Member Resources

Sponsors

Wired West: Volume 12, no. 1

SLA Conference 2008 - Pre-Conference Report, Part 1

By Lena Kuzmina

The official numbers from SLA’s 2008 annual conference in Seattle are quite impressive: 5,011 total registrants, 1,681 exhibitor registrants, and 464 booths.
My report will cover the sessions that I attended and found valuable as well as some highlights of the conference.

Pre-conference sessions Creating a Brand Identity to Market Information Services

This was a Leadership Development Seminar presented by Liz Blankson-Hemans, Director, Information Professional Development, Thomson Scientific. The session covered the “what” and “why” of creating brand identity and offered tips for creating brand identity for an information center with minimal budget. If we think of branding our services, we should ask ourselves: “What is it that we can do that no one else can offer?” We have to define precisely two or three things that we can do extremely well, and this will be our branding. We learned that the ideal brand portfolio should not only efficiently cover company/department priority segments, but also ruthlessly prunes out those that do not fit. In case of info centres these are low-impact and low cost services. So, if we prune the areas that are not helping our cause and somebody else could do it, we can focus on our target marketing.

We learned that:

• the most effective and cheapest marketing strategy is to provide great services to customers.

• “brand” is how customers think and feel about what the business, product or services does. Also, proper branding generates a consistent emotion/belief and loyalty. Brand is that personal.

Marketing of an information center was also covered in the session. Key takeaways were marketing ideas and techniques as well as the basics of developing a strategic marketing plan.

We learned a marketing technique called elevator speech. It helps to define a target customer, deliverables, the benefits of service, and the desired outcome See ''How do you create an elevator speech?''

If we are consistent with our branding, then every interaction and communication with the customer becomes our marketing activity. Quantum2 has a wealth of Marketing Resources, such as Marketing Top 10, Marketing Plan and Marketing Plan Template.

Elena Kuzmina is Library Manager at Natural Resources Canada Library.

© All articles are copyright by the authors.