These are challenging economic times. Users, funders and decision makers are asking tough questions about our products and services and we must be ready to respond with credible usage statistics. Speaking at Internet Librarian International 2010, Brian Kelly stated that we should wholeheartedly embrace this demand for transparency by being clear and open about usage and impact.
The difficulty of course is in identifying useful statistical sources that help us do this.
Speaking from his blogging experience Twitter now delivers over 50% of his ‘blog referrals'. Twitter is a vital tool for building traffic and enabling viral marketing for content. He also recommends that, to help us increase traffic and enable better measurement, we register our blogs on Technorati and Wikio. Both will provide useful (if not completely infallible) statistics. He also pointed out that the key benefit of using bit.ly is not necessarily the shortened URL, but the usage statistics that come with the service.
When it comes to marketing our services, how many of us fall into the trap of describing its features rather than its benefits?! Joy Palmer of Mimas, University of Manchester demonstrated how she and her colleagues managed to engage with their clients on a shoestring and discovered that users could identify the benefits of the services they provided better than anyone else! The importance of engaging with users to better understand impact was also stressed by Arno Janssen of Dutch dairy co-operative FrieslandCampina in the Netherlands. Ongoing user engagement helps you better understand the impact you have on them, and what obligations this may have to inform your service development.
The true benefits of Mimas to the users included ‘serendipitous discovery'; ‘feeling up to date'; ‘peer networking opportunities'; ‘feeling confident' and ‘saving time'. They did not perceive the size of collections for example as a benefit.
All these stories demonstrate why user engagement is critical to our success.