Social networking brown-bag: thoughts!

I thought the social networking brown-bag today was just fascinating!

I thought a lot of what was said reinforced what some of us heard at the Marketing Symposium last fall. One of those was making it fun – catching people’s attention with a stunt or a game. Fontana expressed this as the “Urgent Social Blissful Epic Classroom“: like Farmville, we can make the process of learning urgent (others are counting on you), social (you can see how your peers are doing), blissful (fun and meaningful – engaged), and epic (it grows, builds on itself). We talked a lot about games today – competing for prizes, or against other users. One of the students suggested having something that was produced regularly so that people could look forward to it coming out. I have thought that it would be fun to do library-themed Facebook quizzes. One student had the idea of a recommended books feature that would allow you to participate by saying you’d read the book.

We need to think about our goals for using social media in terms of what we do that’s meaningful to students. The students in the focus group said it again and again – tell us about what the library has that can help us with our assignments, or tell us what the library has that we don’t know about. Give us information we can use. Overwhelmingly, for them, this was information related to doing research. “The library is an educational place,” one of them said.

So let’s embrace it! A while ago, Colleen Boff suggested doing a “database of the month.” UC Irvine Libraries do a really nice “featured resource” that is attractive and not overly detailed. We’ve also talked in LTL about pushing information about our resources and services to students timed to the rhythm of the semester, an idea Brian Mathews talks about in his book, Marketing Today’s Academic Library. I think it’s time for us to do this.

The students suggested that we find out when big projects are due in different programs and push out information that will help students working on those projects. It occurred to me that reference desk workers often know this because of the questions we are getting and the IRA topics we’re seeing, so it would be possible to be proactive on this even now. Remember the “what is in my future?” project we saw so often this spring? Amy Fyn posted something to the Ref Blog to help us help those students – we could have also posted something to the UL Blog (/twitter/facebook) that would help them help themselves.

Anthony Fontana said, “People undervalue their current audience.” He said organizations talk a lot about using social media to reach out to everyone “out there” who they’re not currently reaching, but in doing so underestimate the value of serving the needs and interests of the audiences they already have. We heard this at the Marketing conference last fall, too – reward your power users. Students who are in our building all the time (and see our fliers), students who are already following us on Twitter, our own student workers – these are our power users. And when we reach out to them with content they can use, they tell their friends and create a “ripple effect.”

Terence showed us how COBL has a feed from their blog on their website (which Gwen pointed out is not in the CMS). While not that many people may visit their blog specifically, or follow them on Twitter specifically, putting these together creates a more efficient way of sharing information across all these platforms. Terence and Anthony talked a lot about being smart and strategic about tying social media together to “push” information to our audiences. I know we push our UL blog posts out to Twitter – are there other ways we can tie our social media profiles together? Terence showed us how we can embed our Facebook page into the frame on the UL Blog using a widget in the blog admin module – we should do this! We can also create a Flickr sidebar in our blog. The Popular Culture Library and the Dean’s office has quite a lot on Flickr. Let’s tie that to our blog, too!

At COBL, Terence told us, all their staff Tweet and all their staff blog (some more than others). As a result, they Tweet several times a day and blog several times a week. At the Marketing conference, we were told that you should Tweet at least 2x a day and blog at least 2x a week. The students in the focus group also recommended tweeting like 3 times a day but said they would want to get information in Facebook or e mail less often.

Terence talked about how the Marketing & Communications office has created a bottleneck structure that prevents BGSU organizations from using the BGSU YouTube channel more, for example. I think we should think about our own approach to using social media in light of this observation. We could open up our use of the blog and make it more dynamic, more useful, and more social. Let’s put our individual names on our blog posts and let our users make comments on our blog. And let’s blog more often, being cognizant of our audience and what information will be valuable to them. We could also have more of us Tweeting and posting to our Facebook presence. Gwen has suggested several times that we could have our students blog or Tweet – I think that’s a great idea.

I liked hearing confirmation from the student focus group that they often use Facebook and Twitter the same way I do – as a news feed or “event hub” – “fanning”organizations or following them to stay informed about what’s going on. They stressed that they only want to follow information that’s going to be of use to them – one student provided the example of fanning a local restaurant to get coupons or learn about promotions. Since students strongly associate the library with research resources and research help, we should keep this in mind and try to make the information we put out directly related to this. Details about workshops (“guest speakers” about doing research) and tutorials were specifically mentioned several times as desired information.

Another thing I heard several times was that Facebook is seen as a timesuck. One student said she rarely uses it anymore. Another said he gave it up for Lent. Another said he cut back after spending far too much time on it last semester. Those who did not express “Facebook fatigue” made it clear that they used Facebook mainly as a platform to push information out to other users (their friends), often for their jobs as res hall coordinators, etc. It occurred to me that we could start using those widgets that make it easy to post something to Facebook, etc., in our website. Colorado State does this in their database pages, and so does the EJC.

Other thoughts: let’s embed our winning video from earlier this week in our home page, like BYU did. I was also struck by how many of our student focus group participants read the Campus Update.

91 thoughts on “Social networking brown-bag: thoughts!

  1. afontan Said,

    April 23, 2010@ 9:35 am      

    Excellent notes! I think having a focus group consisting of diverse students really helped to get these ideas jump started in the right direction. I applaud all of your suggestions here!

  2. Gwen Evans Said,

    April 23, 2010@ 10:27 am      

    What I took away from the discussion and particularly the focus group students is how powerful it could be to use our current student staff as “reputation and information amplifiers” using social media. We all know our student employees already serve as the resource of first resort among their friends and classmates; and training or hiring some of them to do it on our behalf using social media would leverage their already existing networks — which they maintain effortlessly. Mercedes is already doing this! I loved that she was already putting our books out there with twitpics and personalized commentary — and since she works in cataloging, faster than they show up in the catalog! The best use of social media for many of our purposes seems to be a true collaboration with the intended audience — otherwise it’s just another form of digital brochure (and we all know we read every flyer that ends up in our IRL mailboxes, right?).

  3. Kathy Y Said,

    April 23, 2010@ 10:49 am      

    I couldn’t make it to the meeting, but J.N took notes and brought me up to speed. I do a lot of readers’ advisory up here in the CRC and I’d love to figure out a good way to use Facebook for that.

    Also, if you can get profs to give us project assignments ahead of time, let me know how you do it! I’ve been trying every semester.

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