Tame The Web

Presentations that ROCK!

Presentations that ROCK!, originally uploaded by _Marianne.

Take a look:

http://mlxperience.blogspot.com/2010/03/presentations-that-rock.html

I really appreciate the points about telling your story and gathering support. The best presentations synthesize current thinking and discourse shared via passionate, unique story.

Social Media Best Practices for Libraries

This post was written by Kasia Grabowska for last semester’s LIS 768: Library 2.0 & Networking Technologies class. Kasia has allowed me to repost it here.

After doing brand monitoring research for the past few weeks, looking closely at Skokie Public Library (and not so closely at several other libraries), I decided to put together a list of “do’s and don’ts” for librarians on successfully utilizing social media.

This is what I learned from doing brand monitoring and what I personally would recommend to libraries that are getting started with social media.

Tip #1: Learn how to monitor your brand

Join the RIGHT conversations at the RIGHT time. In other words, stay on top of what people are saying about you and make sure to respond, to let people know that you are listening and willing to join the conversation.

Tools to utilize for brand monitoring include RSS feeds, Google Alerts, Technorati, and staying on top of your Twitter, Facebook and other social media accounts. This is definitely the number 1 lesson I learned from this assignment.

Tip #2: Learn from your brand community

You’re already engaging in conversations, why not ask people for some feedback? There are plenty of quick and easy ways to get good information that will help you keep learning from what you’re doing and improving the process as you go along. Just make sure not to overdo it; remember to always engage in conversations as a person.

Tip #3: Have a game plan

Set goals, measure and iterate your social media efforts in order to continue to grow and improve your efforts. Make sure everyone who is involved in your social media strategy clearly understands the role and goals of this initiative. There’s nothing worse than joining a social network with no purpose, plan or a way to measure what you’re doing.

By using trackable links (like bit.ly or su.pr) to help track what your users are responding to, you will be able to measure your efforts and make improvements.

Tip #4: Promote, promote, promote

I noticed a lot of libraries who do wonderful things on Facebook, Twitter or Flickr yet they don’t include links to their social networks on their websites. Or libraries that use Twitter often but don’t follow anyone; that’s not a good way to start a conversation.

A library website should be an entry point to social media; you need to create awareness. People should not have to search for you on Facebook, or Twitter, you should reach out to every member of your community first.

Tip #5: Allow open, yet governed access for your employees

This is where a social media policy comes in. By making sure everyone who is involved in your efforts understands what to do (what they’re allowed to say, how they should respond in different situations, etc) you won’t have to monitor what each person does. Instead, you will be able to focus on making improvements.

One tip about your social media policy — make sure it’s succinct and to the point, otherwise no one will want to read it.

Tip #6: Stay relevant and be helpful

Use social media to build trust, credibility and awareness in your community. Instead of broadcasting information, try creating conversations. Remember, speaking doesn’t always result in being heard.

Be helpful, stay relevant and focus on your community’s needs. It’s also important to humanize your efforts; don’t hide behind your library’s logo, allow your users to get to know you as a person.

Tip #7: Give your community room to grow

Focus on small, consistent and ongoing change. Let your members decide how they want to use “their” online community. Listen to what they have to say and change your goals and objectives based on how your community wants to utilize social media.

Tip #8: Remember, you’re not alone

By building relationships with key people within your community who also utilize social media you can leverage your efforts and obtain better reach. People who are influencers, those who are natural communicators or leaders in your community can help your social media efforts immensely. Identify these people and ask for help. Word of mouth can be very powerful.

Tip #9: Go where your users are

Remember, you don’t have to be an early adopter. It is much better to wait for your community to start utilizing the technology before adding it to your social media arsenal. In short, go where your users are. It’s much easier for someone to join you on Facebook or Twitter if the person actually uses the technology.

Tip #10: Lead change

This is important, especially for libraries that can be very resistant to change at times: if you want to lead change, find one thing you said no to in the past and give it a try.

This is actually something I heard at a digital marketing conference I got a chance to attend last month, but I think it applies great to libraries and social media.

Kasia Grabowska is currently working on her MLIS at Dominican University. She is a website manager for Train Signal, Inc and the editor in cheif of www.trainsignaltraining.com a blog focusing on IT training and certification.

Online Education & Blogging

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/online_education_and_blogging

Joshua Kim writes:

The best preparation I received for blogging was teaching online. One of the most important elements for running a successful online course involves presence. The instructor must be “present” in the course discussion boards and blogs. Teaching online gave me tons of practice in writing rapid, hopefully thought provoking, discussion and blog posts around the curriculum and the student’s work. Much has been written about how teaching online can improve on-ground teaching. I’d add comfort with blogging to the benefits online learning.

Is the ability to quickly produce prose that (at least sometimes) may interest a reader the sort of skill that we want to cultivate in our students? The importance of rapid, persuasive writing is growing as blogs and other social media displace other forms of communication. We all need to learn to make our case, to persuade, to make arguments based on evidence – and to do so in a limited attention economy. For all of us, both writes and readers, time is our scarcest commodity.

Perhaps participating in online courses provides students the same practice with rapid and persuasive writing as teaching an online course. The same behaviors that make for a good online instructor, namely the willingness to be active and engaged with the asynchronous communication tools, are also those behaviors of a successful online student. An online course is all about collaboration and interaction. The best students post persuasively, briefly, and often.

I would venture to say the best preparation I received for online teaching is blogging! Quick posts sharing links and commentary – something bibliobloggers have long been doing – translate perfectly to the way I interact with my online and hybrid classes. I also think the blogging activities have helped my students with their writing – just afeeling, no evidence yet, but it might be a good thing to study.

Future of Publishing

Lots of link and tweet love for this already but its cleverness is spot on. Watch the whole thing.

The Library Tweets

The Library Tweets, originally uploaded by mstephens7.

Nice display at the State & University Library of Hamburg. Photo by Markus Trapp.

Thanks Bibliothekskongress!

day 3.15: @mstephens7 auf dem bibliothekskongress #bibtag10, originally uploaded by fabi_k.

I was honored to participate in the opening day of the Leipziger Kongress für Information und Bibliothek. Thanks to all who attended!

Here are the slides:

Hyperlinked Library – Kongress

View more presentations from Michael Stephens.

Shhhh...It's the Library...

Via John Schumacher on Twitter comers this opinion piece from Oregon Live:

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2010/03/shhh_its_a_library_not_the_cor.html

Ellen Hansen writes about her love of quiet and the lack of it in her library: (emphasis is mine)

No, my full wrath is reserved for library-quiet abusers. When did the library turn into the local coffee shop? One man comes into our library and sets up as if it’s his own, private office space. That’s fine, if you’re reading, writing or even typing on your computer nonstop. But his work entails talking on the phone nonstop, for hours on end.

Others conduct education tutorials or hours-long business collaborations or gadget-comparing conferences at nearby tables. Even if not full-throated, the constant drone of nonstop voices rubs nerves raw.

Another fellow comes in, sits down at the table behind me, pins his ears back and tucks into a tub of cottage cheese, smacking his way through a tall can of pineapple slices as a side dish. He then slurps a half-gallon of orange juice to complete the performance. As choral accompaniment in this flu season, a symphony of sniffs and snorts, coughs and throat-clearings chimes in all around me.

A teacher walks through giving a gaggle of fifth-graders a library tour in full recess-volume voice … two friends carry on an excited and loud conversation in the stacks about a favorite author’s recent tome … a grandfatherly fellow peruses magazines and shouts into his cell phone, “Where are you now? Still in the fiction section? No, I’m over in magazines.”

In fact, the periodicals section is often the loudest section of the library, despite two prominently displayed signs which read: “Quiet Reading Area, No [picture of a cell phone].” One woman plops herself down daily on one of the upholstered chairs, chattering away into her cell phone. When a fellow library patron finally points to the sign not 10 feet from the chatterbox’s head, the woman nods, and keeps on talking.

Maybe it’s my jetlag today, but it concerns me that Hansen has monitored these behaviors for “hours on end” to list out the offenses library patrons commit. No shushing librarians come to her rescue during these hours. I wonder what another patron might say about all the activity? That the library feels “alive?”

I hope a representative of her library responds with some thoughts about library use. I wonder if the building is of such size that mixing a quiet area and more general use spaces is difficult. Maybe the library is in transition now. Any readers have the rest of the story?

Take a look at the full piece and the comments. I’ll be sharing this with my Intro to LIS class – maybe an exercise where we write a response.

Using Social Media to Connect with Teens

It’s easy for any library to have a social media presence these days. Translating that into success with serving a teen population? Well, that’s another thing…

Be Yourself

The discussion of personal and professional profiles always comes up. I didn’t want to have two profiles (done it before, hated it) so I had to make a decision: add teens to my own accounts or hide myself far, far away. I went with what some may consider to be the unpopular route. I added them to my own accounts. I feel like it has made a world of difference.

I am happy to share the real Justin with the teens that I serve. I have nothing bad to hide and all good to share. Letting them in on my “personal” life has actually allowed me to establish a deeper connection with them. For example, when one teen found that him and I shared an interest in The Mars Volta, he came running in the library one day in disbelief. He was excited that I was into the same music as him. He now comes in a few times each week and we spend a good fifteen minutes or so talking about music.

This is just one of countless examples of how opening up my personal social networking accounts to teens has made it easier for me to connect with them and provide them with quality service. In the end, it makes you more of a real person to them. They become your friend and they trust you. The upside to this? They’re using the library…and they love it.

Stay Active

There’s nothing that looks sadder than an abandoned profile. If you’re going to have a public account, make sure you update it with the most relevant information. Don’t just create the profile and let it fester and rot away. An up to date profile will show your public that you care about connecting with them. One of the golden rules I try to always stick to is replying to comments or posts. Even if it is a simple hello or a comment on a link, say something back! Conversation and interaction is one of the reasons why we’re all using social media.

Educate Them

Myspace is dead. It lost its appeal when showing off how (badly) one could customize their page with videos, gifs, and pictures won out over connecting and sharing with others. We can learn something from this.

Media 21 is a project created by Buffy Hamilton, a school librarian at Creekview High School in Canton, GA. The goal of the Media 21 Project is to “expand teens’ information literacy skills by introducing them tools for constructing a personal learning network and to posit research as a real world activity for learning, not an isolated unit of study.”

The idea behind Media 21 blows my mind. Taking a moment or two each day to educate the teens using my library about social media allows me to better serve them as a librarian. They understand that social media is a real and credible way to interact, share and create. It helps me be the best librarian I can be for them. I know what they want, and they know I’m always here to listen.

Buffy further adds: “I wanted to them to learn how to use social media tools for constructing and sharing knowledge as well as to start thinking about ways social media can be an authoritative source of knowledge”

Right on, sister.

You can read more about the Media 21 project here

Many thanks to School Librarian extraordinaire Buffy Hamilton for her quotes and guidance.

Give Stuff Away

I love what they’re doing over at the Darien Library with FourSquare. As a matter a fact, it got me thinking. With the tips feature, we’re able to create our own little mini scavenger hunts for teens. I learned just how excited teens get whyen it comes to scavenger hunts when I hosted an all night teen lock in at my library last year. The scavenger hunt was one of the biggest events of the night. By offering daily scavenger hunts with rewards, teens will have more reason to come into the library, check in, and complete the daily tip. You’ve got them inside the library and they’re actively participating in a library program. Win!

(On a related note, I highly suggest checking out this excellent post by David Lee King. “Personal Accounts, Work Accounts – What To Do?”)