At the end of April, I had the pleasure of speaking at the State Library of South Carolina’s PR Exchange, April 26, 2019 in Columbia. My keynote was about community and customer engagement, a topic that is of interest to many libraries.
Too often, when we talk about promoting libraries, the strategy resembles a megaphone. Tell as many people as you can as many things as you can about your library, all the time. True engagement is not a megaphone, it’s a two-way conversation, and though it requires more effort, it yields better results.
There are many benefits of moving from a promotion to an engagement strategy, including:
- Audiences go from hearing the message to helping to spread the message
- You get valuable feedback
- You learn what works and what doesn’t; enabling you to invest more time in activities that yield better results
I then went on to discuss three strategies to help increase engagement: branding, social media and media relationships. I walked through approaches and practical tips for each strategy.
Some of these tips, plus my overall approach to engagement, can be found in my article Amplify Your Impact: Moving from a Promotion Strategy to an Engagement Strategy . If you would like me to speak at your event or conference about this topic, please contact me here.
