Tag Archives: facebook

Reflective statement for INF506

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This is the twelfth and final post in a series produced for studying purposes.

This reflective statement is meant to be a little more touchy-feely than the evaluative statement. However, I feel there is a need for a little background before I launch into it…

To say that I wasn’t prepared to go back to study would be an understatement. I had originally enrolled with my best mate and planned to study two units per semester to complete the four units I needed to do by the end of this year. I then realised I was horribly overcommitted and dropped one. The unit I kept should have been a walk in the park for me, someone that already works with social media.

Regardless, INF506 – Social Networking for Information Professionals – was a definitely a learning experience for me. I learnt that I poorly manage my own information streams. I follow too many people on Twitter, I have too many “friends” on Facebook and I probably have a Dunbar number for RunKeeper too.

Right, that’s enough of the flagellation…

I came in to this unit already knowing a thing or two about practical applications of social media. I came out knowing that I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew. Are you still with me?

First and foremost, I learnt a little bit about social media policy. I long thought that social media policies were a daft idea and all social media issues governed by existing IT and PR policies. To some degree, I still hold that opinion, but it’s been tempered by the realisation that sometimes a single, clear-cut policy to deal with a particular issue is better than having many different policies governing one thing.

Furthermore, I originally thought that policies should not be used in lieu of common sense. This has been replaced with an understanding for the need of policies to protect people, not just govern them. For example, it’s all well and good to delete a trolling post, but if that troll then continues to stir up trouble and scream about “freedom of speech” (which we do not have in Australia, anyway), it’s far easier to point to the policy rather than argue with them, which could be bad for business, or ignore them and let them continue their rant, which could also be bad for business.

I’ve decided to shed some of my conservatism when it comes to suggesting experimental technologies at work. I try to temper enthusiasm with a little bit of accountability – thinking of things like cost overheads and budgets. I think that comes from my previous study in computer science and desire to please IT managers. It used to be that IT was considered a cutting-edge field, but now IT departments are certainly extremely conservative.

Sod it! We should have a budget for experimentation. I’m going to try and argue for it. I might even write a business case. A business case to possibly throw money away? Ask me how it went in six months.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that we should be carelessly experimenting for the fear fun of it without having any sort of direction. Social technographics is something that I’d really like to learn more about. I’ve previously mentioned the copy of Groundswell sitting on my desk, I think I’ll actually make an effort to read it. I’ll even go so far as to ignore social media whiling I’m reading this book about social media.

So where does that leave me? A little wiser and little more courageous, I think.

A to Z of Social Networking for Libraries

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This is the sixth post in a series produced for studying purposes. If you’re still reading, I admire your tenacity.

The A to Z of Social Networking for Library is a list produced by AnnaLaura Brown. As a task for my Social Networking unit, I have to see how a library I am familiar with (I’ll use my workplace as an example) stacks up to five entries in the list.

A is for Active

I am one of five staff members that actively contributes to our Facebook page (is it not pretty?). We are each rostered on for one day each week to make sure that the page doesn’t go stagnant – we actively look for interesting things to post. We also stand ready to respond to any inquiries from our clients.

C is for Cookie

That’s good enough for me.

D is for Direction

Admittedly, our Facebook page is mostly an experiment. We just wanted to experiment with having an additional way to communicate with our clients. I suppose you could say our direction is to play with it for a year and then figure out what do to.

F is for Facebook

Well, all I’ve mentioned so far is our Facebook page. It’s the only social networking medium we’re using that is targeted at all of our users.

T is for Text-messaging

In the past, we looked at using text messaging for a variety of purposes, but ultimately decided against it for a simple reason: cost. It would simply cost too much money to communicate in a fashion that is easily replicated by online chat and Facebook.

Z is for Zeal

My little team of Facebookers are have plenty of zeal between them to support the entire Library, I feel. I’m very happy with what they’ve done so far – in only a few short months, we’ve amassed over 300 fans. At the moment we’re getting up to 10 new fans every day.

ASU and the Library Minute

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This is the fifth post in a series produced for studying purposes. They’re coming a little frantically at the moment because I’m not very good at time management.

Arizona State University has embraced social media in a big way. They produce videos for YouTube and Vimeo, upload photos to Flickr, post on Facebook and Twitter. The staff there are certainly not shy to dive in! How do they stack up to the 4 Cs of social media?

Collaboration

There doesn’t appear to be much collaboration going on. Perhaps internally, when they are producing their videos and such like, but certainly the vast majority of content is being created by the ASU Library itself.

Conversation

Looking at the Facebook and Twitter pages, most of the conversation seems to be pretty one-sided. The majority of posts are simply news blasts, with only a few being responses to other users.

Community

Between their Facebook and Twitter accounts, ASU has a community of 1,460 brave souls (at the time of writing), with about 90% of those being on Twitter and the remaining 10% on Facebook. I’m not sure how old the Facebook page is, but an audience of only 150 seems rather small for an organisation with a community of over 70,000 people.

Content creation

Well, ASU are certainly trigger-happy when it comes to making polished content. My favourite, so far, being the one that has a reference to one of my favourite movies of all time (bonus points if you know what I’m talking about).

Library RSS in action

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This is the second post in a series produced for studying purposes. Not quite what I post normally, but I imagine it will let you see a different side of me.

I’ve been a fan of RSS for quite some time. I’ve loaded up all of my news feeds into Google Reader and it’s the primary way that information is fed to me on the Internet. Although reports of the death of RSS at the hands of Twitter and Facebook are somewhat exaggerated, I’d like to think that I’m going to keep using Google Reader because I like to curate my own content. I do read links posted on Facebook and Twitter, but the vast majority of what I consume comes through Reader.

I have to admit, my use of RSS is quite vanilla. I load up a feed from a web site and leave it at that. So, for this post, I explored a couple of examples where the use of RSS is a little more dynamic.

The organisations formerly known as TAFE in Western Australia use a joint catalogue. That catalogue has a simple “New Books” function that lets you browse, well, new books (and, of course, new non-book resources). Once you’re looking at a particular list of new books, you can access an RSS feed that will deliver these books right to your browser.

How can this be handy to libraries to improve their services? Well, a “New books” feed would be great in letting people keep track of what their library has for them, without having to go into the library to visit the new books display. The RSS is also entirely automated, so Librarians won’t have to manually email out their new acquisitions.

Another nice use of RSS is a vanity feed. By using a service like Yahoo Pipes, you can grab a LOT of feeds and filter posts by keyword. This is particularly useful if you just want to find out what other people are saying about you or your organisation. Of course, you need a somewhat unique name to be able to pull this off – mine is an excellent example :-D

Vanity feeds can also be useful for libraries. Admittedly, this would mostly benefit larger libraries that actually do generate buzz on social media and/or websites. However, it could prove to be an invaluable source of feedback beyond the paper feedback form.