| Abstract: | SUMMARY Libraries' information consumer market share continues to freefall despite the opportunities that have emerged with the arrival of the Information Age. We've built digital libraries, offering access to immense digital collections of quality resources, and online service desks staffed by skilled experts, but 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://www.slashdot.org>, is the key to increasing traffic to licensed digital library resources. Face-to-face and electronically mediated WOM marketing can turn back the tide of falling market share, and regain lost positioning, in the communities a library serves. |
