Social Intelligence

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?