social media | emerging trends | libraries
On Tuesday, I gave a Designing the Digital Experience presentation at Nassau Library System in New York. It was a fun time – lots of good questions and discussion!
So … here are the slides from that talk. Enjoy!
Kansas librarians, pay attention! You might be interested in 23 Things Kansas, a 23 Things program for our state.
What is a 23 Things program? From the 23 Things Kansas website, it’s “a fun way to learn about and practice with online tools for community, sharing and productivity.”
And it’s a pretty cool thing – for January-April, you learn about many emerging web-based tools – some familiar, some not quite so familiar. Each week focuses on one thing – for example, the week I’m facilitating is all about web-based video. So that week, we will play with sites like YouTube and Vimeo, search for videos in video search engines, and some of us will even create videos and upload them to the web. And then some.
Want to find out more? Go visit the website … and don’t forget to register!
Last summer while at ALA’s annual conference in the Chicago area, a couple friends and I were eating lunch at the Corner Bakery Cafe and saw this ad on one of the tables.
The interesting thing about the ad wasn’t so much the content itself (though I’m sure it’s good stuff). We got all geeked out over the URL associated with the ad. Why? Because they didn’t point to their website.
Instead, they pointed directly to their Facebook Page.
Think about that for a sec, because there are some pretty large implications for library web services. I know that many of us have worked for years to centralize all our websites, tools, and services into one place – preferably at www.mylibrarysnamegoeshere.org …. some of us have worked hard to get federated search tools to work on that library website, and have even integrated some of our library catalog content into our websites, as well.
But people aren’t visiting our websites (well, not in droves, anyway). They are going to other places, like Facebook (and YouTube, and Google, and …). And of course we should be active in some of those social sites. But what about pointing directly to those social sites … in an ad? That’s taking it one step further, isn’t it? Pointing directly AWAY from our website … to some social tool like Facebook?
This could work for libraries. If you have a Facebook Page, check out your Page demographics (Facebook provides some basic stats on Facebook Page visitors). Who’s your main audience in Facebook? Doing anything for that group of patrons already?
If so, you might think of taking it one step further, and pointing them directly to the Facebook Page. Why?
But even better – for us sneaky librarians, it’s also a direct connection to a segment of our customers. But not just any customers – these customers already use Facebook and actually LIKE to interact. If they have become a fan of your library, that means they like to interact – with the library.
So don’t be shy! Spread out your nets – decentralize those web services. Send out status updates. Ask questions. Start discussions. Get feedback about new services. And in the process, have fun interacting with a group that actually WANTS to interact.
Remember my post from last summer about comments at my library’s website? Here’s a follow-up post to that earlier discussion.
Because of all those comments (some of which were mean, snarky and personal), we needed a good, fair, “official” way to deal with them. So I started poking around other websites with commenting policies and guidelines, and came up with a library version of commenting guidelines.
I ended up adapting ours from NPR’s Community Discussion Rules. Want to see a whole bunch of these? Check out the Online Database of Social Media Policies – good stuff.
Our discussion guidelines are posted (via a link) beside the comment box on each page of our website. Here’s what it says:
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Community Discussion Guidelines:
Here are some guidelines to posting comments and content at Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library’s digital branch. The goal? To help you have fun!
We encourage comments:
Found this at Mashable – “Students at Purdue University are experimenting with a new application developed at the school called Hotseat that integrates Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging to help students “backchannel” during class.”
I’ve certainly seen some good uses of status updates during conferences, from discussions about a presenter’s content, to asking questions of other people in multiple committees during an ALA Annual conference, to … yes … planning for lunch with friends.
But this could be a pretty useful tool – from the simple “what did he say again” types of questions, to thinking “out loud” about content …
Cool project! It will be an interesting one to watch, to be sure.