Making your voice heard

Excellent information from the New Jersey League of Municipalities on understanding the Public’s Role in the Legislative Committee Process. Topics include: Legislative Committee Structure, Committee Action, Public Participation, Providing Testimony and How Committees Work Within the Legislative Process. They even have a brochure you can print out. Go here.

Statewide search for dynamic people in library field begins…

Starting this coming Fall NJLA and the State Library are partnering to launch a new statewide marketing campaign called, “Solving Life’s Little Problems (and big ones too). This campaign will combine new marketing techniques with traditional mediums in an innovative word of mouth initiative that will engage communities, patrons, businesses, students and libraries in telling authentic stories about New Jersey libraries.

We are looking for dynamic people that will make this marketing campaign both effective and exciting for New Jersey libraries and our customers. All of our teams will provide great flexibility allowing for your work style, availability and even time restraints. Do you think of yourself as an editor, wordsmith, lyricist, singer, web page designer, storyteller, blogger or “Optimzer Prime”? Then have we got a job for you!

If any of the following descriptions appeal to you, please email Nancy Dowd at ndowd@njstatelib.org.

Editors
Are you the type that cringes when you see a word misspelled in the newspaper? Can’t stand misplaced commas? We need you too. We need editors to review posters, ads, web pages and articles before they are published. When documents are needed to be proofed a call will go out to the editing team and if you have the time, you can offer to proof. No stress, work as your schedule allows.

Wordsmiths- love to write or turn a phrase? There are many areas we need your talent!
Wordsmiths: Write ad copy
We are looking for two hip wordsmiths who can write short, fun and interesting ad copy and scripts. You’ll be taking different stories and rewriting them into short easy to digest ad copy.

Wordsmiths: Write 30 seconds PSA’s
The typical person who would do this job best would be creative with a dash of ADD. It takes about 80 words to make a 30 second PSA, really, that’s all it takes. We have found those who really love writing PSA’s tend to laugh at their own jokes and loathes having to use long descriptive phrases.

Wordsmiths : Write 30 second video scripts
We need people who can tell a story with a beginning, middle and end in 30 seconds. Maybe 1 minute if it’s really good. We’ll be gathering the stories of how libraries solve life’s little problems and we’ll need you to put it into a script for a video. Great way to work on a video project that will be produced.

Lyricists
Are you the type of person who loves to put new words to old songs? We need you on our team. We’ll be providing you music and will need you to create lyrics based on different stories. We’re looking for all kinds of songs but if you are known for making up funny songs, we really want you!

Singers
So you love to sing? Let us make you famous. Well, maybe not famous but certainly well loved! If you have the talent and desire, we can work out the details.

Web Page Designer
Bring your skills and show us what you’ve got. We need someone who is going to put together a webpage that rocks. The campaign we are creating is called, “Solving Life’s Little Problems” and we will need an interactive site that will have videos, polls, blogs and whatever we need to tell the stories of how libraries are solving life’s little problems. You’d be working in Dreamweaver.

Story Tellers
Do you know how to take a story and add life to it in front of an audience? We are looking for good orators who will help tell some fun stories about how libraries solve life’s little problems. It could be in mime, classic storytelling, or even as Improv. You might be appearing at a festival or a conference or even a library.

We are also looking for new avenues to share our stories so if appearing in person is a problem, we might be able to have some fun with videocasting as well. Share you talent and ideas and let’s come up with some new possibilities!

Bloggers
If you are already writing a blog about libraries, we need you too!

“Optimzer Prime”
Do you know the ins and outs of search engine optimization? Are you the person who thrives on figuring out why a search engine isn’t indexing a site? Have you been dying to work with Google Ad Words? We need you! You won’t have to attend meetings if you don’t want to – you can give your reports via telephone, or better yet web cast it to us.

We are looking to create a internet marketing campaign that will not only drive people to our web pages but will also use paid advertising on search engines and other sites. Without you, those search engines might crawl right by us.

Film Makers
Have you always wanted to create a 30 second video masterpiece? Think you could make a memorable commercial? Then this is the spot for you. We can provide the camera for you and if you want to travel to Trenton, we can even let you edit on a Mac! Ther are lots of opportunities to be creative! These pieces can be produced as a video or PowerPoint with voiceover.

News 12 My Town Pilot Program in Bergen County

News 12 My Town, an experimental pilot program on News 12 New Jersey’s website, has started with sites for the towns of Bergenfield and Fair Lawn. Anyone can post information and events to the site. This would be another outlet for posting library event information and even linking to the site. The one challenging aspect of the News 12 site, is that you will need to enter a Cablevision or Comcast account number to register and enter the first time. On their New Jersey page, the News 12 My Town tab is on the left of the screen. If this program proves popular, News 12 plans to establish a site for every town in NJ.

Since News 12 is looking to make this a statewide venue, why not take a look if you are a subscriber, and let us know what you think in the comment section and we’ll pass them on.

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Do you have any policies in place for using YouTube?

Just got a great question:
We have been embedding YouTube videos in our site for some time, and my management has recently become concerned about the possibility of exposure to offensive material. Even though we are embedding our own stuff, YouTube still sticks thumbnails of other “related” videos in there at the end of the video. I’m wondering if you know what libraries are generally doing about this, or if you have some sample policies or anything.”

Woud love your input on this one. If you have any policies in place or would like to share a suggestion that might be a good policy, please enter them in the comment sections. Thanks! -Nancy

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Free Bookmark Printing for your Library

Mariano Press, 14 Veronica Ave., Somerset, NJ, has offered to do free full color custom bookmarks for New Jersey libraries if they can put their contact information on them. Often, due to paper inefficiencies on the large press sheets they use, they have considerable blank space, which they will make into bookmarks. The paper will vary, but will be cover weight stock. Production time would be whenever there is extra space on a cover run, which usually happens at least once a week.

If interested, contact Jeremy Mariano at 732-247-6828, e-mail: jeremy@marianopress.com.

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Needed: Links to any videos you’ve made

I’m putting together my presentation for NJLA and need links to the videos you’ve made for you library so I can brag about you!

Along that line, I think we need a strong presence somewhere/somehow that shows the all the videos NJ libraries have and are creating - great for press and public. I’m thinking it would be cool to create a page and link off of the njlibriares.org page? Kind of how I listed them for the video contest. What do you think?

Any other ideas or pages you think would be good to use as a model?

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Looking for a way to market that teen program?

This video was made by a teen at Highland Public Library to promote upcoming Improv workshops. Very cool. If you want to figure out how to make a video for your library, NJLA’s IT section is sponsoring a session at NJLA Conference where I’ll be showing some neat library videos AND give you some easy to follow steps to make your own videos! NJLA Session: Libraries Gone Wild - 9 .a.m. - May 1.

Survey spurs marketing to implement better comunication tools

Thanks for taking the time to help us out with the NJSL marketing survey. What a great turnout- we had nearly 400 people respond. Wow!

We had an idea that there were some communication problems on our end, but boy did that survey say it LOUD AND CLEAR. So in answer to the question of how the marketing department did in our communication to the field about our campaigns … Not so good.

The good news is we are setting up a few communication tools that should start to solve the problem. This web page is one of those tools. We’ll be posting marketing news here on a continual basis. Don’t worry, we did listen to you when you said you wanted us to communicate via email and listservs. We are in the process of creating a marketing listserv that will allow us to email you directly when we post something here. We will also be posting a notice on the library listservs.

Oh and this is the Three Reasons PSA. Information Today awarded the full version the InfoTubey Award- we were one of five in the nation! We also adapted it into a 60 second video that is being shown on Public Access TV stations throughout NJ. (Thanks Michelle Reutty for putting us in touch with them.)

To post to your website go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUBZdlj4Ulo and
copy the “embed code” then paste to web site or blog. Easy, yes?

FREE OFFER TO PERSONALIZE THE VIDEO FOR YOUR LIBRARY
If you would like me to personalize the 60 second version with your library’s name and web site let me know. I will personalize videos for the first 50 people who email with a request. Email me at ndowd@njstatelib.org and put “Personalize a video for my library” in the subject line. I’ll post on YouTube and send you a Quicktime file!

Again- thanks for your input! -Nancy

Thanks Blue Ribbon Task Force!

The Blue Ribbon Task Force invited me to share some new trends in marketing at their meeting this morning. Great group! I can’t wait to hear the recommendations they are going to make to Norma. They are going to present their report at the State Library’s session at NJLA this April. Be the first to know!

Free materials to promote online resources

ProQuest has a complete marketing tool kit for academic and public libraries.