Diving into storytelling and content creation with library and information students
Right now, I’m a subject coordinator for a social networking subject for library and information students. As always, I am focused on demonstrating the connections between the teaching materials and the workplace and finding ways to encourage the students to focus on building their own social networking skills — with a view to creating momentum in their new chosen career, rather than just tick the box by completing assessments. As a mature age student, I was definitely focused on getting the degree finished (whilst juggling small children, jobs and life) but managed to pay attention to building my networks and using multiple platforms to do so, which still creates opportunities for me.
Our final online class was focused on storytelling and content creation, with a small splash of “this is a great, transferable set of skills to have, so don’t hide, get out there and get curious on social media”! Here’s what we discussed.
Back to the beginning of time (or just the early 2000s)
When Apple released the original iPod, they could have used ‘the breakthrough technology for ultra-portability is a 5GB hard drive and FireWire’ BUT instead their slogan was 1,000 songs in your pocket. Gold. But how can libraries use these super snappy, direct slogan? How about . . .
10,000 free e-audiobooks in your pocket.
Your family history, for free, at your fingertips.
Your favourite reading chair is missing you, visit soon (with photo of super popular comfy chair in situ).
Tired of reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear? Let us do it at story-time!
Something everyone in the class was familiar with was mentioning free e-books being available at the local library, in a social situation and being met with incredulous cries of “what! you mean they are FREE and I’ve been paying for Audible for all this time????”. This is why we can’t just promote ‘the library’, it needs to be…
1 resource. 1 idea. 1 story.
The students have been working on a social media strategy as part of their course work, and I wanted to get across to them, the value of grabbing those little snippets of potential content as they happen, noting them down and using them.
One of the biggest challenges for many people in social media management, is finding the content. Libraries are FULL of potential funny stories, quirky moments, hot off the press books, curious manga readers, lovers of the comfy chairs by the windows, and picture book aficionados. So many nuggets of content!
Becoming the content whisperer/putting on their content glasses/building their content creation muscle — whatever you want to call it, develops the skills that go with this sort of work (editing, writing for different audiences, graphic design, photography, storytelling, customer service, user experience and more) and gives them great pieces of work to talk about in future job applications and interviews.
Of course there’s a list of useful resources
Canva.com — free online graphic design tool.
Quillbot — paraphrasing tool for rewriting content and messages.
The Noun Project — free icons and photos for everything.
Unsplash — free high resolution photos.
The Gender Spectrum Collection free non-binary and transgender stock photos.
Accessibility — Creating Content from Indiana University— camel case, Alt-text, inclusive language, closed captions and includes accessibility information for all major platforms.
4,000 plus free photos of people with a disability — free creative commons stock photos.
The Handy List of Human Words — A plain language word list for UX writing and help content to make your writing sound more human.
Use a content calendar or you’ll run out of steam
You’re going to need a content calendar. An online tool like Trello, OneNote or Planner, or a whiteboard with post-it notes . . . whatever works (stay flexible and start with something simple, then upgrade if you need to).
Planning and creating content in advance is 100% the BEST way to create content BUT it requires dedicated time to do it. (If social media has suddenly become part of your library role, ask, no, demand (!) at least 30 mins per day for ideas generation and content creation). Creating content on the fly isn’t sustainable and leads to inconsistent posting and you’ll get sick of the work pretty quickly!
If you have a regular team meeting, ask for 10 minutes on the agenda to ask for content ideas — here are three prompts for people in your team in case your agenda item is met with silence or an avalanche of ideas:
What has been borrowed a lot lately? What’s the most random/unusual question you’ve had this week/month? What’s something that we have in our collection that you really want someone to know about?
There are a billion articles out there about batch content creation. Find one that vibes with you and go for it. As always, Angela Hursh is my go-to for easy to follow, useful information on library marketing and content calendars.
To lurk or not to lurk
My final point was to use social media, either actively or passively — it’s about being familiar with the platforms, the lingo and the way one idea can be shared in multiple ways on various platforms. Either way you are gaining insights, developing your content radar, collecting knowledge and learning.
And another final point
I don’t work in libraries any more, but I still use all of these tools and concepts every day. Transferable skills!
