One simple way to save time and make sure that you post regularly is to schedule tweets and posts. The best tool I have found to do that is HootSuite. HootSuite allows you to connect to both your library Twitter account and Facebook page and easily update them both from one web-based application. In addition HootSuite gives you the option to schedule your posts for sometime in the future.

Scheduling posts makes it easier to post regularly without the hassle of doing it every day. A librarian can take a half an hour once a week to write a research tip of the day and posts about multiple upcoming events, schedule them, and have posts coming out every day that week. This even makes it possible to post on weekends when you’re not actually around.

This is a very useful tool for already overtaxed librarians, yet it shouldn’t be the only thing you use. You also have to answer your patrons when they post on your wall or @mention you. And don’t let scheduled posts kill spontaneity either. Spontaneous posts are the often some of the best and most authentic. It’s necessary to find a good balance, but scheduling posts can be a very helpful practice in dealing with social media work flow.

Here’s a very brief video showing how to use HootSuite to schedule your posts.

image from mars_discovery_district on Flickr

Looking back on your social media use of your library or organization is important. Whether your blogging or using tools like Facebook and Twitter we need to be scientists. We need to conduct experiments. Social media is great for this because you get rapid, measurable feedback. You can see what sorts of posts get shared, liked, retweeted, or commented on. Once you understand what people are responding to you can then try to replicate it, thus improving your posts. Below are three types of posts that get responses from our library’s social media following:

• Questions – Want a response? Ask a question. It’s one of the most natural exchanges in conversation. People are much more willing to reply to a question than to a statement. If you can phrase your informational post as a question or add a question to it you have a better chance of a response. Example: “Who loves chili? Chili cookoff today at 2:00pm in the library.”
• Fun – Posts that are lighthearted and fun often get responses, at least from our students. You don’t have to only post about library news or events and not everything has to be informational. Social media is about being social so you need a balance of business and pleasure. Here’s an example of having fun with the Kanye meme that swept the web.
• Talking about others – Only talking about yourself is boring in real life. The same is true in the virtual world. Blogger Chris Brogan is an evangelist for talking about others and I find that he’s right. When I retweet people’s content from our library account it gets shared again. When I post on the library Facebook about a student group organizing a Quidditch team the organizers appreciate it. Talk about others and you’ll be rewarded.

These types of posts got the most responses at our library. It may not be exactly the same for yours. Remember to experiment. Try some unorthodox posts sometimes. Try different posts and see what works and what doesn’t, but make sure you learn from your mistakes.

What sorts of social media posts have been working for your library?

• Library events – Let people know what’s going on. Having a movie night in the library? Let people know. Having a chili cookoff? Get the word out!
• Links to articles, videos, etc. – If you come across web content that would be relevant or helpful to your patrons, tweet it. You can even tweet things marginally related if you think your patrons would respond favorably. Twitter is great for sending links. And don’t forget to use a link shortener like bit.ly or tinyurl.
• Solicit feedback – Twitter is made for conversations, so feel free to ask questions of your followers. Ask things that you actually want to know about and that you are prepared to act upon though. Don’t ask, “should the library stay open until midnight?” unless you’re prepared to do something with their responses.
• New additions to your collection - Got some new books? Added a database recently? Tweet it up! People might not know about your additions unless you tell them. Twitter can be helpful for informing patrons about new resources.
• Marketing - get the word out about how great your library is! Libraries and librarians do some pretty awesome stuff, but people don’t always see it. Let people know you just created a new tutorial or that you had over 150,000 visits last year. Don’t worry about tooting your own horn a little bit, just not all the time.
• Answer questions - in the example below I noticed someone was working on a paper and simply sent them a link, you’d be surprised how powerful that can be.

Don’t forget to be human and be social. Being human means not only sending out the same links to events or new books over and over, but sending out fun things like librarians dancing to Thriller. Don’t be an automaton. And being social means having conversations with patrons. Answer @replies, ask questions, socialize. Don’t simply broadcast like you have a megaphone. It is social networking after all.

This list is by no means comprehensive, just some ideas to get people thinking. Please leave any other ideas you have in the comments.

This just in: Fail Whale! (thanks to Lee LeFever on Flickr)

Twitter has gotten a lot of press lately. CNN loves to talk about it. It has been on both John Stewart and Steven Colbert. Jimmy Fallon uses it copiously and talks about it on his show. Twitter has grown 2,300% in 13 months. There is no ignoring it.

Yet, recently at the ACRL conference in Seattle I was told students aren’t using it.  I heard this at an excellent session called If You Build It, Will They Care? Their data may be correct for the time they conducted the survey. I thought as much was true myself. I had not seen students on Twitter. Now, though, my response to them is: “just wait.”

The presence here at Champlain College has been growing steadily. This is likely in part due to the efforts of “the queen of social media” Elaine Young, a marketing professor at the college. She began to use the hashtag #campchamp to group all the tweets Champlain College together.

Following and using that tag has proven very useful in learning what’s going on around campus and connecting with students, faculty, and staff. I was even able to perform some preemptive reference for a student who tweeted that they were working on a paper.

I am predicting a growing number of students will be on Twitter in the coming months. It is not going away. We may have a number of pretty savvy students and faculty members here at Champlain, but I forsee a this becoming a national trend.

My advice? Try to find and follow the tag for your school or your community using a tool like Tweetdeck or even Twitter Search and RSS. If there isn’t a tag , start it. Someone has to be the first. Why not you?

It is a much less formal way to interact with students and faculty members. Instead of seeing them in class or meetings or a reference interview, you can simply have conversations about what’s going on around campus or in current events or whatever. It can be very powerful community building tool, in addition to its other myriad uses.

Your students may not be there yet, but they will be…they will be.

I have been working on a facebook page for our library. A number of other libraries have entered into the social networking realm and I think it is past time for us to do so.

When I walk through the computer lab in the library to grab some coffee, every other computer I see has facebook up on the screen.

The other day I tried to imagine if any student was not on facebook at the college (I am sure there are some). Facebook is a whole separate life that intersects and meshes with everyday physical life. And if there are students not on there, it seems like they are missing out on half of what is going on. The same is true of the library. Right now we are missing out on half of what is going on.

I feel it is important to not always make students come to you. “Go to the library website.” “Come to the library.” We should also meet them where they already are. A vast majority of them spend a lot of time on facebook, and I think it would be worth our time to have a presence there as well.

Not only would it allow us to help students thorough things like IM reference through the Digsby widget I hacked together, but it would enable us to show a more human side of the library. I’ve added pictures of the librarians and staff and also pictures of different events like the Chili Cookoff or when T.C. Boyle came and autographed our library books. The library is made up of people. It’s not just a building; it has a life of its own.  Hopefully we can show that through facebook.

I hope to continously add content. Our amazing Information Literacy Librarian Sarah Cohen proposed that we have a Scrabble tournament sometime which would be a lot of fun and yield some excellent pictures/videos. I also would like to use it to converse with students and try to find out their thoughts and feelings about the library. A number of other library pages I have looked at don’t do so hot on this front. They have great content but the conversation is often lacking. I wonder how this can be better facilitated.

Other than that I have to keep brooding on the best ways to promote the page, but I hope to get it published by Spring Break.

Photo by Bryan Veloso on Flickr

I have risen to a new level of geekdom. The other day, as I was putting together a Facebook page for the library I ran into some problems, so I had to learn some FBML.

We recently switched from Meebo to Digsby for our IM reference widget. I wanted to put that same Digsby widget into our Facebook page so students would be able to connect with the library there as well. There is already a “Digsby widget” application  available in Facebook, but unfortunately when I tried adding it to the library page it kept failing and instead added itself to my personal profile.

Then, I decided I could just find an app that just allowed me to copy and paste the HTML to embed the Digsby widget, but none of those worked correctly either. Finally, as I was about to give up, I found an FBML app in this blog post. I googled FBML and found the Facebook developer’s wiki. It was easy enough to map FBML to the HTML that I already knew.  So I wrote a few lines of FBML including the location for the Digsby widget, and lo and behold it showed up there on my Facebook page.

This was one of those moments similar to when I first started writing HTML or CSS, when you just take a step back and say, “oh wow; I actually just created something.”  What amazes me is that is that I could actually understand enough about HTML to hack together something that worked in FBML, a totally new language to me. It is just a little over two years since I started learning HTML. Ever since then my curiosity and interest in technology in technology has been piqued.

I realized that there must be some solution to my problem, and kept trying different approaches to solve it.  That is the part I really love about technology. You are constantly learning and solving problems.  If something doesn’t work you have to keep trying until you find something that does. And with every problem you have to learn a little bit more.

Yesterday I went to the Vermont 3.0 Tech Career Jam.  I did not go into the actual gym with the tables set up since I am not actively looking for a job, but I did attend two panel sessions that sounded interesting.

The first one was called “So you wanna build websites.” It was interesting to get a perspective on the field of web design today and where it will be going in the future.  The future clearly is mobile computing and handheld devices (cell phones, etc.). and the future is here. They gave excellent advice to students and career seekers.  First they told them to concentrate on designing to standards not browsers.  “The browsers will come around,” they said.  They also said that it was necessary to have a concentration.  You cannot be a Jack of all trades in the web-design world doing graphic design, web app programming, and actually designing the site. You need to find your place and hook up with a few other people who have complementary skills.  Web design is far to specialized now.

The second session I attended was “So You Wanna be an Internet Marketer.”  This session was mainly about Google Analytics making conversions.  It made me want to do some more reading about making sense of web traffic numbers.  The most important thing that was said in the session, in my opinion was to be open to play with technology.  Champlain professor Elaine Young and others noted how important it was to try out technologies instead of instantly deciding, “that’s not for me.”

I wholeheartedly agree with this philosophy.  I need to constantly do this for my career as an Emerging Technologies Librarian.  Playing with technology is the only way you will stay current with what is out there and what your users are doing.  I hope to foster this environment and idea of play at Champlain College, along with other colleagues who are already playing and enjoying it.

Overall this Vermont 3.0 Tech Career Jam seemed like a great event bring businesses and students from around the area together to fill mutual needs.  I look forward to it next year.

The panel was composed of Steve Benen a political pundit blogger from the Washington Monthly, Cathy Resmer online editor of Seven Days Newspaper, and Ann DeMarle, head of the Emergent Media Center at Champlain College.  It was moderated by Jeff Rutenbeck Dean for the Division of Communication and Creative Media at Champlain College.

One thing that got people going in the audience was when Jeff said that books were an inefficient means of communication. Publishing online is much quicker and people can interact and have a conversation with the information, whereas books take years to publish and you cannot interact with a book.  The audience got defensive and sentimental about books, expressing that they did not want them to go away.  Someone actually stated how books were one of the most perfectly evolved forms of media.  Jeff also passed around a Kindle for people to gawk at.  The guy next to me was ogling it for about five minutes.

Photo by davidking

What was especially interesting was the discussion that ensued after Jeff brought up the idea that textbooks are “so superficial.”  He said that for his classes, “you could get 90 percent of the information in the textbooks from Wikipedia.”  At this a student commented that he did not go to textbooks first.  He went to Google or YouTube or blogs or other online sources.  Barbara Shatara, a librarian at the Fletcher Free Library asked him the same question I was thinking: how do you evaluate this information for credibility?  His answer was that he evaluated by cross referencing.  If he found info on one blog he would look and see if it was confirmed in other places.  If there were more people agreeing with something than disagreeing then he would believe it.

This gives a good insight into how information is being evaluated in this era.  Instead of looking for some authority people look to the masses.  “Do a lot of people believe this?  Ok, good then I will too.”  A lot of people believe that evolution is a falsehood and that global warming is a fabrication.   A great danger with this is when looking to corroborate or disprove a piece of information on the web, it very much depends on how you are searching.  If you search with keywords only  related to creationism, or find a creationist website and start following their links, the information your find is going to be colored in a very specific way.  With a mindset such as this, the tyranny of the majority can then determine what is true and not true, and that is very dangerous.

There were a number of debates back and forth and everyone really got into the session.  I was surprised at how many people were engaged and actually caring about these issues.  I guess information literacy is a real issue that people outside of libraries or academia care about.

There are a few rules you need to follow when naming your new startup web 2.0 company.

1. Have real cutesy names (These would be names like Bebo or Jing. It gets your customers excited about something cutesy while not telling them anything about the company. It’s like a surprise.)
2. Your best bet is to have a name that includes double letters together so customers can remember it. (Names like Joost, Meebo, Moodle, Joopz, Goowy, or Blummy work well. Extra points if you put three letters in your name like Zooomr.)
3. Rule two is especially important if you are in the social bookmarking business. (Two big ones Digg and Reddit know the score. Del.icio.us is getting along without it, but the way they split up their name is cutesy enough)
4. Hurry! All the good names are running out! (I tried making up a name for my own startup 2.0 web site. I figured if I could get a sweet enough name Yahoo or Google [both double letter names] would buy me out. Unfortunately Squibble and Grinky were already taken.)

Now, I have decided to start up a consulting business where I help fledging 2.0 companies find a name.

Me: “Alright, tell me what your company does exactly.”

Them: “Well, we are synergistic, hybrid blend of chat, VoIP, social networking, and user created content of some sort.”

Me:”Hmmmm………..you’re now Chubblekins. Wait, wait, wait! Zoombango!”

Those two are free. The rest you’ll have to pay for.

It was a fun technology to play with, and I think it could have some really great uses. I could see it being very useful in things like tech support, or reference questions that include detailed computer instructions. You can simply record your mouse clicks and voice at the same time, explaining it like you would to a patron who was there at the desk. It then creates a flash video you can e-mail to the patron. I look forward to playing with Jing some more. Also the web services librarian Jonathan told me about another screen capture software called Utipu that may even have more features. I may have to check that one out too.