Somerset International conference for librarians and teachers 2010

Andrew J Stark, Head of library services and conference director for Somerset College writes an overview of the 2010 Somerset internatioanl conference for librarians and teachers, held recently on Queensland's Gold Coast.

The conference was, again, a tremendously successful two day event with activities and presentation on both days receiving extremely positive feedback. With Somerset International Conference being the academic precursor to the Somerset College Celebration of Literature Writers' Festival, it made March 15 - 19 a truly literary experience for everyone involved.

Conference Monday brought together 7 international recognised presentations who provided an inspirational insight into their areas of expertise. While all quite different in their areas of speciality, each presenter's paper resulted in delegates receiving a highly informative and global exploration of issues related to literacy, literature, research and the role of libraries in the 21st century. All presenters complemented the 2010 conference theme Reading Locally, Learning Globally: creating a universal experience and highlighted to those in attendance the need to understand the gloval implications of our profession, but no at the expense of local knowledge and resources.

Workshop Tuesday exceeded all expectation with the event being completed booked out. These informal sessions reflected the conference theme exceptionally well and I offer sincere thanks to all involved. Clearly, there is a real need for such workshops and networking opportunities being made available for librarians and teachers.

For your interest and reference, the conference presenters' papers are available for you to read online. I would like to extend to you an invitation to refer to these professionally challenging documents, to share their ideas with your colleagues and to consider and reflect upon teh issues raised by these experts in their fields.

Andrew J Stark
Head of Library services and conference director
Somerset College

Webstock 2010 conference

Ben Yuan, web publisher from digital publishing team attended the "Webstock 2010" conference at the Town Hall, Wellington 18-19 February 2010.

Webstock is a premier web conference in NZ. In 2010, this two-day conference featured 24 internationally recognised key speakers. Topics were across today's web industry, focusing on web design, mobile application, web usability and open data. Attendees included web developers, user interface (UI) designers, user experience (UX) experts and project managers. Each presentation was about 40 minutes.

A number of presentation were worthwhile and beneficial undertaking for me. The following highlights a few:


Web design that grabs people - Scott Thomas
The first day started with Scott Thomas, Design Director of Obama Presidential campaign 2008. He emphasised the importance of simplified design to improve user experience and showcased the methodology for building website informaiton structure based on mission's architecture. Scott talked about creating designs that deliver clear and consistent messaging and elements between web and print channels. After Obama's success, Newsweek said "Obama is the first presendential candidate to be marketed like a high-end consumer brand"


Brian does the Andrew Sisters - Brian Fling
Brian Fling, mobile design expert, talked about mobile web development. The presentaiton gave some useful indications of the future web applicaiton on mobile devices. Brian listed that 56% generation Y (people born 1976 to 2000) own iPOD in US and mobile is atrillion dollar industry which equals the grocery industry. His talk also painted a bright picture for mobile web applications that looik great on iPhone/iPod and other devices. Follow Brian Fling on Twitter.


Security-centered design: exploring the impact of human behaviour
Chris Shiflett, a founding member of Analog, gave a fresh view of creating secure online user experience. IN this presentation, security was not just referring ot programming security, it's really about to understand how people think, so the production won't let people feel unsafe. Chris showed some real world examples to demonstrate meeting expectations is a fundamental of good security. Also this is an interesting example to show off the social media security issues. Follow Chris Shiflett on Twitter or take a look at his blog.


Continuous refinement and data driven dynamic personas - Sebastian Chan
Sebastian Chan, the head of digital at the Powerhouse Museum, presented how Poerhouse Museum tweaked content production on the fly based on web analytics and custom metrics. This presentation is my personal favourite and a number of tips could be applied to ACL website. Seb walked through a real cultural website and demonstrated how Google Analytics data was used to identify main target audience. The segmentation of visitors data then became the driver to continuous refine the content of the website. Follow Sebastian Chan on Twitter or follow his Powerhouse Museum blog.

More information about the conference is on the official website

Amazingly, instead of showing email contacts at the end of their presentation, all key speakers are having Twitter accounts. So, we can see how widely social media is being used in today's life.

Marketing Management (offered by University of Auckland – Short Courses)

Greg Morgan, service planning & enhancement management manager attended a short course at University of Auckland on Marketing Management.

Steve Bridges is something of a NZ marketing practice guru. That said, he is an American who has had considerable experience as an academic as well as generalist marketing consultant. Steve migrated to teach the first university marketing course in this country in the early 1970s (at Victoria) and was for a time professor of marketing at Massey University. This two day course aims to give participants an overview of sound principles and practice that would normally take about 70 hours of teaching and learning time.

The course objectives were:

• to learn or refresh the basic principles of marketing
• to enable us to critique our own organisation's approach to marketing

For me this was a very timely course given the customer-centric model adopted by Auckland City Libraries and eLGAR libraries taking the step to walk in our customers' shoes - in fact, exactly that language kept popping up in the course of discussion. Working from textbook theory and a wealth of real world case studies, Steve first got us to think about "pseudo marketing". That is the kind of production, product or sales orientated activity which, because it is so visible, can sometimes seem to be all that marketing is about.

Real marketing, however is the down to earth business of identifying and satisfying customers' needs and wants at a profit. In a library context better language might be, solving customers' problems "profitablity". It follows that true marketing is a consumer-customer or client-centric activity.

And it is a philosophy. Ghandi:
"The customer is the most important visitior on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. She is not an interruption to our work - but the purpose of it"

We explored case studies of how (negatively) organisations sometimes copy the form but not the substance of marketing and when (postively) the marketing manager acts internally as both consumer's advocate and integrator. Advice is absolutely to seat the small stuff, to invest in client-friendly practises and to treat staff too as customers.

The course looked at the component parts of a maketing plan, and this section was full of illumination. I really enjoyed working through hypothetical cases:

• trying to picture distinct customer segments
• creating a hypothesis for each (what is the particular problem they'd loved solved? teh benefit they would like?)
• thinking about appropriate marketing mix of products and/or services to deliver a solution of new customer benefit.

Customer-centric thinking leads us to understand that people are seeking benefits or solutions to problems, not products or services as such. It was interesting to reflect upon the reality that the golden rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you is not necessarily a customer-centric philosophy...How good in practice are various kinds of organisation at market segmentation (understanding different customer groups) rather than the aggregation approach of one service for all? How knowledgeably can we differentiate our customer base by geography, demographics, psychographics factors (eg lifestyle, personality) and demonstrated behavious?

Do we understand customer behaviour? Do people's apparently rational answers to surveys really connect with the true feelings and emotions? Do we assume that humans are happy decision makers? The reverse is true - we don't like making decisions and avoid or subvert them. How do customers make choices? How can we in the way we relate to customers reduce or eliminate the anxiety they feel around deciding whether to use our services?

Negative customer feedback is especially valuable to the development of relationships that build detractors who care into loyal customer-advocates. In taking a quick look at market research we reviewed the pros and cons of tools such as focus group interviews, telephone surveys, mail surveys, door to door and web based surveying. We thought about how to make research pertinent, ethical and cost effective.

The course rounded off with sections on branding, marketing communications and social media. Each session was relevant to library service, and to an organisation which has for a long time put resource into understanding the library related preferences of users as well as non users.

Superbly presented and accompanied by carefully selected references to further reading and online resources, this course was just right for me at this time. It gave me a lot to think about in terms of my current role. Further more, it left me confident that I actually know a bit more about marketing approaches than I might have thought. After all, as customers we are epxerts of our own experience.