It’s so exciting how Information Today is using its content management system to build a community for their conference events that I’m using Google’s doodle to celebrate with some fiddling! Yes today is the 332nd birthday of Antonio Vivaldi, an Italian composer. But I digress, something unusual for me, right?
So go to the Computers in Libraries 2010 website and click on speakers. You can now reach those speakers through Twitter, Facebook, their blog, or LinkedIn when they update their speaker page. Check out Joe Murphy and myself, Jane Dysart, to get the idea. Computers in Libraries 2010 also has a wiki to build more community, and this year has a special section — 25th anniversary memory bank. If you have a vibrant memory of a past Computers in Libraries conference, please share it!
I just love what social media is adding to the 2010 Olympics! From the thousands of tweets from the #Olympics Twitter feed, to YouTube videos, to Facebook, social media is definitely enriching my experience of the Vancouver Winter Olympics. Amazing.
My favorite tweets so far are from the people calling curling “ice shuffleboard” but the number of tweets supporting the athletes is truly incredible. On Facebook, I became a fan of Vancouver 2010 Olympics and last night right after the Canada/Swiss hockey game, they posted asking who had seen the game. Within 4 minutes I and three hundred others had responded that we liked it! Every time I refreshed my screen it went up by 50+ people and within 24 minutes over 1500 “liked” the post and a third had made comments. After 10 hours, over 3,500 “liked” the post and 1,150+ had made comments about the post. YouTube has a rich base of videos about the Olympics but several of my favorites include commercials about future young athletes and Canada’s first gold medal on home soil, but I also love Shaun White’s gold medal big air performance with amazing spins, flips and twists (all together!).
So social media is definitely engaging and bringing the world together over wonderful global events. Yeah!
Helene Blowers posted a wonderful note today about a social media strategy framework. Being a strategy junkie, I agree with Helene that Ross Dawson’s framework is excellent as it leads an organization from its priorities through governance (ye gads! someone actually considers governance early in a strategy!!) through to “listening” while engaging (there’s a concept — listening — to honestly hear what people are saying, or not saying…).
It also prompts me to explore the notion that many libraries are still rather ‘iffy’ about social media, particularly Facebook & Twitter, because they perceive these to be “social media” and somehow that just doesn’t “fit” for them — somehow “social media” makes them uncomfortable. Stephen Abram & Helene are absolutely correct — libraries, particularly CEO’s or Directors, have to engage themselves in these media before developing their strategy. But to engage means they have to first accept. And some are lightyears from accepting. A few weeks ago when I was working with a group on integrating social media into their processes and services, a senior librarian negatively retorted to me that these “things aren’t all good — there’s a real dark side to them.” At which point I responded, “yep, there’s a dark side to cars when people hit and kill innocent people, too, yet you drive a car. So what’s your point?”
And then it hit me (the point, not the car), that libraries have to see Facebook & Twitter & other social media not as “social media” (discomfort), but rather as “connecting networks” (a bit more comfort) and “non-traditional publishing platforms” (oh yeah…lots more comfort!). That’s what they are, right? Look at the volume of content on Facebook & Twitter. It’s unbelievable. My connections on both sites “connect” me with more content than any library would have ever imagined. When I positioned Facebook as a publishing platform, the pixels in eyes started to widen.
Libraries are - and want to be - gathering places for people to connect with content, with ideas, with knowledge, with experts, and with other people to learn new things, solve problems, explore issues and entertain themselves. If they begin to accept that sites like Facebook enlarge their capacity as that gathering place, both physically and virtually, to connect people with content, then they will move much faster along that continuum from acceptance to engagement.
Nancy Dixon just blogged about A-Space, a Facebook-like space for the US intelligence community. She mentioned this to me a few months ago when we were finalizing her participation in KMWorld 2009 and I’m really pleased to see the executive summary in this post and the full 30 page study here. It talks about how A-Space is shaping the analysts’ work bringing in cogintive diversity. It emphasizes:
A-Space is an environment in which analysts collaboratively create new meaning out of the diverse ideas and perspectives they collectively bring to an issue. Through this collaboration, analysts have the potential to break through long held assumptions to provide new ways of thinking about complex problems.
Networked relationships on A-Space provide a stream of cognitively diverse information without the costly time investment that maintaining strong ties requires.
A-Space is reinforcing the value of asking questions of colleagues, providing analysts the means to uncover flaws in their own data and reasoning.
A-Space is providing analysts a set of new practices to: 1) build cross agency networks, 2) gain situational awareness, and 3) hold discussions of interpretation, that operate in parallel with the normal production process. These new practices constitute an emerging model that provides a level of cognitive diversity not previously available.
The non-hierarchal nature of A-Space, results in analysts feeling that it is okay to offer their thinking even if it is not completely formed or thought through, increasing the speed of product development by eliminating faulty hypotheses early on and quickly settling on those that are viable.
This article, Beyond Facebook and LinkedIn, talks about social networking sites on the web that have more specific purposes or narrower audiences. It reminded me of Bill Drew’s Library 2.0 Ning community of almost 4000 members. So many communities, so little time!
Ever since Bill Drew pointed me on Facebook (FB) to this article, The Underwear Theory of Social Networking, it has been bothering me. It features a guy who does not want business colleagues as friends on FB. He’s dropping them. He feels LinkedIn is a better place for his business communications. Andrew Conry-Murray says on an InformationWeek site:“Here’s the mental picture I’ve created for the Big 3 social networking platforms I use.
LinkedIn is a suit and tie. It’s a conference room for business meetings, and people tend to be on their best behavior.
Twitter is a sports coat and jeans. It’s the hotel bar at a security conference or trade show. Technically I’m still at work, but there’s alcohol. The industry chatter, shop talk, and self-promotion gets salted with gossip, mild flirting, and swear words. You might even see a fight.
Facebook is boxer shorts and a T-shirt with burrito stains. It’s the couch where you sprawl out to watch “Family Guy,” eat Phish Food straight from the carton, and leave your socks laying around.”
And, now I’ve just read about employees being fired for their comments on FB. We know that people have always had less than flattering things to say, and do say it in many ways, what’s different about this media? Anyway, I like what C. G. Lynchhad to say on CIO’s Web 2.0 Advisor site,
“Transparency (with good, bad and ugly information) ultimately betters your organization and keeps it honest. Social technologies enable that transparency, and punishing employees for passionately engaging in conversations about where they work is a backwards way of thinking.” Same thinig Don Tapscott said about transparency in his book, The Naked Corporation, a number of years ago. Same thing Clay Shirky said recently at the FASTForward 2009 conference.
Don Tapscott, keynote at FastForward09, built on an his earlier books, Growing Up Digital, Wikinomics, and others as he talked about how a new generation is driving an age of engagement which aligns with the conference theme: Engage Your User. He talked about his new book, Grown Up Digital, about how disagrees that the net generation or digital natives (also known as millenials and Gen Y) is the dumbest generation (especially check out out Don’s YouTube video on this site) , and about how this generation is a powerful force for change in our world. He gave lots of examples including a digital native who has a year’s worth of one week jobs, and a 6th grader who went after financing for his business Playspan. I loved how he talked about the net gen attitude: work=collaboration=learning=fun – that’s the kind of workplace we all should want to see. And also his caution to organizations who do not allow the use of social tools like Facebook to be accessed. Here’s something you can use if your organization is one of those: I won’t go onto Facebook during work time or on work computers if you don’t expect me to answer company emails after hours or on weekends. Nice! Check out more info about Don’s talk and book, and also here, on the FastForward Blog.
I must have been really busy in the fall because I missed the report released by the Pew Internet folks called, Technology & Media Use: When Technology Fails. I found this report today while preparing my talk on Building Learning Communities for the Ontario Library AssociationSuperconference on Friday at 2.10pm. Of course, the report on technology failure especially intrigued me today because Facebook is down (at least for me???). I use FB for a lot of things and it is almost as bad as when the electrical power goes down — feels like an appendage has been lost!
Fantastic article about Jeff Trzeciak’s work as Univ Librarian at McMaster University bringing in Second Life (Cybary City), blogs and wikis, plus the training program underway to support this. Mohawk College joins Second Life next week. While you are looking at Mac’s site, take a minute to read Jeff’s blog where he talks openly and honestly about the Transformation initiative and the new groups he’s formed in Facebook, Association of Research Libraries and Canadian Association of Research Libraries.
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