Tag: marketing

ER&L: Library Renewal

Speaker: Michael Porter

Libraries are content combined with community. Electronic content access is making it more challenging for libraries to accomplish their missions.

It’s easy to complain but hard to do. Sadly, we tend to complain more than doing. If we get a reputation for being negative, that will be detrimental. That doesn’t mean we should be Sally Sunshine, but we need to approach things with a more positive attitude to make change happen.

Libraries have an identity problem. We are tied to content (ie books). 95% of people in poverty have cable television. They can’t afford it, but they want it, so they get it. Likewise, mobile access to content is moving to ubiquitous.

Our identity needs to be moved back to content. We need to circ electronic content better than Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, etc.

Electronic content distribution is a complicated issue. Vendors in our market don’t have the same kind of revenue as companies like Apple. We aren’t getting the best people or solutions — we’re getting the good enough, if we’re lucky.

Could libraries became the distribution hub for media and other electronic content?

WordCamp Richmond: Exploiting Your Niche – Making Money with Affiliate Marketing

presenter: Robert Sterling

Affiliate marketing is a practice of rewarding an affiliate for directing customers to the brand/seller that then results in a sale.

“If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” If you have a blog that’s interesting and people are coming to you, you’re doing something wrong if you’re not making money off of it.

Shawn Casey came up with a list of hot niches for affiliate marketing, but that’s not how you find what will work for you. Successful niches tend to be what you already have a passion for and where it intersects with affiliate markets. Enthusiasm provokes a positive response. Enthusiasm sells. People who are phoning it in don’t come across the same and won’t develop a loyal following.

Direct traffic, don’t distract from it. Minimize the number of IAB format ads – people don’t see them anymore. Maximize your message in the hot spots – remember the Google heat map. Use forceful anchor text like “click here” to direct users to the affiliate merchant’s site. Clicks on images should move the user towards a sale.

Every third or fourth blog post should be revenue-generating. If you do it with every post, people will assume it’s a splog. Instapundit is a good example of how to do a link post that directs users to relevant content from affiliate merchants. Affiliate datafeeds can be pulled in using several WP plugins. If your IAB format ads aren’t performing from day one, they never will.

Plugins (premium): PopShops works with a number of vendors. phpBay/phpZon works with eBay and Amazon, respectively. They’re not big revenue sources, but okay for side money.

Use magazine themes that let you prioritize revenue-generating content. Always have a left-sidebar and search box, because people are more comfortable with that navigation.

Plugins (free): W3 Total Cache (complicated, buggy, but results in fast sites, which Google loves), Regenerate Thumbnails, Ad-minister, WordPress Mobile, and others mentioned in previous sessions. Note: if you change themes, make sure you go back and check old posts. You want them to look good for the people who find them via search engines.

Forum marketing can be effective. Be a genuine participant, make yourself useful, and link back to your site only occasionally. Make sure you optimize your profile and use the FeedBurner headline animator.

Mashups are where you can find underserved niches (i.e. garden tools used as interior decorations). Use Google’s keyword tools to see if there is a demand and who may be your competition. Check for potential affiliates on several networks (ClickBank, ShareASale, Pepperjam, Commission Junction, and other niche-appropriate networks). Look for low conversion rates, and if the commission rate is less than 20%, don’t bother.

Pay for performance (PPP) advertising is likely to replace traditional retail sales. Don’t get comfortable – it’s easy for people to copy what works well for you, and likewise you can steal from your competition.

Questions:

What’s a good percentage to shoot for? 50% is great, but not many do that. Above 25% is a good payout. Unless the payout is higher, avoid the high conversion rate affiliate programs. Look for steady affiliate marketing campaigns from companies that look like they’re going to be sticking around.

What about Google or Technorati ads? The payouts have gone down. People don’t see them, and they (Google) aren’t transparent enough.

How do you do this not anonymously and maintain integrity in the eyes of your readers? One way to do it is a comparison post. Look at two comparable products, list their features against each other.

NASIG 2010: Integrating Usage Statistics into Collection Development Decisions

Presenters: Dani Roach, University of St. Thomas and Linda Hulbert, University of St. Thomas

As with most libraries, they are faced with needing to downsize their purchases in order to fit within reduced budgets, so good tools must be employed to determine which stuff to remove or acquire.

The statistics for impact factor means little to librarians, since the “best” journals may not be appropriate for the programs the library supports. Quantitative data like cost per use, historical trends, and ILL data are more useful for libraries. Combine these with reviews, availability, features, user feedback, and the dust layer on the materials, and then you have some useful information for making decisions.

Usage statistics are just one component that we can use to analyze the value of resources. There are other variables than cost and other methods than cost per use, but these are what we most often apply.

Other variables can include funds/subjects, format, and identifiers like ISSN. Cost needs to be defined locally, as libraries manage them differently for annual subscriptions, multiple payments/funds, one-time archive fees, hosting fees, and single title databases or ebooks. Use is also tricky. A PDF download in a JR1 report is different from a session count in a DB1 report is different from a reshelve count for a bound journal. Local consistency with documentation is best practice for sorting this out.

Library-wide SharePoint service allows them to drop documents with subscription and analysis information into one location for liaisons to use. [We have a shared network folder that I do some of this with — I wonder if SharePoint would be better at managing all of the files?]

For print statistics, they track separately bound volume use versus new issue use, scanning barcodes into their ILS to keep a count. [I’m impressed that they have enough print journal use to do that rather than hash marks on a sheet of paper. We had 350 reshelved in last year, including ILL use, if I remember correctly.]

Once they have the data, they use what they call a “fairness factor” formula to normalize the various subject areas to determine if materials budgets are fairly allocated across all disciplines and programs. Applying this sort of thing now would likely shock budgets, so they decided to apply new money using the fairness factor, and gradually underfunded areas are being brought into balance without penalizing overfunded areas.

They have stopped trying to achieve a balance between books and periodicals. They’ve left that up to the liaisons to determine what is best for their disciplines and programs.

They don’t hide their cancellation list, and if any of the user community wants to keep something, they’ve been willing to retain it. However, they get few requests to retain content, and they think it is in part because the user community can see the cost, use, and other factors that indicate the value of the resource for the local community.

They have determined that it costs them around $52 a title to manage a print subscription, and over $200 a title to manage an online subscription, mainly because of the level of expertise involved. So, there really are no “free” subscriptions, and if you want to get into the cost of binding/reshelving, you need to factor in the managerial costs of electronic titles, as well.

Future trends and issues: more granularity, more integration of print and online usage, interoperability and migration options for data and systems, continued standards development, and continued development of tools and systems.

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing. You can gather Ulrich’s reports, Eigen factors, relative price indexes, and so much more, but at some point, you have to decide if the return is worth the investment of time and resources.

ER&L 2010: Developing a methodology for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of journal packages

Speaker: Nisa Bakkalbasi

Journal packages offer capped price increases, access to non-subscribed content, and it’s easier to manage than title-by-title subscriptions. But, the economic downturn has resulted in even the price caps not being enough to sustain the packages.

Her library only seriously considers COUNTER reports, which is handy, since most package publishers provide them. They add to that the publisher’s title-by-title list price, as well as some subject categories and fund codes. Their analysis includes quantitative and qualitative variables using pivot tables.

In addition, they look at the pricing/sales model for the package: base value, subscribed/non-subscribed titles, cancellation allowance, price cap/increase, deep discount for print rate, perpetual/post-cancellation access rights, duration of the contract, transfer titles, and third-party titles.

So, the essential question is, are we paying more for the package than for specific titles (perhaps fewer than we currently have) if we dissolved the journal package?

She takes the usage reports for at least the past three years in order to look at trends, and excludes titles that are based on separate pricing models, and also excluded backfile usage if that was a separate purchase (COUNTER JR1a subtracted from JR1 – and you will need to know what years the publisher is calling the backfile). Then she adds list prices for all titles (subscribed & non-subscribed). Then, she calculates the cost-per-use of the titles, and uses the ILL cost (per the ILL department) as a threshold for possible renewals or cancellations.

The final decision depends on the base value paid by the library, the collection budget increase/decrease, price cap, and the quality/consistency of ILL service (money is not everything). This method is only about the costs, and it does not address the value of the resources to the users beyond what they may have looked at. There may be other factors that contributed to non-use.

NASIG 2009: Informing Licensing Stakeholders

Towards a More Effective Negotiation

Presenters: Lisa Sibert, Micheline Westfall, Selden Lamoreux, Clint Chamberlain (moderator), Vida Damijonaitis, and Brett Rubinstein

Licensing as a process has not been improving very much. Some publishers are willing to negotiate changes, but some are still resistant. It often takes months to a year to receive fully signed licenses from publishers, which can tie up access or institutional processes. Negotiation time is, of course, a factor, but it should not effect the time it takes for both parties to sign and distribute copies once the language is agreed upon. One panelist noted that larger publishers are often less willing to negotiate than smaller ones. Damijonaitis stated that licenses are touched at fourteen different points in the process on their end, which plays into the length of time.

Publishers are concerned with the way the content is being used and making sure that it is not abused (without consequences). Is it necessary to put copyright violation language in licenses or can it live on purchase orders? Springer has not had any copyright violations that needed to be enforced in the past five or six years. They work with their customers to solve any problems as they come up, and libraries have been quick to deal with the situation. On the library side, some legal departments are not willing to allow libraries to participate in SERU.

Deal breakers: not allowing walk-ins, adjunct faculty, interlibrary loan, governing law, and basic fair use provisions. Usage statistics and uptime guarantees are important and sometimes difficult to negotiate. LibLicense is useful for getting effective language that publishers have agreed to in the past.

It’s not the libraries who tend to be the abusers of license terms or copyright, it’s the users. Libraries are willing to work with publishers, but if the technology has grown to the point where it is too difficult for the library to police use, then some other approach is needed. When we work with publishers that don’t require licenses or use just purchase orders, there is less paperwork, but it also doesn’t indemnify the institution, which is critical in some cases.

Bob Boissy notes that no sales person gets any benefit from long negotiations. They want a sale. They want an invoice. Libraries are interested in getting the content as quickly as possible. I think we all are coming at this with the same desired outcome.

gas boycott on tuesday — what’s the point?

Go ahead and don’t buy gas on Tuesday, but it’s not going to lower the price per gallon.

It appears that the perennial gas boycott has reared its ugly head again, this time setting next Tuesday, May 15th as the day to not fill up your vehicle’s gas tank. This time around it is protesting the recent price per gallon increases to an average above $3, but will it be effective? Probably not.

This has been tried before over the past decade or more, with no visible effect on gas prices. Usually, folks who participate in the protest simply buy their gas on other days. In no way do most reduce the amount of gas they use, so as far as the filling stations are concerned, it’s simply a small blip in daily sales.

What will really send a message is to drastically reduce your gas use. Walk or bike instead of driving, or use public transportation or a carpool if you have those options. Do all of these things every day, and not just on next Tuesday. Of course, these things may not lower the pump prices in the short run, but they certainly will have less of an impact on your wallet.

Gas prices are on the rise, and we would be foolish to think that oil companies are going to lower them for any reason since there hasn’t been a real backlash against them. Americans are still buying big gas guzzling vehicles, and even if we feel the squeeze at the pump, we are willing to pay for it. Oil companies have us over the barrel, and they know it.

checkout coupon printer

I haven’t been feeling well today, and I suspect that this morning’s hike didn’t help that, either. So, after sitting in my miserably hot house all evening, I decided to take action and get some ice cream and juice from the store. I also picked up a box of candied ginger to help settle my … Continue reading “checkout coupon printer”

I haven’t been feeling well today, and I suspect that this morning’s hike didn’t help that, either. So, after sitting in my miserably hot house all evening, I decided to take action and get some ice cream and juice from the store. I also picked up a box of candied ginger to help settle my stomach a bit. Apparently, this combination of purchases equated to a need for a coupon for maxi pads, or at least that’s what the algorithm in the checkout coupon printer’s computer concluded. If I had written the program, I would have had it print out a coupon for cold medicine or throat drops.

Maybe it’s because the orange sherbet I bought has dark chocolate chips?

library overnight

Need a library collection fast? For about $7600 + shipping, you can get the 1,082 title Penguin Classics Complete Library from Amazon.com tomorrow. The books are paperback and likely not made to withstand the test of time, but to impress your friends with your collection or for getting a new library set up, it’s not … Continue reading “library overnight”

Need a library collection fast? For about $7600 + shipping, you can get the 1,082 title Penguin Classics Complete Library from Amazon.com tomorrow. The books are paperback and likely not made to withstand the test of time, but to impress your friends with your collection or for getting a new library set up, it’s not a bad deal. [thanks aaman]

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