Referral Marketing Campaigns: 'Slashdotting' Digital Library Resources

Abstract

Word-of-Mouth referrals via face-to-face, telephone, email, blogs, and websites is how YouTube, FlickR, MySpace, BoingBoing and others became successful as measured by traffic to their sites. When was the last time you heard EBSCO, ProQuest, Elsevier, Kluwer, NetLibrary,eBrary, Books24X7, etc. in social situations? It doesn't happen, but it should. We’ve built digital libraries, offering access to immense digital collections of quality resources, and the crowds are not coming. Marketing missteps are largely to blame for the declining role of libraries in people’s lives. There is an awareness gap between the offering of digital libraries and the communities they serve. Word-of-mouth (WOM) or referral marketing, modeled on blogs like Slashdot http://slashdot.org/ is the key to increasing traffic to licensed digital library resources.