Public libraries usually do everything they can to advertise their services. As they should, with budget cuts and having to prove their worth and whatnot. Like other organizations/businesses, this has meant having a presence on Facebook. Makes sense…Facebook is a part of many people’s daily life, and many ‘like’ everything under the sun, from their favorite baseball teams and TV shows to the fast food joints they frequent and the kind of underwear they buy, making the SNS a marketing powerhouse. At least in theory…
But more often than not, it seems that organizations, including libraries, fail to see the real value of social networking- that social media affords participation and conversation with the people they are trying to reach. Instead of engaging with people, they simply shill their products and services. They talk at us, not with us. A good example of this is Vancouver Public Library’s Facebook page (for those of you with FB). Every post asks us to ‘check it out’, and unless I am missing something, never invites us to comment on Facebook, the tool we are actually using. While it may direct some traffic to VPL’s website, it is not utilizing the tool to interact with the public at all.
There are exceptions to this. I have been following my local library’s FB feed for awhile now, the Multnomah County Library system. I admit I’m biased, but I’ve always found the page to be more inviting than most. While they still advertise their services, they also often pose questions to get their patrons’ talking, and use the medium for other fun activities. Their latest is a book and film review haiku challenge, where the winner gets a free tote bag. It challenges users to be creative and to interact in a fun way. Another great use of the space is that they have done reader’s advisory over Facebook. They asked for us to list the last three books we’ve read, and then personably responded, suggesting a book and giving the reasons why. The couple of times I have seen (and participated) in this, it garnered an incredibly large amount of participation, and the moderator was extremely timely in his/her responses.
But in my opinion, the best way Multcolib uses Facebook is by, *gasp*, letting us post on their wall! Patrons post suggestions/questions/complaints, and the library responds. This simple option opens up the lines of communication between library and patron. Upon investigation, I realized that hardly any library does. I searched for every public library I could think of and literally none of them allowed this, excluding a couple Portland suburbs who probably modeled their own pages on Multnomah County’s. I’d love to hear about others, if anyone out there knows of them. If you can’t post, how can you fully interact with the library? It is then a necessarily “top-down” system, not a participatory one.
There is an obvious reason for this. You need an active moderator to make sure people aren’t posting obscene things, so libraries just don’t want to risk it/bother/hire someone to read the dang thing. This is unfortunate. And it doesn’t even eliminate the potential problem, because of course people can still comment on posts however they want to. Until libraries actually allow people to participate, I doubt FB will really allow libraries to reach others. I know that when I skim my FB feed, my eyes glaze over most library posts, because they are just shills; I doubt I’m alone in this. Libraries need to trust their patrons and let us post.
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