Bite‐sized Marketing: Realistic Solutions for the Overworked Librarian

This book has been written by three American authors with a considerable range of marketing experience, encompassing both public and academic libraries and offering a range of specialisations. The book sets the tone from the outset with a pleasantly short introduction of less than half a page, which is there to encourage as much as to outline the book's purpose; to stop the idea of marketing becoming overwhelming and to provide practical help to “integrate marketing into every day”. To this end the book presents ten concise and practical chapters that are subdivided into bulleted subsections and contain numerous summaries, checklists, tips and calls to action.

The chapters are:

1. 1.

   “Word‐of‐mouth marketing”;

2. 2.

   “Bring your library to life with a story”;

3. 3.

   “How to market electronic resources”;

4. 4.

   “Public relations 101”;

5. 5.

   “Outreach”;

6. 6.

   “Advocacy”;

7. 7.

   “The new marketing tools”;

8. 8.

   “Design”;

9. 9.

   “Branding”; and

10. 10.

    “Marketing best practice”.

Chapter 1 set to work immediately by tackling the topic of word‐of‐mouth marketing, which has the advantage of pulling together numerous key threads, some of which are explored later in the book. This section is wide‐ ranging covering such areas as customers' needs and perceptions, how to find and engage with the influencers, how to communicate, build trust and hold a conversation. It even manages to include: viral marketing, web 2.0 and niche marketing and includes a sample questionnaire and various real‐life examples and checklists.

Coverage is uneven with certain topics given much more coverage than others. The public relations chapter goes into a great deal of detail on exploiting the media, with considerable attention given to drafting a press release and on public service announcements. In these areas of content the US public library bias is a little more evident.

The use of web 2.0 tools for marketing has become a hot topic and is covered fairly well in the section “New marketing tools”. The greatest coverage is given to blogging and the advice is practical, ensuring that you never loose sight of your main aim: “helping your organization fulfil it missions and goals” (p. 63). The section also looks at: texting, tagging, video, YouTube, Facebook and podcasting. An unnecessary amount of detail is given to choosing the right microphone and achieving the best recording however, and I feel this technical detail would have been better presented in an appendix. The same is true of the section on design, which offers a mix of good practical dos and don'ts such as: don't use Clipart – do use Flickr, yet went into rather too much detail on understanding picture resolution and printer quality.

E‐resources have an important presence in many libraries and the chapter offers succinct and practical guidance on getting the customer to connect with these resources. Although this section does not cover this topic in the detail that an academic librarian might appreciate, much of the advice given holds true.

American librarians have led the way in library marketing and the book includes links to US sources of information and examples of good practice and only occasionally does the US bias seem incongruous. The chapters are subdivided into “bite‐sized” subsections with many bulleted lists and quotations and real‐life examples highlighted in shaded boxes. This layout makes the book appealing to read and easy to dip into and a useful index is provided. I would say it achieves its aim of providing a librarian who is not a marketing expert with practical advice and pitfalls to avoid and it does so in a manner that is attractive and easy to digest.