Social Intelligence

When I started this course I was a social media neophyte I used Facebook and have an account with WAYN which I check, but do not use to its’ full capability. Now I know that there is a tool for almost anything I want to do in the virtual realm and outside it. If a task would work better with collaboration, particularly, if the collaborators are computer savvy or at least comfortable with computers then social media may be the way to go. This software breaks down the barriers of time and space as well as helping those who are less confident with face to face collaboration to feel comfortable participating in planning processes.

I have participated in conference calls that could have benefited from the ability to send files, create real time diagrams and to do lists. A conference call with instant messaging and file transfer allows work that has been carried out between meetings to be shared and commented on in the course of the conversation. Decisions can be made more quickly as a result of file transfer and virtual clip board/wiki collaboration.

My list of social media tools is growing, but two of my favourite tools at the moment are my blog and wiki. I hope to get other people to participate in my wiki project soon. I love hearing back from people about something I have posted and knowing that what I shared has resonated with them. I love reading about other people’s perspectives on the world or finding the solution to a problem I have been struggling with in someone else’s post. Being in library is about being part of a larger conversation and sharing ideas, worries, concerns and innovations with others. Social media seems to be about the same thing.

As for the tool that I found least useful, I have not mastered Yahoo Pipes yet, however, I must admit to being somewhat distracted with other new online adventures lately. It is on my list of future challenges because I can see its’ usefulness for libraries in the coming years as well as being a useful tool for my own personal virtual exploration and explanation process. I have not tried other mash-up tools, but it looks like my next course may give me that opportunity while dealing with Google Earth and the world of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in Academic Libraries.

Mobile technology while interesting seems to require  people to have the right technology such as an iPhone so I have feeling that until more of the world converts to this type of technology the applications for libraries will be limited. I have yet to attain a mobile phone with all the right apps so I found some of the uses for mobile technology a little hard to relate to and some were down right spooky. Maybe part of my problem with this technology is that at this point I get charged heavily for much extra text messaging and the same for web surfing so the idea of using my phone for the majority of the suggested functions did not seem practical. I did use my phone for taking photographs of plants and tags so that we could look them up and figure out whether they would work in my Mother’s landscaping project. I hadn’t used the camera on my phone before today. Now I just have to locate the photos I took! I guess the more functions I learn to use on my present cell model the more likely I will be to upgrade both phone and phone plan; and I think this could be the case for many people when it comes to technology is that they have to see the usefulness of a particular technology and in some cases have the money to try out either preexisting functions or to upgrade their technology before they will support new services,  media policies or projects.

LIS9763 and social media has opened up the world of distance education for me as being something that I can enjoy and participate in with pleasure each week. I love meeting with my classmates and you, Amanda, in the chat room though sometimes our chat felt like it ended before the discussion was over. I was only taking one class this semester so our weekly chats were my only contact with my fellow library students other than comments I left for them on their blogs or they left me, except for our awesome group work team for Cooking the Books on Facebook. I would like to see a few more planned options for alternative routes to this discussion so that if Meebo is acting up we do not lose this opportunity for our weekly visit!

The experience of exploring social media provided by LIS9763 has been wonderful and has opened a variety of new doors for exploration and expansion in both my personal and professional lives. I have spent too many years putting limits on what I felt I could accomplish and what was possible and now I realize that they are just that my constructed limits that I do not need to hold on to anymore. Working with social media has taught me a whole new level of patience as well as when to ask for help and when to just try something until I get it to work because I can and it would be cool to have said feature available on my wiki such as Meebo chat widget that did not work the first few times I tried to set it up. Realizing that if I looked for a solution I could get the mash-up I needed to watch for wk. 11 by downloading a new application and transforming it into a pc friendly format. This course has been a whole series of learning experiences which have given me the confidence and experience to keep learning and pushing the limits of what is possible. I look forward to checking out my classmates final projects and keeping in touch! May we collaborate on all sorts of interesting projects in the future.

What some business people and librarians are recognizing is that people like to be heard and to have an opportunity to participate in decisions, both big and small. This may mean an on-going blog about new ideas and challenges as well as everyday life. It may mean sharing books, websites, wikis, and blogs as well as experiences with the world and your colleagues. It may mean using collaborative virtual note pads, instant messaging, text messaging, email, and VOIP software to connect with people across the city, province, country and world. Being able to attend conferences either in person or remotely and or continue other forms of professional development is also important!

My Social Media Best Practices:

1. Keep up with new technology through reading and listening to as many sources as possible!

2. Use common sense and think about how you could apply this and whether it is right for your library or your personal use!

2. Discover the answers to these questions before starting a project:
What do you want to achieve?
Who do you want to include?
Who you want to connect with?
Which softwares are they familiar with and already using?
Which softwares you are familiar with and have a comfort in using?
Do you need technical support for the project you are planning?
Do you need expertise or ideas from other people?
Who do you have to get approval from or at least inform about you plan? What is their knowledge base? What do they need to know?
Do you have deadline?
How do you want to assess this project?
What stats do you need to prove its’ usefulness?
What sort of feedback system do you need to help with growth and problem solving?

4. Believe in yourself! Be willing to take risks, make mistakes and admit when you are wrong or need help!!!

Here is a blog post that will be of use for those thinking about marketing through social media. It gives a set of step by step suggestions and best practices for starting out. Thank you Sean Gallagher for this useful tutorial.:

http://community2.business.gov/t5/Small-Business-Matters/Getting-Started-with-Social-Media-Marketing/ba-p/13949#A555

My social media tool box will include some or all of the following:

A Twitter account for promotion and communication.

A Facebook page and or group for similar purposes as well as for personal communication.

An account on Skype for communicating over long distances and short ones, possibly to work on projects and attend workshops virtually.

An instant messaging software or site such as the connection through Meebo that lets me communicate with people using different IM providers.

I may also use online clipboards such as the one we used for our group project and the various Google applications from the feed reader to the search engines. And last but certainly not least I will have my bookmarks available on Delicious so that I can access them from anywhere whether I am updating my wiki or my blogs  and or sending an e-communication to someone with research assistance or professional development information.

I look forward to hearing any other suggestions and input on this post!

Imagine the amount of time that you have just put into being a presence in one or more social media realms, then imagine you come online to discover that someone or multiple someones have highjacked your site or page for their own purposes. Now what? Do you delete all these comments? Do you respond right away? Do you breathe deeply and possibly take some time away from your computer and then respond to this new community of users with some useful commentary and a polite request that they remember the original purpose of your page? Do you give them the page and create a new page with information for directing your users from the old page to the new one?
If you wish more information I recommend Jeremiah Owyang’s blog post, Crisis Planning: Prepare Your Company for Social Media Attacksand notNestle’s lead Happy Computing! Thanks for the original links Amanda!

Another week is halfway done and I feel like I could continue my research and work on our group work project for many days to come because I love researching food writing and reading about other people’s literary and culinary adventures. The only problem with doing this sort of research is that it makes me hungry and as such when I climbed on the scale this morning it told me I had gained instead of lost weight. Can you gain weight just by reading about food and looking at pictures and videos online?

In helping to create a Facebook group about cooking and books with my band of merry maids I realized how little I truly utilized the power of all of Facebook’s many applications and options. I had previously been using it mostly to communicate with old friends and new acquaintances from around the country and the world. I had not done any extra exploring or participated in any groups online. I have my virtual zoo,  my email, and my time instant messaging people back  and forth. I may occasionally post a note on someone’s wall, but I am still very much a Facebook virgin.

I found that because I had not set up the network section of my profile online I could not access the first group that was created. The network issue is something I will have to straighten out at a later date. We decided that if I was having trouble and had spent some time online and with Facebook that the group structure needed to be more easily accessible to others, who might not have spent any time online or in a social networking environment such as Facebook.

I like the option presented by Matthew Williams and the other librarian, who use their personal profiles to communicate with their patrons as I find that I have enough trouble taking the time to properly check my various school and personal accounts in various software without adding further accounts to the list. I would prefer to use the time to look for interesting links to share and updating the blogs and accounts I already have on the go. My personal account has some character to it, but not anything that I would find professionally embarrassing as I figure that my digital footprint will likely outlive me by centuries.

After taking part in the UStream video and chat yesterday I see it having great potential for a variety of functions within the library environment from professional development to information literacy sessions with distance  students. The idea that you could share ideas and resources in a session and get relatively immediate feedback from your audience even if they could not get to your physical location is amazing. The idea that small libraries within a system could share programming responsibility for a book club or storytelling program. One week the librarian in one community could share her chosen story with discussion and or project with step by step instructions. The following week or month someone else in the system could share their part of the program. You can do a cooking demo and book discussion from your kitchen while still including your audience as long as they are comfortable signing  up and accessing the websites required, in our case Facebook and UStream.

I thought I should include links for our Facebook group, Cooking the Books and our group post that Dayna posted for us. I hope you all check out both links and enjoy the content.

Here are some interesting examples of people thinking in similiar ways about  social networking. An online comic artist draws comics live through UStream communicating with audience by writing chat responses in the comic.http://www.ustream.tv/blog/2008/04/19/penny-arcade-draws-comics-live-creativity-to-the-max/

Another interesting post I discovered this week was an A to Z of Social Networking for Libraries which appealed to me as a fan of alphabet and number books. I enjoyed many of the other posts on this blog, but felt that this would have been something fun to post on a professional bulletin board at work. I am thinking I will add it to my Facebook wall with a note as it is the best explanation I have come across for why I am spending hours online of late and will likely spend many more to come.

I listen to the CBC radio regularly and it seems that everytime I am turn around they are telling me that if I want to learn more about a topic or person they are interviewing I should go to their Facebook or Twitter account. Or if you wish to respond to anything you can respond via either Facebook or Twitter. Today they spoke with a tech blogger about the latest Apple  product, an ipad which is somewhere between a laptop and an iphone for reading e-books, websites, and watching movies with touch screen functionality.

The readings for week 8 that I have been reading to get ideas for my groupwork project talk about the use of social networking sites as a way for professors and librarians to connect with students, however, it sounds like those who have been using this technology are already popular so this is just another way for their students to interact with them. I think that the most important thing to remember in using this sort of technology is that this is only one way to communicate with our audience. We need to remember that not every audience within the library population will be comfortable with attaining their information via a social software network. I must make sure that I have feedback from the audiences that I am trying to communicate with via social software so that I am communicating on the right network and am not infringing on their privacy. If Facebook or MySpace is your chosen method, like your blog, you must make a personal point of connection that they can choose to connect to or not. It seems that if you go with the institutional communication method or try to link directly with your patrons by friending them it can backfire. They have to get to know you on their terms.

I have spent a good bit of time online in the last little while setting up a virtual zoo on Facebook that a friend prompted me to create. I checked out the list of visitors I had had and this little virtual adventure is definitely bearing more fruit than the call I put out to seniors on this blog.  I must either link my latter post to senior friendly sites or comment on these sites with my blog as a connection. Does anyone else have a helpful suggestions for getting more traffic to this post?

I also sent a help request to Facebook to add Naramata to the list of possible locations so that I can enter my current location into my Facebook profile. A small thing, but something that I want to be able to do.

Maybe it is just my comfort level, but I still prefer to go to a library in person or to their website versus connecting with them via Facebook.  I like to leave my Facebook time for communicating with friends some of whom happen to be librarians and library students. I wonder whether I would use it more for building a professional network of colleagues all around the country and the globe that I can chat with to solve problems or swap ideas.

I use MySpace to check out new bands when there are concerts offered I can check out the band’s sound to help me decide whether I want to spend the money and time on going to a concert. I would talk to my young adult or an technically connected friends about whether they would find a facebook connection to their libraries anymore accessible or if they still prefer to do other things with their online time.

As to the whole internet dating thing that a number of friends have chosen to experiment with over the last few years, I do not know if I am in the right headspace to try it. I think there is too much opportunity for misrepresentation and outright fabrication in this realm, but maybe I am just not ready to do that sort of personal research and exploration yet!

I am think about doing a paper about older adults’ use of social software. I did a quick Google search and came up with an interesting and lengthy set of results for seniors and social software. I am also volunteering in a library with a good sized senior population so it could be of help to the librarian here.

I am interested in when you started to use social software and why?

 Which applications do you use eg. Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Social networking sites including internet matchmaking sites?

What prompted your entrance into this world?

If you do not use social software, why not?

Who do you visit with old friends, new friends, family?

Are you part of interest groups?

What can libraries do to faciltate social networking and information gathering in the virtual realm?

After reading various prospectives on web 2.0 technology and transparency of business and marketing objectives, I started to wonder how far we as a society have really come in creating transparent, user friendly environments that promote access and collaboration. I would say that this issue may be one that will be perpetual beta as people seem to treat web 2.0, like the metric measurement debate (CBC commentary ), which means that we will use some of the new ideas and technology and at the same time hold onto many of the old ways. The metric debate I felt this clip was appropriate from the CBC archives as similiar points about the cost, time, cultural connections, etc. were brought forward by both sides. The difference is that while this was a Canadian debate the debate over social software is an international debate.

I think in some cases not moving forward or complaining about social software is the result of a combination of protecting our professional turf regardless of which industry we are in and fear that the new technology will cause more problems than it will solve. The issue is though that regardless of how we feel about the new technology that is coming into our world it will not stop coming. We must find a way to contribute that is both comfortable and productive. Meredith Farkas has some suggestions and opinions about libraries using social software that I thought you should all read. She has also included a lengthy set of links that may be of use if you are patient enough to read to the end of her post or if you choose to skip the post that is up to you. I enjoyed it as I have seen some interesting uses for both Facebook and MySpace and I enjoyed her commentary. Thanks Meredith for your input and making me think. I look forward to hearing my colleagues’ response to Libraries in Social Networking Software.

 http://meredith.wolfwater.com/wordpress/2006/05/10/libraries-in-social-networking-software/

 I also enjoyed the input of  Michael Casey and Laura Savastinuk about possibilities for serving our customers in a library 2.0 setting and particularly the discussion about patrons adding reviews, ratings, and tags or subject headings to library catalogue records. There were whispers about this technology before I left cataloguing temporarily to go back to school. The whispers appear to be turning into shouts with articles and blog entries such as Laurel Tarulli’s about social tagging in library catalogues and patron complaints about other people’s tags. The question is why can we not treat patron created content like the comments received on blogs which can be moderated with the appropriate disclaimer.

 http://laureltarulli.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/social-tagging-in-the-catalogue-you-allow-that/

It may require extra time from our already busy day.

It might alienate older users who were comfortable with old system. 

It might actually make it more convienent for library patrons to do their business without ever stepping through the doors of our physical library, thereby, decreasing circ stats, and decreasing the need for staff.

I know the way I have presented these concerns it may seem like I am trivializing them as at least two of the concerns mentioned are contradictory in nature, but I am not trivializing as I have had similiar concerns particularly the one about the extra time it would take me to get used to a new system. The problem is that if we do not change then we will be left behind and not be serving our communities effectively.

 Hi, My name is Megan Neilans.  I am in my third, and hopefully not last semester of my Masters in Library and Information Studies at the University of Western Ontario. I am a library technician, who has worked in a variety of library settings from a public library headquarters to multiple art galleries and the B.C. Ministry of Health. I have a BA in history and all, but two courses of a BA in Canadian Studies as well.

I am a relative newbie to creating content for social software applications as I only started blogging last semester. I have been enjoying reading and watching the other people’s contributions on YouTube as well as content found on a variety of websites. I have been watching television online for the last year as I did not have a television with cable and I could watch what I wanted when I wanted. I caught up on older shows and those that have been cancelled that were of interest. I also utilize Facebook to keep track of friends and family around the world as I have moved every three years for the last 30. One of my favourite features with my social software applications is the birthday notifications for friends so that I can seem totally organized even when I am busy.

I had never used google for anything, but searching until today and the RSS aggregator and google documents look like they will be very useful additions to my tool kit of tricks for both my personal and professional life. My next task will be signing up for and sorting out Delicious as I think I will try and get that assignment done first to leave space for my group and final projects.

I look forward to enlarging my skill set for both recreational and professional purposes as I have heard about many of these applications, but have never used them. I am curious and willing learn. I look forward to reading about and playing with the variety of social software applications that are out there.