Thing 15: Social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter)

Have you ever noticed that 15 is the new 23?  I believe that this is our last 23 thing, I think the reasoning behind this is that on some of the "things" we have looked at more than one thing and therefore we have reached 23.  .....No, me neither.

So our last thing is Social Media, I have used all the three sites listed for this thing regularly so all I have to do is review them and my challenge will be to do so succinctly.

Facebook

Weirdly I remember the exact moment I first heard about Facebook, I was in my home-town during the University holidays and friends at Uni at Oxford and St. Andrews were talking about being on Facebook.  When it first arrived in this country it was restricted to those two Unis plus Cambridge.  Then when I got my trainee job at Cambridge Uni, and with it a cam.ac.uk email address, I was finally let into the Facebook world and have not looked back since.  Not long after that it was opened publicly so I only had exclusive access for a very short while.  I have always thought of Facebook as purely social, I would never use it to find professional contacts and information and very rarely add people I currently work with onto Facebook.  Not because I'm particularly private, just because I prefer to draw a line between work and play, and Facebook is my "play"-time.  It is the site I visit most regularly on the web and I store most my photos on there.  I do tend to check-in to places and update my status regularly just because it creates for me a nice archive of things I have done, perhaps as a substitute diary.  I keep in contact with friends who I see regularly in the "real world" but also it allows me to stay in touch with people I don't, for any number of reasons, see regularly.  I have noticed in the last couple of years a drop-off of people using it but I can't envisage it ever being the wasteland that MySpace and Bebo became.  I know many libraries are on Facebook but I have always slightly agreed with the argument that for students it is their social space and libraries on there are like the embarrasing dad dancing at a party.  Having said that with the now not-so-recent creation of "pages" organisations can create, what seems to me, a more professional and more detached (as opposed to the smaller, more personal interaction Facebook groups affords), stand-alone site which students can "like" to get updates.  So maybe my position on Facebook needs a rethink and maybe we should be discussing it as another option in reaching our net wider and making ourselves more visible.

P.S. for anyone on Facebook who hasn't tried Museum of Me- do so now- it's brilliant!  Thanks to Allan for the heads-up on that.

LinkedIn

I'm on LinkedIn but that is as far as it goes.  I have never really used it beyond having a profile and connecting to work colleagues, I have never really felt the need to use it as a tool with which to interact with people.  I did add a widget to my blogs on there and as I am connected to academics I suppose that is another network in which I am advertising my blogs.  It seems to often be touted as a great career tool so I would love to know if anyone has found a job through it, for example.  I suppose it is good to be seen on a professional network though and so I will continue to maintain my profile and look for connections. 

Twitter @elliemurphylib

I am absolutely a Twitter convert and find it one of the most useful professional tools.  To start off with I didn't really see the value and didn't really get it.  But I persevered and I found it made much more sense to me firstly when I got it on my mobile (timely information is a bit limited if you have to wait until your signed in on your PC) and when I had started following a good set of people tweeting valuable stuff.  I do have a separate personal account but don't really use that much as not many friends are on Twitter, it's connected to my Facebook account so if anything it's just another way to update that.  I have done training sessions for several academics now who are starting to see the benefit of Twitter but aren't quite sure where to start.  The most useful advantages of Twitter I find are:

• Current awareness for professional development.  I find now I use Twitter I very rarely use JISC mailing lists.  I follow many librarians on Twitter and through them I am kept up to date with most things that are going on in library world, it's a fantastic awareness tool to help with professional development.  It provides more breadth than I could get from mailing lists unless I subscribed to a lot more than I do currently and as they are just quick alerts I can choose to follow them up or quickly scan through them.
• Crowd-sourcing.  As there are so many (helpful!) librarians on Twitter (amongst other user-groups) it provides a great pool of knowledge if you want to ask a question.  I have previously asked questions on the use of QR codes and have got instant replies.
• Information from business sources.  As well as library related current awareness it is useful to keep up to date with what is happening in the business world and things I have read about on Twitter have sometimes formed an idea for a blog post on our business resources blog.  Most database suppliers are also on Twitter and it is useful to follow these for developments and news.  
• Connecting to academics.  There aren't a huge amount of Uni people I am connected to on Twitter but it is one more network where I can interact with academics and tweet/retweet relevant pieces of information to them. 
• Some Unis use Twitter as a sort of Ask-A-Librarian tool and I have also had a couple of my students tweeting me questions.  The University Twitter account monitors and responds to student queries.
• Monitor what is said about your service!  Twitter search offers invaluable insights into what is being said about your service and gives you a chance to respond.

It's quite clear that different social media tools offer different advantages and that we shouldn't just embrace everything but select the right tool for the job.  I think the best way to do this is to start using the tools yourself to really evaluate what their value is and how they can benefit our users, rather than just dismissing social media out-of-hand. Next tool to evaluate: Google Plus!

Further reading:
I recently presented at a CPD25 event looking with Emma Woods entitled: ‘Follow Us On …: Using Social Networks And Technology To Reach Readers’, Emma and I talked about our blogs, Dave Puplett spoke about what social media the library uses at LSE and Tim Fletcher talked about Twitter at Birkbeck.  To see a write-up of the event and links to presentations see the thoughts of a [wannabe] librarian blog.


Pic: Tree of networks, Lower Benefield, Northants taken by Ellie