David Lee King

social media | emerging trends | libraries

Personal Experimentation: Two Wins, One Fail

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One way I keep up with emerging trends is to actually try things out when I hear about them. Sometimes, that means creating an account in a new service. Sometimes it might mean buying something (an Amazon Echo is on my wish list).

Here are 3 things I’ve been experimenting with recently:

Instagram Business Profile: I wanted to learn more about Instagram’s Business Profiles, so I switched my personal Instagram account to a Business account. So now I can get analytics and create ads (which I probably won’t mess with). I’m doing it to learn more about analytics, and what types of videos and images resonate with people.

Quora’s Partner Program: Are you familiar with Quora? It’s a service where you can ask and answer questions. I’ve had an account for awhile, but haven’t really done much with it.

Recently, I answered a couple of music-related questions, and people liked one of my answers. I think because of that, I was invited to Quora’s Partner Program. Did you know you can get paid to ask good questions? I’ve made a whopping $1.05 so far … so maybe I don’t ask great questions. But still …it’s a very  interesting tool to learn about, and certainly has some ramifications for libraries!

Dock.io: So I have a Dock.io account. Dock.io seems to be an online contact list created with Blockchain technology. I wanted to find out how it worked, so I signed up when someone invited me.

I chose to connect my contact list … and ended up bombarding all of my Gmail and Facebook contacts with emails, asking them to get a Dock.io account. Even people like my parents and older people I go to church with. They’re actually asking me if they need to join it. And it didn’t just do it once or twice – it sent those emails every week. Yikes!

I finally figured out how to turn that off (and there’s apparently other people sorta ticked about that email spammy thing, too). Lesson learned.

Ok … 3 experiments. Two wins, one fail. Really, 3 wins because I learned something with each experiment. That’s one way I learn about emerging trends – learning by playing.

If you don’t normally experiment with new things, I suggest stepping outside of your comfort zone and trying something out – maybe just one thing you’ve heard about. See what it does, how it works. Think about how it might work for your library.

And yes, I’ll  forgive you if you end up spamming me 🙂

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Experimenting vs Not Doing

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me, experimenting

Recently, I’ve been working on a video project (a not-for-work video project). And it’s been fun. And a little irritating at times, too.

Irritating? Why?

Glad you asked! Because lighting has been a struggle, among other things. I’m creating these videos in my basement, and started out using some umbrella lights and my trusty Sanyo Xacti HD1A video camera.

And in the process, I’ve discovered that I have A LOT to learn about lighting. And sound. And scripting (because I generally have a hard time winging it). And because my trusty Sanyo Xacti video camera has started to act up (whack! There, it’s fixed).

But guess what? Instead of giving up, I decided to experiment a bit and improve my skills. The pic accompanying this post is just that – it’s me in action, playing with a new backdrop and a couple of new lights, and figuring out how to use the white balance on my video camera (as in hey, what’s this thing do?).

My point?

I’ve discovered that a little experimentation goes a long way to improving what I saw as problems. Color problems? Fixed. Weird lighting problems? Getting better. Audio irritations? I fixed those, too. Camera problems? (Whack, whack! Fixed again – ok, more improvements needed there, I think).

These days, most of us are NOT experts. Sometimes, we have to wing it. And we have choices when presented with one of those “oh-shoot-I’m-no-expert” projects:

  1. Don’t do it. You can always say “I can’t do that – I’m no expert.” boo, hiss.
  2. Do it, but don’t learn from the experience. marginally better than boo, hiss.
  3. Do it, learn from the experience, and improve it next time. Yay!

Want to improve something? You HAVE to start. You HAVE to keep on doing it, purposefully experimenting during the process, and learning from those experiences. Simple to say, much harder to do.

That’s all for now (whack. whack, whack, whack. Whew!).