August 2007

The CBS Early Show aired a segment this morning called The Friendliest Skies. The star of the piece is a United Airline pilot, Captain Denny Flanagan, who takes it upon himself to bring customer service up to a whole new level. Here are the highlights:Flanagan...

• buys McDonald's hamburgers for passengers on delayed flights.
• takes pictures of pets stored in cargo to reassure passengers.
• makes sure children flying alone get window seats; calls their parents if there are unexpected delays.
• asks passengers to play in a contest in which they write down their best or worst flying experiences; he later posts them on United bulletin boards so that employees can learn about customers' experiences. (Contest winners, by the way, get a bottle of fine wine).
• writes personalized thank-you notes on the back of his business card for first-class passengers who are frequent fliers.

Flanagan insists it only takes a minute to provide these little extras that put the "service" back in customer service. Makes one think about what small surprises we can add to our own services to make them exceptional.

Over the weekend, I put up a post on the Designing Better Libraries blog called Playful Design. I'm sharing it with you on LM as well because the post's theme is highly relevant to librarian-marketers. In it, I outlined 12 learning principles discussed by James Paul Gee at the Gaming Learning and Libraries Symposium. These learning principles can be applied to library services to make them more enjoyable and widely-used. Play is a serious consideration as we develop meaningful patron experiences. Employing playful elements in our services can:

• Create a feeling of community; Bring together people of various backgrounds
• Engage and excite users by making them active participants
• Nurture word-of-mouth communications
• Increase the value of educational services by improving learning outcomes; Teach patrons how to effectively use our services
• Make using the library fun. :-)

Let's get game and play around with our services!

In case anyone's been wondering what happened to me, I did not fall off the earth! It just feels that way since I've been wrapped up in beginning of the school year craziness and starting my second-to-last Marketing class before completing my certificate - yeah! While it's been insanely busy, I've still been cooking up ideas for the blog and I think there are some exciting developments in the works.The next project I want to tackle is building on the concept of a community creativity lab as a model for library services. I got some fairly good responses to my previous post on the topic, so I decided to take the concept a bit further. I can't claim to be the first to come up with this general idea, and there's already a lot of outstanding work being done along these lines. However, I thought it was a little unfair to say that libraries should become creativity labs without giving any specifics as to how they could work in reality.So, in a series of posts, I'm going to tackle questions lik...