$98 for ALA membership?
ALA wants from me to renew my membership. Is it worth a hundred bucks for librarians doing social media marketing? How much value does ALA provide to someone like me?
First let me say that the byzantine network of pages that is ALA Connect, ALA mailing lists, the ACRL portal, etc. makes it hard to know just how much support ALA actually provides for new media marketing.
The Marketing @ Your Library er…subject guide?…seems to be the primary list of resources they curate. The @ your library toolkit there is from 2007 and doesn’t mention social media at al. I’m going to assume the Word .docs from 2003 on strategic marketing also aren’t going to be helpful on that front. :
I searched the fledgling ACRL Marketing Discussion Group for “social media” and “Facebook” and “Twitter” and got no results.
There are 753 subscribers to the ALA ACRL Campaign Libraries for PR mailing list. I just joined the list while researching for this post, so I can’t say how much discussion there is happening about social media, but looking through the 2012 archives, there have been no emails with “social media” in the subject line.
Am I missing something? Cause from this brief exploration, I’ma gonna go ahead and say: ALA membership is not worth $98 for academic library social media marketers.
