http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/05/which_users_lif.html
Who in your company gets the emails/stories from your users? Too often the good stories are routed to PR/Marketing (the success stories that make for good testimonials) while the rest of us (programmers, customer service, etc.) get all the complaint emails. Yes, we like hearing about how great our product is, especially when we did the work. But it’s the stories about how the company/product/service/cause has changed someone’s life–that matter to those of us doing the actual work. And sometimes the way a user’s life is changed is not at all what we’d expect. Let me tell you a story about how an employee of one company changed the life of a user in a most surprising way…
Who in your library gets the email/stories from your users? What do you do with them? What do you do with stories that relate how the library changed someone’s life? What do you do to even collect these stories? Do you mine blog comments for content that may help the library?
I’m reminded of Durrance and Fisher How Libraries and Librarians Help and their focus on telling the library’s story and how that might be more effective and, I’ll add, human, than relying on statistics and ratings!
Here’s a tip: just because it may come to the library in an e-mail doesn’t mean it should be coming in to IT or the Web developer’s computer!