Thing 12 – Putting the Social into Social Media

Thing 12 is a bit of a reflection thing on the social use of social media.

I do tend to use social media as a current awareness tool – picking up on what other people are doing; as well as a promotion tool - to promote our resources and services. Conversations seem to be few and far between and I’m not really sure how to change this. I don’t feel a burning desire to comment. While I have made an effort to keep up-to-date with other participants on the course I can’t say that I’ve felt the need to follow particular individuals either. 

The blogs and twitter feeds that I do follow tend to be much more practical rather than conversational and opinion-based.

Perhaps a work in progress.

Thing 6 Online Networks

Thing 6 is looking at online networks.

Twitter

As mentioned previously I've been on Twitter as @libcheryl for a while now. This is in a professional capacity, linked to my current role. I mainly use it for current awareness and passing on relevant re-tweets to do with health, medicine, nursing and midwifery or librarianship. I haven't really found it to be a conversational place and the only question I asked was ignored.

LinkedIN

I've been on linked in now for a few years. I find that the groups are really useful - you can post questions and most seem to get some sort of response. It is also helpful to lurk - you can pick up lots of interesting bits of information. I've recently noticed that more spam posts appear to be posted which is starting to annoy. The email updates are also getting repetitive though maybe I need to investigate my settings more here.

In terms of contacts I have mainly re-connected with former colleagues. I'm not sure of the etiquette of making contacts. The advice seems to be don't connect with people you don't know but then surely the point is to build up a new network. A work in progress I think.

Facebook

I have 2 Facebook accounts - one is personal for family and friends whilst the other is used to admin our library Facebook page. We decided to set up a library page so that we had a presence in the largest and most likely used network. We have linked in our blog so that entries get posted automatically and we also add any news about new resources. 

Others

I had not heard of the other networks mentioned:

LISNPN - not sure how active this is, there seemed to be few replies to some of the forum posts despite lots of views

Librarians as Teachers - doesn't apply

Cilip Communities - hadn't heard of these despite being a cilip member, and I'm registered on the site too.

Summary

At the moment I find Linked IN most useful for connecting with other professionals via the groups. Twitter is most helpful to me as a current awareness tool. Facebook is either purely personal or used to connect with our user groups. I'm not sure how much I can expand on my use of networks - there is only so much time in the day.

Thing 4 Twitter and Paper.li

There was a great post from Jen Gallagher about Twitter that also referred to using paper.li

While I had started tentatively to create lists of people I follow on Twitter, after reading Jen’s post I definitely think this is a super way to organise your tweets and it is something I will be applying in the future. I split those I follow into different lists so I have a librarians list, librarianship issues list, Health Professional list, NHS orgs list and so on. I can also create a stream in hootsuite to follow each list. This means that I can separate out my health feeds from my library feeds, from my stoke feeds… and so on, which makes it all much easier.

I had also started to experiment with paper.li. I didn’t really seem to be getting the papers I was hoping but I’ve rearranged them now to follow my various lists. So I have Healthcare Today! which follows my health-related lists and Librarian News I’m not sure how the different sections are populated. I don’t think I’d use them to present information to users but I might try to interest some of my non-web2.0 colleagues.

Thing 4 Current awareness - Twitter, RSS and Storify

Thing 4 looked at current awareness and Twitter, RSS feeds and Storify.

Twitter

I have been on twitter for a few months now. I help to manage the Health Library account @ceclibrary as well as my own account @libcheryl. Both these accounts are focused on our user groups. The health library account promotes services and resources available at the Health Library. I use my account for current awareness and resource promotion. I follow a number of healthcare-related tweeters as well as librarianship-related ones and a few local (Stoke on Trent and North Staffordshire) resources. I tend to retweet mostly. I must admit that I don’t make sufficient use of hash tags to identify my tweets. Though I have recently started to pick up on following particular tags, for example #mlib and #lilac12 which followed conferences. I use Hootsuite to manage my twitter account.

I don’t think that we have really had the breakthrough to connect to our user groups yet. Though I am picking up… well, I’ll say an eclectic group of followers.

RSS Feeds

I have used RSS feeds for quite a long time now. I currently use Google Reader to keep track of feeds that I sign up to, previously I used Bloglines. At the moment the most active ones that I keep up-to-date with are health-related ones or (lo) technical ones. I think many of the library-type bloggers that I signed up with originally have moved on – I need to review which library blogs I follow.

I have found that RSS feeds are invaluable for making resources visible to users, even though our user groups don’t seem to have embraced their use. We can put feeds into web pages, blogs, emails and reuse the content – a mashup? - etc. using netvibes, yahoo pipes and feedburner; as well as provide email update services. (see SATH libraries wiki for information about how to do this).

For example our Health Library latest news blog is embedded in our home page; I have used RSS feeds with Netvibes to create a current awareness service; then used yahoo pipes and feedburner to re-use our netvibes feeds to create news animator widgets which I put on our subject pages.

Storify

I have not come across Storify before. It seems to rely only on social media sources such as twitter. I must say I wasn’t impressed with the presentation and it didn’t really appeal to me.

Scoop it

I love Scoop it! I really like this as you can have any type of internet resource, as well as add your own text. I think it looks pretty good too as items are presented in a magazine type format. You can also follow other people’s topics and make/receive suggestions.

I am already signed up to this. I have 3 topics:

• Healthcare Researchers and Social Media
• International Nursing Day
• My CPD 23 Things (just started)

I was so thrilled when people started following my topics (ok only 4 but still).

I also follow….

• Information Literacy – Education
• Social media and networks in medical education
• Social media, learning and (medical) education
• Technology enhanced learning
• Elearning and health

I have linked my scoop it account to my twitter account so that items are re-tweeted.

Paper.li

I hadn’t come across this before and this seems to look even more like a newspaper / magazine. It seems that you set up searches to populate the paper rather than individually select your own content – how useful this is would seem to depend on whether you are collecting the information for yourself or presenting it to someone else.

Current Awareness

I use a whole range of resources and tools to help me to keep up-to-date both in my own profession of librarianship as well as in the subject areas of my users. In addition to these mentioned above I also follow a number of Jisc mail groups and am signed-up to a number of email bulletins. The tools I use depend on function required, availability, ease of use and how attractive they are to re-purpose to use with library users.