Making Viral Advertising Easy

Jill Stover of Library Marketing – Thinking Outside the Book (a great source of library marketing ideas, by the way), wrote about a handy feature added to the Engineering Village 2 database. Once you’re in the database and viewing the abstract of an article, there’s a link to “blog this”. That link, when clicked, gives you a snippet of code to put into your weblog.
The code EV2 provides gives the title of the article and a graphic for EV2. Clicking on either will bring you through your library’s proxy server to the full text. (This example will work if you have access to Tufts University’s proxy server, but not for anyone else…):

Corrosion and fatigue characteristics of positively polarised Zeron 100 base and weld metal in synthetic seawater

Jill notes how useful this functionality is for librarians who want to highlight tools available to their patrons. I take this one step further: why not have a link to “blog this” appear on any relevant portion of the library site? From a change in hours to a new exhibit in the library lobby to other news, events, or information of note — make it easy for your patrons to link to the source of the information when they are blogging.

[Via Library Marketing-Thinking Outside the Book.]

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  4. Yahoo Pulls Plug on RSS Advertising Tool

5 thoughts on “Making Viral Advertising Easy”

  1. I would love to see something like what you propose, Ken! Word-of-mouth isn’t just about doing remarkable things, but giving patrons the tools they need to pass along information about great servcies to others. RSS/blogs offer some great marketing opportunities, so thanks for the work you do in pointing out ways we can apply this technology.

  3. Jill and Bill,
    This should not be difficult to do as a simple utility. A link from a web page that says “blog this”, a script somewhere else that generates the HTML code for a blogger to copy and paste. I’ll see if I can do a proof of concept tonight.
    Ken

  4. Introducing WOMBLINK — Word Of Mouth Blog LINK

    The discussion in the comments section of my most recent post prompted me to do a bit of coding. It struck me that libraries needed a tool to help encourage their patrons to blog about the library. And not just…

  5. I’m actually surprised more libraries don’t make use of viral advertising and marketing techniques. The information sciences lend themselves very well to this method of promotion.

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