Brand Monitoring – Manchester City Library
For this assignment, I chose to monitor the Manchester City Library in Manchester, NH.
First a little background about Manchester. According to the city’s Wikipedia entry, Manchester is the largest city in Northern New England with a population of approximately 108,580. The article states that, “In 2009, CNNMoney.com rated Manchester 13th in a list of the 100 best cities to live and launch a business in the United States. In addition, Kiplinger voted Manchester the second most tax friendly city in the United States, second only to Anchorage, Alaska.”
I discovered that the Manchester City Library has a Facebook page, a twitter account, a Flickr account as well as a library blog. The library homepage is found on the City of Manchester, NH’s official Web Site. The library blog and corresponding RSS feed is prominently displayed on the library homepage. Here you will also find the library’s link to its Facebook page and its Flickr account.
Library Blog
The library blog provides website visitors with information about the library – changes being made at the library, author visits, programs, etc. – as well as local information about events in and around the city of Manchester. Entries are made to the blog on a fairly regular basis. A small number of entries have comments posted to them and I noticed as I read through them that staff members are reading the posted comments and responding to them. I believe that this is a good indication that the library is committed to utilizing its blog as a way to communicate with its patrons and the public at large. Away from the library’s website, there doesn’t appear to be a library presence because when I searched Yelp, it brought up the library’s website but there were no reviews posted.
The library provides a link to its Facebook page, which currently has 337 fans, on the library homepage. It appears that Facebook is primarily used to highlight upcoming events. There is a Social RSS feed which when clicked takes visitors to the library calendar. Under the section of RSS/Blog, there are RSS feeds to the library calendar, the library’s photos on Flickr, and the library blog. The majority of posts on the library’s wall are either selective tweets from its Twitter account or an announcement of an upcoming event with a link to information about the specific event. There are a very limited number of comments made by fans to the Facebook posts.
The Manchester City Library Twitter account manchlibrary has, as of 11/20/2009, 1,076 followers which places the library 22nd in Twitter’s list of top public libraries.
- “We are one of the top public libraries on Twitter! Lots of UK folks follow us, but we’ll take it! http://tinyurl.com/ybdezwr #fb 2:24 PM Nov 5th from Seesmic “
The librarians seem to tweet every day and the tweets tend to focus on information specific to MCL (Manchester Public Library) as well as general information about any number of subjects, many related to libraries, some not. There is a limited amount of conversations going on between MCL staff and the library’s followers.
- “Library usage is up again! Library users borrowed over 46,000 library items last month! That is a 13.3% increase from last year! #fb 12:00 PM Nov 10th from Seesmic”
- “MCL News:: A new look for Reference! http://manchesterlibrary.or… #fb 6:22 AM Nov 4th from Twitter Tools”
- “”Why We All Need Libraries” – Retired Guy makes MCL famous! http://tinyurl.com/yz7e2uc #fb 7:23 AM Nov 6th from web”
- “RT @kevinmic: Reading: 14 social media lessons we can all learn http://bit.ly/1PmEc9 | Very good advice. 6:33 AM Nov 3rd from Seesmic”
Flickr
The MCL Flickr account was created in October, 2007. The account profile states that:
“We are Yvonne Loomis and Lichen Rancourt from the Manchester City Library in beautiful Manchester, New Hampshire.
We wanted to use Flickr to record the wonderful things that happen here to try to build interest in the library’s programs, the beautiful building, or what have you. I’m hoping it will help interest people in the wonderful community resource we have here.”
Photographs feature library architecture, staff, events, displays, etc. Photos from the library’s Flickr photostream are prominently displayed along the top of the library’s website and visitors to the website can access the full selection of photos from the link provided.
From what I have observed, I believe that the Manchester City Library is actively utilizing Web 2.0 tools to create a library brand. Library information can be found on its website, Facebook page, Twitter account, and Flickr account and each site provides links to another site. The library promotes its Facebook page and its Flickr account on its library website and links to the library website, blog, and photos can be found on its Facebook page as well as selective tweets from its Twitter account. MCL staff members appear to be monitoring conversations on the library blog, Facebook page, and Twitter account because whenever a comment is posted, a staff member usually responds. Unfortunately, at this point in time, conversations on Facebook and Twitter tend to be somewhat one-sided, but I believe that given time, this will change as library users become more comfortable with social networking sites. In the meantime, I feel that Manchester City Library is in a good position to promote itself at the same time as it monitors how others view it.
November 23rd, 2009 at 10:35 am
Hello Maggie,
I don’t think I’ve ever been monitored so closely before! Thank you for your attention to our efforts – there are many additional things I have planned and many more things I wish I had time to do with our existing tools, but simply don’t.
All in all I have been pleased and encouraged by the reception of social media by our community – the feedback I receive is much more than what is reflected in our comments. Twitter, especially, has been extremely exciting for us – we had a huge response right from the beginning.
When I first started our Facebook page, I declared a contest between us and an neighboring library to see who could reach 100 friends first. People got totally on board and asked all their friends to friend us to win. Nothing like harnessing a bit of competition and civic pride. The prize was muffins… although we are still waiting for ours.
All the best,
Lichen Rancourt