  When that
happened, we got a lot of photographs and a lot of excitement when they saw it for
the first time.  There was a lot of more organic and free reach for us.  So on the
next slide this is a picture I took of the Social Media Ambassadors they are on the
the first floor of the new library in the atrium that goes up six stories.  The
gentleman on the right is the director of the Austin Public Library an I arranged for
him to welcome the ambassadors before we set them loose to start tweeting and posting
and using the hashtag.  So he did that.  He welcomed them for about five minutes and
I insisted it be a short welcome because we didn't want to hold the ambassadors back
from going wild in the new building.  So now, before this preview happened, we, over
the two years before this -- from November 2015 to 2017 we tracked how much the
hashtag was being used and we could see it was used most on the big three social
media platforms, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.  If ever have a chance I'd
encourage you to go and look it up for the post dated October 22nd, 2017 which is
the day of the sneak preview to see what posts they put up.  There were a few hundred
of them, especially on Instagram.  For this webinar, I created a little collage.  On
this slide is a collage of screen shots I took from the #APLambassador on Facebook
and twitter.  Dated October 22nd.  I want to show you what it looked like and it
was a myriad, a very diverse group of comments and it was very exciting.  So what are
the takeaways?  What are the lessons and tips I can share with you about the
ambassadors program?  The first one is that your social media ambassadors share and
thus amplify your community's library love.  Because they are simply average,
everyday citizens of your community who want to share their love of the library on
social media.  Another lesson that I gleaned from this is ambassadors are a long-term
strategy to both organize and build your library's identity.  You can build
up a group of ambassadors and over time they can be something that you can count on. 
A group of people you can count on when you need to get the word out.  If any of you
listening to this webinar have any interest in trying an ambassador's program, I have
a few tips for you.  The first is to make it simple to sign up.  Like the library,
open to everyone.  Second is to build an E-Mail list.  Here at the Austin Public
Library we use MailChimp.  If you want to, depending on your budget or if you
couldn't subscribe to a platform creating an simple list on an excel spreadsheet or
an E-Mail account they are library and E-Mailing the group can be easy as that.  I
think it is important to attach some action to the action of signing up to be an
ambassador.  You want to make them do something to become one.  Even signing up for
an E-Mail list is more than enough.  Another tip I have is to strategize.  So build
an E-Mail list and strategize the E-Mails long term.  There's the keyword again, long
term.  Based on what I would call your library's big moments.  A big moment is a
high-profile event in your library, such as opening a new facility, launching a new
service, new program, new partnership.  Once you have identified those big moments
you turn one of them or all of them in to an incentive to sign up as an ambassador. 
Here at the Austin Public Library when we extended the sneak preview to the social
media ambassadors we knew we were going to do the sneak preview and we started to say
if you were a member you would get a sneak preview but in order to get a ticket, to
get the golden ticket, if you will, to the sneak preview you had to be a social media
ambassador.  When we started to promote that our list went from 300 to 800 people. 
Hundreds of people signed up, anticipating we were going to do this for them and we
did.  So that's definitely a big tip for me.  So I'm turning it over to Lisa.
>> I'm going to jump in.  This is Jennifer.  Thank you so much.  Oh, my goodness.  So
many ideas.  I'm going to pause here to share some of the questions I've seen come
through with you all and work backwards.  Cesar, I'm going to ask you a couple of
questions that came up.
>> Sure.
>> One of them was specific to who picked the hashtag that APL uses?
>> The social media advisory team of the library picked them.  We sort of survey our
pages.  We tried to get a sense of what is trending and what we think we can use over
time, again over the long term.  The hashtags are the ones we use frequently.
>> Fantastic.  I'm curious how many libraries have picked up on #library love?
>> The #librarylove was trending before we got it.  It is out there.
>> We used it to publicize our rebranding campaign.
>> Oh, excellent.
>> Yeah.
>> That's a good one.  There was a question about how you orient your ambassadors,
especially in terms of making sure that their posts are available publicly.  Do you
provide them with some guidelines and recommendations for how to post?
>> We don't provide formal guidelines other than what we articulate in the E-Mail,
the letter that we sent to them as a group.  It's a letter written by a library staff
member in the first person.  It goes something like dear social media ambassador, I'm
Cesar Garza.  We have a new opening and we'd love it if you would use the
 hashtag New central library.  If we see an ambassador use an
image and don't think it is appropriate we won't retweet it.
>> Okay.  Excellent.
>> A couple of folks were curious if you have had negative posts related to the
ambassador program, or are there any down sides to having social media ambassadors?
>> I haven't seen any negative posts because the nature of the group is that they
love the library.  The way we describe it.  The way we have them sign up for the
E-Mail list, the message is you are so grateful you are doing this.  We know you love
the library and now show us how you love the library.  I don't see any down sides. 
The only down side is the challenge of maintaining it, finding ways to engage them
and finding topics for E-Mails or hashtags they may use that they will actually use. 
That's the challenge, actually getting them to do it.  That's the biggest challenge. 
It is not a down side, just a challenge.
>> Excellent.  There were a few questions.  This is to Lisa's portion.  Lisa,
somebody loved if you could write the two words, that graphic that you created. 
Somebody said, can we use that.
>> Of course.  It was something I did just last week.  If you go to the Pima County
Public Library  Facebook page, it should be there.  If you are a member of the
Facebook group, which I invite you to.  And a number of people share graphics
like that in this group and another group there are some that libraries share
successful images they have made or found.
>> Jessica was a presenter on our first session.  Head back over.  I did post her
link to she shareable click group earlier when somebody was asking about how do
you -- a couple of people commented, Lisa, that they don't have the engagement that
you have been seeing and wondered what are some tricks?  I recommended the shareable
click to see the posts that libraries are making that have gotten traction.  So
definitely check that out, as well.  Lisa, one more question for you.  Somebody
brought up the issue of in terms of curating content and staying true to your brand,
for example, the library brands guidelines, the photography of people event and
programs should be used rather than illustration or GIFs, how do you work through
those branding policies if you need to coordinate with other folks that are making
those decisions?
>> Yeah.  It's helpful that I work in the same office.  What is on our branding
committee.  We have a similar part of our branding where the only images, for
example, that can be used on the website are professional photographs.  We prefer
things that are local and taken of our own programming, but when we don't have that,
we have access to getting images for that.  We try to minimize stock photography as
much as possible.  On the other hand, we saw social media as a place where -- for now
it is the only place that staff can post their own photographs.  Because of the
branding they can't be on the website.  So social media was seen as an outlet for
that creativity and photography is something that we have trained staff on, how to
use photography to tell the story.  That kind of thing.  If we have a barrier --
photography wise, it is that we have to get permission for everyone who is
recognizable if the photograph.  That can be onerous and get in the way of
spontaneity.  I hope that answered the question.
>> We have gathered some policies that folks have internal and external policies and
we will be sharing that on WebJunction in a little bit.  We let folks know on web
pages when that is available.  All right.  In the interest of time, let's continue
on.  For those that need to leave at the top of the hour, we will continue to record.
So you can certainly circle back and listen to the rest of it when you have a chance.
So thank you for being here.
>> What I want to show here where examples of what you can accomplish when you have
your whole staff behind you and at this point I have been training staff on social
media for -- oh, gosh, maybe nine years.  We definitely hit critical mass as far as
the number of people that know what we are doing on social media.  It is also part of
the training we give to every new member.  So I'm part of the new employee training
and I talk about our goals on social.  If you remember, our goals here at Pima
county, I want the people that read our Facebook page to say least once a month, I
love my library, or wow I didn't know I could do that at the library or the library
helps to make the community strong or I'm welcome at the library and I can't --
sitting in the fourth floor of the main library, I can't do that without the help of
my fellow staff members.  I know million libraries have policies who can post
districtly to social media.  I want to make an argument for using your staff as
ambassadors, as well.  This is how you are going to get the story of the library in
people's lives.  It's how you get stories of staff excellence in realtime.  It is how
you find ways to connect with people and business groups and it really does reinforce
the sense that the library is synonymous with your community when you have many more
of your staff members posting on social media.  What I say is these front line staff
members represent the library face to face every single day.  As far as I'm concerned
they are the library voice and this is the library brand.  I don't really interfere a
lot with what they want to do with their branch page.  Isn't this wonderful?  This is
actually a photograph that is three times as wide but one of our branches serves a
neighborhood that has a high number of recent immigrants and refugees and they have
made a concerted effort to have staff that speaks these languages.  We have a great
telephone translation service but whenever possible we try to have staff that can
speak these languages.  What the French did, for their Facebook page, is they took
pictures of the 15, 16 staff members holding up signs of the languages they speak
natively.  And then share it on their Facebook page.  We have reused this photograph
in a number of similar contexts.  There's to way I could have really gotten this
picture easily and it was all on this branch's initiative.  Your staff are
ambassadors too.  This photograph came from a staff member.  I can't be there to
photograph.  But the staff can be.  And they see these wonderful things.  This is
another story that -- let's see, Maria, if I'm pronouncing her name right and her
twin sister come in to the library a lot and one day Maria came in and asked the
librarian if she could recite a poem.  I won't show it but this is a video of her
reciting the poem at the library and she listened an her mouth dropped and asked if
she would read it again for the camera.  And then got it on social media that day. 
It is gold.  I can't say it enough.  Be hyper local.  Share in realtime more often
than you schedule posts.  Empower your front line staff with tools like cameras,
tablets and training and time and honestly, at your locations have a camera or tablet
with a camera on it.   Cesar, your turn.
>> Thanks, Lisa.  This is Cesar Garza, again.  I'm from the Austin Public Library a. 
We Are in the Final Leg of Our Webinar Here.  I Will Talk About Facebook Live and How
We Used It.  I hope to show you how it can be done and how it is not as
hard as you think.  Here at the Austin public library to date, December 2017, we have
recorded 28 broadcasts.  They are archived in the videos tab of the Austin Public
Library'S Facebook page.  You can see our videos range from crafts to Austin history
to eBooks to live music and the closing of the old Central Library.  And Our
Viewership Has Been from Zero to 30, Viewers.  That's an Average.  I Hope That Is Not
Discouraging to People but for a Library Facebook Page, My Observation Has Been It Is
Not That Bad.  Although the leadership maybe discouraging where you get the most
views happens after the broadcast is over.  So for the us a public
library we have gotten from 350 to 6100 video views.  In last one it was a live
broadcast about the closing of the old Central Library and the lead up to the new
Central Library.  It is part of our flagship series and we post a library related
question and answer it live.  As it happens we encourage people who might be watching
to ask their own questions or comments and we answer it live.   One way to think of
the "Q&APL Live" is an FAQ that you turn in to a Facebook episode.  Speaking of
questions, a question we have to ask yourselves and maybe others will ask is why do
we need to do Facebook live?  And do we need to do it?  And the answer is yes.  We
have to do it now.  One reason is an article I'm going to share with you.  The link
will be shared as I speak.  It is an article on the website of Forbes.com.  It is
titled "Top 10 Video Marketing Trends and Statistics Roundup 2017".  It has two big
points that hit home.  A half billion people are watching video on Facebook every
day.  Another big point, internet video traffic will be over 80% of all consumer
internet traffic in four years.  The gist here is Facebook newsfeed is primed for
video.  I would say and argue that a video on Facebook these days generates stronger
customer engagement.  It is more likely to be shared and in the sharing is where you
get more reach.  It is that organic free reach that is illusive to us these days. 
Now I will share four tips on how to do Facebook Live.  And I hope you find them
helpful.  My first tip is to borrow ideas from other libraries.  See what other
libraries are doing.  There's an article on the website of libraryjournal.com.  It
was published in April of this year.  And it features the Austin Public Library
Facebook Live and it may give you ideas.  There are other libraries that are doing
virtual reference sessions, readers advisory, such as what to read on Wednesday. 
There are other libraries that are using Facebook Live to get the tour of a new
exhibition that is being held at the library.  And fourth, it is a worthwhile article
to look at.  The Facebook Live tip two, equip yourself.  Use a smartphone and tripod.
All you need is your personal smartphone.  In the picture on the slide here, those
are my hands in the lower right corner.  My hands peeking in to the frame.  I'm
holding a six-inch smartphone tripod.  This only costs 10 or $15, depending where you
buy it from but I thought it was useful because it helps me to hold my smartphone
camera a certain way and stabilize the video and reduces hand held shakiness.  In my
experience, when you record video you can't get rid of the shakiness completely.  It
comes down to how steady your hand is, but that tripod, the way you hold it with the
phone is actually very useful.  All you need is your smartphone.  Get a little tripod
and you are good to go.  Facebook Live tip three.  Promote the broadcast as a library
event.  What you are seeing on the slide here is a screenshot of the way you may see
an upcoming episode of our flagship series "Q&APL Live."  This is a Facebook Live on
November 30th, 2017.  I decided early on as we promoted them we would post this
Facebook Live as an event next to our story times, classes, next to our book clubs
because it is library staff using library time and resources to organize this.  All
events are created equal on the library's event calendar.  So I put it up there and
that is Juan way to promote your event outside of social media.  The last tip,
Facebook Live tip four, broadcast the fun, focused conversation.  Not overly
scripted.  It is up to you how scripted and how much you can memorize of a script. 
Don't be afraid to make mistakes.  It is part of the charm of live video is being
able to see regular people that happen to be library staff members make mistakes and
try to recover and they are teachable moments as it happens.  Spontaneity is fun,
too.  That is encouraged.  You want to broadcast something fun and make it focused. 
Focus on a question, on a topic, event, anything related to the library, anything
that might get people interested in coming to the library or using it as a resource. 
As long as it is focused on something is all you need to worry about.  The latter
part of the tip is if it is possible get yourself a Facebook Live team of three
people so that you have one person behind the camera, one person on camera and one
person monitoring comments on camera or somewhere else in the building, in the
library.  I videotape -- I record 99% of the Facebook Live videos.  I have recorded
all of the "Q&APL Live" series and it is my smartphone.  I hold it up and I talk to
the person on camera and the person monitoring comments and amongst the three of us
we chat amongst ourselves.  We try to stay on topic and invite viewers to join our
conversation.  The reason I think it is important to have someone behind camera
talking to the person on camera, or to have a conversation is because earlier, in an
earlier slide, I mentioned how sometimes we get no one watching.  That will happen. 
It's nothing to be discouraged about but sometimes people just won't watch.  So the
whole thing with Facebook Live is to engage with people watching and if no one is
watching there's a lot of dead air there.  Plan to have a conversation on Facebook
Live.  And you can be confident in the fact that once it is over it will still be
viewed and depending on the topic you cover you can use the Facebook Live video and
reshare it or embed it on your website or blog or something like that.  So that would
be the end of my tips here.
>> Fantastic.  So exciting.  Really powerful to see the way you have been using
Facebook Live.  I want to mention, there's the Milwaukee Public Library  Live S.T.R.E.A.M.ed an Event.  I Just Featured Them in the Social
Library Edition That I Published Just Today.  I Want to Be Sure -- I Forgot I go
through a couple of times a month and find examples of things that libraries are
doing on Facebook and APL was featured for their live streaming.  I want you to share
the tips.  There have been great questions specific to Facebook Live.  Thanks for the
tip on the equipment you use.  People were curious how you keep steady.  Someone
asked about using a lab top versus a mobile phone and sounds like your focus is
looking out, not necessarily behind your laptop and speaking, is that correct, right?
>> That's a good question.  That's correct, Jennifer.  I find -- we found it more --
I suppose the video to be more interesting if I move around a bit.  Sometimes if I
use a smartphone, you can't zoom in as the video is happening so you have to be
sometimes in your co-workers face to talk to them and make the video.  I do the
tripod because it lets me move around.  It lets me create a different shot and frame
it in different ways to make it interested to look at on top of everything else.
>> It seems like an iPad.  I have seen people use an iPad for that purpose.
>> They can.  But iPads are larger and heavier.  It is totally up to you if you are
willing to hold up an iPad with your bare hands if you don't have a stabilizer to
hold it 20 to 30 minutes.  If you are comfortable doing that then absolutely.
>> There have been a couple of questions about how long your segments are.  Someone
talked about would it be a good idea to use to record book club meetings?  How long
are your segments usually?
>> On average, our Facebook Live segments are 15 to 20 minutes.  That's especially
true for the "Q&APL Live" series where we post a question and answer it.  Sometimes
we don't need more than 30 minutes to do that.  There's been one or two Facebook
Lives which was an author talk given.  I didn't record it but it happened on our
Facebook page and that talk was an hour long.  It depends on how much, the topic
itself, how long you think people will watch.  If there is some utility, if you get
 utility out of afterwards.  It can be longer than 30 minutes or an
entire beginning to end.  It is up to you how you want to use it.  I'd recommend to
be strategic about it.  Do you want to have -- is this a one off event where it will
never happen again or maybe you want to capture it on Facebook Live.  Be strategic
about it.
>> Any tips for making your Facebook Live episodes handicap accessible.  I don't
think I have ever seen Live sessions closed captioned.  Have you investigated that?
>> I have investigated the closed captioning.  You can not do it through
a mobile device.  We are stuck in a way because all I have is a mobile device.  The
way to do closed captioning is you would need to feed your Facebook Live video
through -- you need a laptop and computer with certain software and connect it to a
high-end camera and record Facebook Live through the camera and through the computer
connect to Facebook.  So it is a broadcasting network you have to set up in order for
it to happen.
>> Okay.
>> It is a little complicated.
>> Worth investigating for sure.  Excellent.
>> Somebody put a big question out there and I want to put it out there verbally. 
Someone said, will the loss of net neutrality interact with the way that Facebook
works with libraries and other nonprofits and if people have been talking about that,
it would be great to hear.  Either of you have comments on that at this point?
>> My understanding of net neutrality it will change because of Congress or the
Communications Commission but it is not changing yet.  It remains to be seen how it
will affect library and Facebook Live.
>> Right.
>> Yeah.  All I could think of is that one of the things we saw before the rules were
in place during the Obama administration was that large corporations were slowing
other corporations broadcast to a trickle.  I think if that's one of the effects that
we can probably count on Twitter and Facebook to protect their bandwidth.  I am not
really worried about social media.
>> It will be interesting to see what comes.  I do want -- also you mentioned, Cesar
that you mention events to let folks know when you have Live events coming up.  Do
you communicate that information with your ambassadors?  Is that part of your regular
message or just assume they are probably following and will jump in with their
ambassadorship through the Facebook -- or through their feed?
>> Sometimes we do communicate our upcoming Live broadcasts.  We communicated that we
scheduled a Live broadcast before we closed the old library to open the new one. 
That was a big push for us.  We don't do it all the time.  Sometimes the ambassadors
will find out we are doing it because we have tried to clue them in to the fact that
we schedule our posts or our Live broadcasts ahead of time.  It is a little of both. 
Sometimes they will find it on their own and sometimes they will E-Mail about it.  If
not, we don't do either we leave it on the event calendar and just go with it.
>> Is your mobile device your own or the libraries?
>> It is my own, personal iPhone.  So I'm not able to get from my library an
iPhone.  So I use my own.  It is okay.  When I use a Facebook account, it
technically belongs to the Austin Public Library.  I use that to log in.  But
anything you do is posted directly to the Facebook page.  There's nothing saved op my
personal device or captured there.  It is directly in to Facebook.  That's why I'm
comfortable using my personal device.
>> Excellent.  I see a little bit of some folks sharing the connection between You
Tube and Facebook in terms of an option for adding captions.  I do know that can be
done.  I'll try to seek out some resources that outline that process and add that to
the event page.  If anyone has that experience, feel free to chime in.  A reminder,
too, that the Facebook groups we mentioned, especially the libraries and social media
group is an excellent place to get tips from others that have been exploring some of
these great ideas, as well.  Every day I go and I'm amazed at all of the great ideas
I see shared there.  If you are running in to problems, get stumped or need
inspiration, be sure to head over there, as well.  Well, I'm going to -- we have a
couple more things since we have a bit of time.  I was curious also to check in with
folks.  I mentioned the survey is something we have been collecting.  If you haven't
yet taken the survey, you have a little more time.  We will close it down tomorrow
morning and start looking at the results of the survey.  And share those results
after the new year.  Thanks to techsoup for helping us with this great work.  In the
survey, one of the questions we asked you is about what you are using social media
for.  One of the questions, or one of the ways we looked at your responses was to
understand the ways that you would like to start using Facebook -- or start using
social media more.  I thought we'd have a little bit of a interactivity here and get
some thoughts from you all on how you would like to use your social media a little
more.  I'm going to give you access to our annotation tools.  You'll see over to the
far left corner of the slide there's a little marker.  If you click on that marker it
will turn blue and you will get this panel on the left side of your menu.  Go down to
the square.  Then there's another teeny tiny arrow that gives you access to a
checkmark.  Click on that and feel free to use this slide to test your checkmark and
I will know you have access.  Perfect.  So you see all of those check
marks coming up there.  And now I will ask you to hold your checkmarks and I'd love
for you to think of three things that you see that you would like to explore further.
Hold your checkmarks, everybody.  Hold your checkmark.  All right.  And here are some
of the top ideas that folks talked about wanting to start using on social media more.
I know some of these are a little more platform specific but some of them cross over.
I think everybody is ready to Livestr eam after your speech.
>> Glad to hear that.
>> We can do a better job on things that we can do better.  Readers or reference
advisory is another top.  It looks like a lot of people are saying all of the above,
as well.  Those who are answering have probably answered in the survey already.  I'm
so excited that people are excited about exploring the different ways to use social
media.  I encourage you to take a closer look.  If you were not part of the earlier
sessions because we dive a little deeper in to the other platforms.  I know we were
really focused on Facebook, talking more generally about Facebook today.  Be sure to
check those out.  As I mentioned, we will be -- I'll follow up with you today, once
today's recording is available and all of those recordings will be available to you
all to share with your colleagues and teammates, perhaps some of your advisory board
folks, if you have teams engaged in your social media.  A lot of folks can benefit
from the learning.  And the Facebook group libraries on social media, Lisa  Bunk is one of the founders of that group.  And I want to thank Molly for
joining us as techsoup advisory.  Great working with you and thank you to
Cesar and Lisa for your great work.  We look forward to continuing to follow all of
the great work you are doing in your libraries and being prepared for whatever is to
come with social media and our communities that use them.  So thank you all very much
for being here and thank you to our captioner for today.  Everyone have an excellent
day.
>> Take care.  Bye-bye.