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Which social network should I use as a librarian? - 0 views

www.philb.com/...whichsocialnetwork2.htm

social network librarian

shared by anonymous on 24 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Which social network should I use as a librarian?
  • I've already hinted at this, but it's time to be more specific. My online contacts are now the way in which I get my information. They (or probably you) are constantly sending me a stream of useful stuff, which is personalized to my interests, based on my choices of who to follow, and who to pay attention to. So this isn't 'social' in the way that we're used to thinking of it, it's a hugely influential stream of data. If I follow you, you influence me, and if you follow me, I'm influencing you. It may be simply because the tweets or links are funny or interesting, or they match my personal interests.
  • The amount of data that's flooding out is truly daunting, and if I didn't have a social network - or rather, several of them, I simply wouldn't be able to cope. My filters are no longer based on the magazines that I read, or the evening news, they're based on the people that I follow. Now, this is really important I think, because what it does is links me into particular communities. The data I am served is important, but the community is increasingly valuable.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • My RSS feeds are similarly hugely important to me. My feeds and the information there, drawn from blogs, searches, profile pages and the like are not there for me to read every single one - that way would lie insanity. They are there to alert me to news that I'm likely to find important. Any one of those blogs or posts or tweets are saying 'this is happening, go check it out' with the important link. I don't need to read everything that each of my contacts has said (although sometimes I do, if I want lots of different views and opinions), because they're all pointing me to the source, and I can go off there and read what I need.
  • By using social media it's much easier to get the information that you need quickly and effectively by asking a question in the right format. I couldn't remember who wrote the piece which I've now attributed to Woodsiegirl, but I had the answer within seconds from several different sources by tweeting the question.
  • This is why - as librarians - we need to be involved in as many social networks as we possibly can. By doing this we're absolutely doing our professional job - we're helping to create and maintain communities - and it doesn't matter if that's a workplace community, a community based on geography or one that's based on specific content. We have to consider how to curate data within this social media environment, and I'll look at that in more detail later. Secondly, we're acting as authority filters. I know that when I get a tweet about a subject it's going to be good quality. I don't have the same trust with something like Google, or pretty much any other search engine. There are exceptions to this rule, since search engines are beginning to inject Facebook data into the SERPs, but in general, I'll trust people a lot more than I'll trust a computer. And - when it comes down to it, I'm going to trust a librarian more than just about anyone else.
  • The point however is that often we don't know we're in specific groups, but we can nonetheless play very important roles. Just because you don't think you're important doesn't actually mean that you're not. I really want to push this point once more before moving on. In my experience librarians do not often think they are that important, and they don't value their skills as highly as they should. Please do consider the value that you can give to others within your social networks - even when you're doubtful that you do give value!
  • The more that librarians do - NOW - with social media, the more that we're going to already be embedded into the social medium. The more contacts, friends, links, tweets, photographs, likes, +1's that we have, the more influential we can become. The more influential we are, the more people will link to what we're doing, the more we'll be working in networks of influence and the more useful we can be to people."
  • This can all be neatly summarized with the phrase that I use all the time 'go to where the conversations are'. We all know that users of library services are physically using them less, so we need to really utilise social to keep in contact with them. But it's more than that. We need to show them - by using social media how valuable contact with us can be. The more value we can provide, the more likely our work is going to filter up and down the information chain. People are increasingly taking the view that if news is important, it will find them. For many people - particularly younger users, 'checking the news' means looking on Facebook because for them, the 'news' is what they see, read have shared with them, and share with others. Similiarly, I share my information via Facebook, Twitter, Google+, my blog, LinkedIn and so on. It doesn't just get posted onto my site. We can't do that any longer. At the end of this article I've put up a quick poll - I'm really interested to see how YOU found this article. It's one question, and will take about 5 seconds to answer.
  • This new way of providing content and added value is not going to sit happily with traditional users of media - even if they think that they have made the leap into the internet. The traditional CEO, publishers of books, magazines and other print material, traditional authors, advertisers, press and publicity directors are not going to flourish. If we, as librarians think that we've got it bad, it's as nothing in comparison to those folks.
  • The main difference is that we know we have to change and adapt or we'll die.
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