“How Social Networking Can Ruin Your Library’s Reputation”…08.18.09

Here is an interesting and valuable post from Social Networking in Libraries titled How Social Networking Can Ruin Your Library’s Reputation:

“…Here are some things that could happen and how to avoid them.

1. Trying to use too many social networking sites to promote your library. This can confuse your patrons and staff and be too time consuming. Pick one or two and focus on these.

2. Angering your patrons. If a patron becomes angry enough or annoyed enough they may use social networking to tell everyone about it and this can end up being a nightmare.

3. Not keeping track about what is being posted on your library social networking sites. This can cause content or comments to be posted that are spammy or that are not what you would like. If you are going to use social networking with your library then you need to keep track of what is being said and posted…”

FREE Webinar – “Introduction to Blogging for Nonprofits and Libraries”…07.30.09

Introduction to Blogging for Nonprofits and Libraries
Thursday, August 6, 11 a.m. Pacific time

Is your organization looking to expand your reach and communicate more directly with your supporters and community? Are you considering starting a blog to help you do this?

Join Becky Wiegand from TechSoup during this free webinar as she interviews Allyson Kapin, blogger for Care2′s nonprofit marketing blog Frogloop, and Jason Griffey, who literally wrote the book on blogging for libraries to discuss the ins and outs of starting a blog for your organization. From considerations like which tool to use, how much staff time to commit, whether volunteers and interns should help, best practices, and how to launch your blog into the blogosphere, we’ll discuss all the basics of how to get started.

Register today!

Harris Poll – Consumer Perceptions About Twitter…07.28.09

Would you like to know more? Read: Twitter’s Biggest Problem: Most People Still Don’t Know What It’s There For

Facebook Most Used Social Media For Sharing…07.20.09

Mashable! reports today that ”…According to AddToAny, Facebook now dominates sharing, with 24 percent of shares from the widget consisting of users posting items to the social network. That handily beats out email (11.1 percent) and Twitter (10.8 percent), making the world’s most popular social network also the most popular service for sharing content. This is undoubtedly welcome news at Facebook, as the site continues to emphasize sharing and readies its own real-time search engine…”

How Employees are Allowed to Use the Social Web…07.16.09

There is a useful post from Jeremiah Owyang from Web Strategy today titled Breakdown: The Five Ways Companies Let Employees Participate in the Social Web excerpted here:

“…I’ve noticed that there are three ways that companies allow employees to participate. Update:  On a related note, I gave my thoughts to CNBC about the roles of social within corporations.

Type One:  We Have No Clue
This model, where brands have no rules, no guidelines, and therefore no resources to help employees –it’s a freefor all…

Type Two:  Shut it Down
Fear is the primary motivator here, but in some cases, this is to protect employees and the company from liability…

Type Three: The Corporate Represenative
Some companies setup only small groups within corporate communications, or polished executives to be on blogs…

Type Four: Common Employees Blessed For Social
Last night, I shared the stage with Intel’s Michael Brito at Stanford’s continuing education program on web 2.0, he shared that Intel has a SMP program, which stands for Social Media Practioner. The different from the ‘tower’ model listed as type 3, is that this can include other regular employees beyond the refined executive…”

Type Five: Everyone Is Encouraged To Be Involved
Some companies that have active employees in the social sphere can benefit from having every employee involved…

Culture impacts how companies choose
So which model is right for your brand? It really depends on your industry, culture, and employee behavior. While many companies may select the first or second model in the next few years, in the long run –as Generation Y enters into the workforce, it’s undeniable that the third model where everyone is a participant of some form is most likely.”

Social Media User Survey Results…07.16.09

This is some interesting and relevant information from a post today on Mashable! by Jennifer Van Grove titled What Type of Social Media User Are You?:

“Back in May, Anderson Analytics worked with Greenfield Online to survey and interview respondents on their attitudes and behaviors regarding social networking. Based on these results, Anderson was able to identify and categorize seven types of individuals, from the social media pessimist to the social media maven.

They then used the data to publish a report on the lifestyles, behaviors, spending habits, and income levels for each of their identified categories. The results are in, and the largest percentage of social network service users are business users (31.8%), which they estimate correlates to a total segment of 35 million users with an average age of 33 and an average income of $56k….”

10 Tips to Manage Your Social Media…07.08.09

Here is an excerpt from Part 1 of a helpful MakeUseOf.com‘s post 20 Tips to Manage Your Online Social Life — Part 1:

“…1. Visualize Your Social Map

Use pen and paper or mind mapping services like MindMeister to draw your social network or social map…

2. Define Your Target Audience

For each network where you share data, define your target audience…

3. Use a Password Manager

When we sign up with a lot of different web services, we are tempted to use the same password across several websites. The problem with using different passwords was remembering all of them…

4. Separate Private & Public Photo-Sharing

Use two or more photo-sharing sites for different types of photos…

5. Use One Social Bookmarking Site

Social bookmarking helps keep all your bookmarks together, easily search and tag them, and share them with your friends. Do not spread your bookmarks across different sites. Choose Digg, Delicious, Redditt, or any other service you fancy and stick to it…

6. Use a Gravatar

Use an avatar that looks good in both 64×64 and 128×128 sizes and save them for reference. Using a gravatar helps you get a consistent avatar across multiple sites…

7. Use Social Surfing

Do you browse a lot of websites, open separate tabs to social sites, and copy-paste to share interesting stuff with your friends? Or keep several tabs open to check updates in Twitter,Facebook, and Friendfeed? If you’re using IE or Firefox, get the Yoono plugin to make life easier. Yoono also supports popular IM networks. Or if you’re a power social user, try using the Flock browser…

8. Integrate IM, Email, and Social Networking

If you use a browser that doesn’t yet support plugins or are a heavy user of IM, check out the latest version of Digsby or Trillian…

9. Use a Consistent Username

For people to easily recognize you, use a common username across all sites…

10. Track Your Comments

Ever leave a comment on some blog or site and never visit it again? You may be disgruntling those who respond to your comment with a question. Get control of your comments across blogs, sites, and social networks, with comment tracking systems like BackType…”

Library Social Media and Customer [Patron] Service…07.06.09

The Search Engine Watch blog had a good post by Linda Evanas today relevant to libraries titled Customer Service in Social Media:

“… ‘The Undo Button‘ showed a Twitter conversation between a restaurant owner and a woman who had visited their establishment.

…This example demonstrates a few things about conversations in social media that any marketer can integrate into their strategy for entering the social media space.

1. Monitoring Pays Off: The establishment Brasserie Pavil was clearly monitoring their name in the social media space. If they weren’t monitoring their Twitter account and actively engaged in conversations with their audience, then they would’ve missed out on Bloom Maternity sharing her experiences with their establishment.
2. Engaging Conversations: Looking at the Brasserie Pavil Twitter account reveals that this restaurant is clearly engaged in conversations with its audience by tweeting, retweeting, and replying to its followers. Also note their ratio of followers to being followed. They aren’t using Twitter to broadcast what’s on their menu — they’re speaking to patrons about their experiences, letting their audience know about events, and so on. Actual conversations are going on.
3. Understanding the Power Community Members Hold: Brasserie Pavil recognized the power of the tweet that came from Bloom Maternity and what power the sharing of her experience at their establishment would have on her followers. By quickly recognizing Bloom Maternity’s influence and addressing her experience in a way that respected her opinion, Brasserie Pavil turned a negative experience into a positive situation.
4. Being Humble: Brasserie Pavil didn’t argue, nor take offense to Bloom Maternity’s tweet. They embraced it as an opportunity to make a bad situation better. Being humble, accepting the bad, and saying ‘I’m sorry’ when bad things happen to your customers are some of the best actions companies can take when dealing with potentially negative situations in social media.
5. Creating Fans/Evangelists: By being honest, forthright, and genuinely caring about Bloom Maternity’s experience and demonstrating that care with engaging conversation, Brasserie Pavil has likely created at least an avid fan in Bloom Maternity, who will relate this experience in a positive manner to her audience. Rather than continuing down the path of  ’this place was a disappointment,’now her experience is ‘even though my first experience there wasn’t the greatest, they cared enough to ask what went wrong so they could fix the situation that caused my disappointment.’

Investing in social media conversations is very resource-intensive. However, conversing with the audience in a genuine manner, not with predefined marketing messages, can have great rewards…”

Educational Objectives Taxonomy and Web 2.0 Tools…06.26.09

Thanks to the Baby Boomer Librarian for posting the following interesting image in Bloom’s Taxonomy applied to Web 2.0 tools today:

“…Like other taxonomies, Bloom’s is hierarchical; meaning that learning at the higher levels is dependent on having attained prerequisite knowledge and skills at lower levels (Orlich, et al. 2004). A goal of Bloom’s Taxonomy is to motivate educators to focus on all three domains, creating a more holistic form of education.”

Organizing the Library for Social Media…06.26.09

There is an interesting and relevant post from Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy blog discussing the latest Forrester Research survey today titled Report: Companies Should Organize for Social Media in a “Hub and Spoke” Model which is excerpted here:

“I often get asked by brands: ‘How should we organize our company for social media?’ or ‘Which roles do we need’, or ‘Which department is in charge’. So for our latest report (clients can access all the details) answers just that, it has data and graphs about spending, brand maturity in the social space, which department ‘owns’ the program, and how companies are organizing.

Companies organize in three distinct models
For this post, let’s focus in on how companies are organizing. There are three basic models that I’ve observed and surveyed brands:

1. The Tire (Distributed): Where each business unit or group may create its own social media programs without a centralized approach. We call this approach the ‘tire,’ as it originates at the edges of the company.
2. The Tower (Centralized): We refer to this centralization as the ‘tower’ — a standalone group within a company that’s responsible for social media programs, often within corporate marketing or corporate communicaitons.
3. The Hub and Spoke (Cross Functional): Like the hub on a bicycle wheel, a cross-functional group that represents multiple stakeholders across the company assembles in the middle of the organization. The hub facilitates resource sharing and cross-functional communications (via the ‘spokes’ in the wheel) to those at the edge of the organization (or the ‘tire’)…

The faster brands can realize that approaching social marketing and collaboration isn’t about technology, but about process and change management the better off they are…”

Social Libraries and the Growing Need for Social Librarians…06.10.09

There is a good INMAGIC post - When Libraries Go Social, Role of Librarians Becomes More Important Than Ever – that articulates the current and expanding roles of librarians as our professional and technological world continues to evolve which is excerpted here:

“When we talk about the trend towards social libraries, one of the next major questions on librarians’ minds is, What’s going to happen to me? How is my role affected? The answer has a bright outlook, because with social libraries comes the need for social librarians.

It’s a role that calls upon core skills of content management, organization, and tech savvy, and asks librarians to take them to a new level, making the role more important than ever. We’ll explore it more below in our latest Social Libraries 101 course.

In a social library, librarians continue to manage diverse information provided by content publishers, including business, scientific, technical, and community information (traditional, vetted content). But patrons are allowed to add tags, comments, and ratings (social content), which increases content quality, as we discussed last week.

A librarian is needed to oversee content development, maintain structure, and manage this content community. The social librarian assumes the crucial role of information organizer and moderator, managing both vetted and social information. Social librarians monitor and modify taxonomies as patrons browse and categorize information on their own. They sit at the center of the knowledge repository, and manage the knowledge community and its assets, such as by ‘weeding and feeding.’…

Creating a Social Media Policy…06.03.09

Here are some good points from Sharlyn Lauby’s Mashable! post 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy:

1. Introduce the purpose of social media…

2. Be responsible for what you write…

3. Be authentic…

4. Consider your audience…

5. Excercise good judgment…

6. Understand the concept of community…

7. Respect copyrights and fair use…

8. Remember to protect confidential and proprietary info

9. Bring value…

10.  Productivity matters…”

The posting also lists a real, sample social media policy statement.

15 Social Media Maxims for Librarians, Markerters, Etc…06.01.09

Here is a good excerpt to consider from SearchEngineWatch.com post 15 Social Media Maxims for Markerters:

“…Here are 15 social media maxims:

1. Successful marketers will be more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy; listen first, sell second.
2. Consumers are looking to peers for recommendations on products, services, health issues, and more via social media. Only companies that produce products and services of great value will be part of these conversations; mediocrity will quickly be eliminated.
3. Social media’s ability to quickly disseminate information among friends and peers helps eliminate different people performing the same tasks (multiple individual redundancies), whether it’s researching the best vacation spot or smart phone. This results in a more efficient society.
4. The old adage that you can only have two of these — cheap, quick, or quality — doesn’t hold true within social media. It’s possible to have all three.
5. Successful social media marketers will function more like entertainment companies, publishers, or party planners rather than as traditional advertisers.
6. With the increasing popularity of e-books, there will be new digital media placement opportunities for brands. This is very similar to product placement in movies, only this is for books, and the placements are clickable and measurable.
7. The most successful social media and mobile applications are those that allow users to brag, compete, or look cool by passing it on.
8. The transparency and speed of information exchanged within social media mitigates casual schizophrenic behavior. Having a ‘work’ personality and having a ‘party’ personality will soon become extinct. People and companies will need to have one essence and be true to that essence.
9. Being ‘well-rounded’ as a company or individual is less beneficial. It’s more productive to play to your core strength. This differentiates you from the competition.
10. Companies that produce great products and services rather than companies that simply rely on great messaging will be winners in a Socialnomic™ world. The social graph is the world’s largest and most powerful referral program.
11. Marketers’ jobs have changed from creating and pushing to one that requires listening, engaging, and reacting to potential and current customer needs.
12. Making multiple mistakes within social media is far better than doing nothing at all.
13. If you’re a large brand, you can rest assured that there are conversations, pages, and applications constantly being developed around your brand and by the community at large. The social community is ‘doing’ social media even if your company chooses not to.
14. The information exchanged in social media in relation to job searching and recruiting has rendered it unrecognizable from the information exchanged 10 years ago. Appropriate matches between employer and employee have increased as a result of an increased information flow.
15. The overall achievement of individuals and companies will be largely dependent on their social media success…”

Social Media Challenges – “Doing Social Media Right in 2009″…05.29.09

“Friending Libraries: Why libraries can become nodes in people’s social networks”…05.29.09

“Lee discussed Pew Internet’s latest findings and why they suggest that libraries can play a role in people’s social networks in the future. He described the reasons that people rely more and more on their social networks as they share ideas, learn, solve problems, and seek social support. And he explored how libraries can act as ‘nodes’ in people’s networks.”

Friending Libraries: Why libraries can become nodes in people’s social networks

View more OpenOffice presentations from PewInternet.

How to Share Your Social Media Identity…05.27.09

Excerpted from Mashable!‘s 5 Ways to Share Your Social Media Identity:

“…Retaggr is a really well put together utility that lets users create a social media profile card, which not only displays links to your other social profiles, but includes a bio, picture, and other vital information. Most impressively, though, profile cards are interactive. Retaggr profile cards have built in widgets that let you display some of your social media content – blog posts, recent photos, tweets, etc. – directly inside your card. That means that not only can the profile cards point people toward all the pieces of your social media identity, but in many cases people can actually view your social media content without having to navigate away from wherever you’ve embedded the card…

Geek Chart offers a unique spin on social media identity sharing. Rather than just make it easy to display links to your various social profiles, Geek Chart puts your social media use in perspective by letting you show exactly where you are most active. The site lets you create a clickable pie chart of your social media profiles that depicts your use of each site over the past 30 days — if you haven’t used a site in 30 days, the chart will not include that profile…

The Karma badge from alternative search engine DuckDuckGo is easily the most simple widget on this list. Essentially, Karma only displays social media links for sites that have some sort of ranking system, such as followers, points, or friends. It requires no sign up to create and works with 15 different sites…

If you want a profile badge service that supports that obscure, niche social network you’re active on, then DandyID is likely for you… Once you’ve added your services – a process made less daunting by DandyID’s clever use of the Google Social Graph API, which finds and suggests your profile links after you’ve added the first couple – the site can generate JavaScript or image-based embeds to share your social profile links more easily, and also gives each user its own profile page, similar to Retaggr…

FriendFeedoffers a lot more than just the ability to create and embed social profile information – but they do offer that service, so they deserve a place on this list.

FriendFeed supports 58 social media services, and their embeddable ‘FriendFeed Badge’ widget lets you share links to your profiles on all of them, as well as your activity on FriendFeed… One of the great things about FriendFeed’s widget is that you can fully customize the CSS to make it match the look and feel of wherever you plan to embed it. Rival lifestreaming service Profilatic offers a similar badge widget, as do many other lifestreaming services…”

How Libraries Should Use Facebook…05.27.09

I thought Stephen Abram‘s post today Facebook and Libraries has some important points about libraries using Facebook:

“There’s some emerging consensus on how libraries might use Facebook. I am no expert but, as usual I have an opinion.

You have a choice. You can create a regular Facebook Page or a Facebook Group (sometimes called a Facebook Fan Page). Simple really. What would work best in which situation?

As other’s have noted (here and here), it can be very problematic if you use a page for your library institutional presence. (‘Facebook ties a page to the account of the person who originally created it and I quote’ and ‘the original creator of the Page may never be removed by other Page admins.’ So, if your original creator leaves under a cloud your organization is at risk.)

Groups let you own your presence on an institutional level and allow the creator to be removed and assigned to others. For comparisons of pages and groups see this and this.

Of course the creation of a Facebook Group for your library does NOT absolve staff from having individual Facebook pages. Staff and management are individual experts and the key competitive advantage your library has against the generic search engines. If they’re not marketed well, and marketing themselves and building relationships with their key user groups then your library is just vanilla.

So, my opinion is that the library and it’s important segments have group pages and that librarians and key staff have their own pages. Try it.”

“Social Networking Literacy Competencies for Librarians”…05.23.09

Thanks to The Resource Shelf for pointing out the recent paper Social Networking Literacy Competencies for Librarians: Exploring Considerations and Engaging Participation by Joe Murphy and Heather Moulaison from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) 14th National Conference, Pushing the Edge: Explore, Engage, Extend at Seattle, Washington on March 14, 2009.

“From the Paper:

The social networking literate librarian possesses the skills necessary providing services in and with online social networking sites

Social networking sites are extremely popular across age groups and are central forums
for accessing and sharing information. Librarians are responding to the popularity of social
networking sites and their expanding role in the creation, use, and sharing of information by
engaging them as a central medium for interacting with library patrons and providing services to
meet their information needs.

Librarians need a new branch of skill sets specific to utilizing and leveraging social
networking sites to provide quality services and maintain their role as information experts in a Web 2.0 world.”

 

Librarians – Building Your Personal Brand on Twitter…05.21.09

Here is a very useful excerpt for librarians, libraries and others from Mashable! from the post HOW TO: Build Your Personal Brand on Twitter by Dan Schawbel:

“..By leveraging the Twitter platform to build your brand you can showcase yourself to a huge and growing audience.

1. Claim Your Twitter Handle

…By not reserving your domain name, your business or personal brand is at risk and you may never be able to reclaim it once you’ve lost it…

…claim the Twitter handle for your full name, as well as any products and/or companies that you currently own or you have plans to create in the future. You can’t truly own your personal brand if you don’t even own your Twitter handle.

2. Decide How You Want to Brand Yourself

Before you start actively using Twitter, you need a strategy, and the first step in developing that strategy is to completely fill out your user profile. One of the goals of having a Twitter account is to gain followers and few people want to follow an account that doesn’t look legitimate (i.e. the profile hasn’t been filled out and there’s no avatar).

Take a good look at your other websites and profiles and draft a Twitter bio to match the rest of your online branding. This is how people will find you and recognize you now and in the future, so be honest…

Once you have everything filled out, you should spend some time focusing on your Twitter background, which gives you an opportunity to extend your brand image onto Twitter and create a more cohesive experience for your followers. There are many sites that you can use to help you develop a custom background, such as Twitpaper and Twitterimage…

Three techniques for branding yourself on Twitter:

1. Lead with your company…

2. Mutual branding…

3. 100% personal branding…

3. Become Known as an Expert or Resource

Essentially, Twitter is a shorter and more viral form of blogging, so the same rules actually still apply, and by constantly writing or tweeting about your expertise on a specific topic, you’ll become known for it and people will gravitate to you and follow you. If you already have a blog, then I recommend using Twitterfeed, so you can syndicate your posts on Twitter automatically…

4. Establish a Twitter Marketing Plan…

Elements of a Twitter marketing plan:

• Email signature…

• Personal/corporate website…

• Blog homepage + posts…

• Email newsletter…

• Presentations…

• Business Card…

• Article writing / guest blog posting…

• Networking on Twitter…

• Promotional products…

5. Utilize Third Party Applications

There are literally thousands of Twitter applications out there, but only a few that can really help you build your personal brand…

• Twellow: Find people in your industry to follow and connect with using this Twitter yellow pages guide…

• Tweetbeep: Keep track of your brand reputation by getting alerts through email when your brand is mentioned on Twitter.

• Tweetmeme: Put a button on your blog that allows your readers to more easily retweet your posts.

• Hashdictionary: Keep track of conversations that include hashtags on Twitter.

• Ping.fm: Save time by sending messages to all of your social networks at once.

• Twitter Grader: A site that ranks your influence in the Twitter world based on an algorithm…

• Tweetlater: Schedule tweets so that they are published automatically in the future. It’s a real time saver.

6. Form a Twitter “MasterMind Group”

As you may suspect, certain groups of people on Twitter constantly promote and retweet each other. Some of them are in what are called ‘mastermind groups’ — groups of individuals who are committed to helping each other and sharing knowledge amongst themselves…There are a few Twitter applications that help you form these special interest groups…”

Libraries – “UNLEASH THE USERS!”…05.12.09

Thanks to Helene Blowers for pointing out this great video from the Aarhus Public Library:

“Overcoming the Top 10 Objections to Social Learning”…05.11.09

Here is a good presentation from Mzinga titled “Top 10 Objections to Social Learning“:

“The Whuffie Factor: Applied Cluetrain Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century”…04.21.09

The Whuffie Factor: Applied Cluetrain Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century post on BoingBoing by Cory Doctorow discusses the just-released today Whuffie Factor – Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt which many of us should read.  Here is an excerpt of the review:

Tara Hunt’s The Whuffie Factor is a quick, insightful update to books likeThe Cluetrain Manifesto, the seminal work that described the means by which conversations were conducted online and advised companies on how to join the conversation without seeming smarmy or patronizing. As Hunt points out, Cluetrain preceded the rise of blogging, not to mention Twitter, social networking services, and all the other key elements of modern online conversation.

Hunt’s book is a lot shorter on theory and manifesto than Cluetrain and a lot longer on practicalities, devoting a lot of space to explaining how all these tools work and citing examples of different commercial and charitable organizations that have used them to good effect (as well as citing cautionary examples of companies that bungled things badly, usually by being caught out in deceit of one kind or another)…

Hunt’s central thesis is that participating in community and gaining social capital is the fastest, most reliable way to attain success for products, services, causes and movements than advertising and marketing are, and she sets out to re-educate executives and marketing people who haven’t cottoned on to this. There’s something of a holy mission in explaining the networked, twenty-first century reality to successful but out-dated people, if only so that execs get enough religion to give excited junior people rein to do experimental and exciting things online…”

Getting Management to Accept the Need to Incorporate Social Media an Organization’s Marketing Plan…04.19.09

Here is an excerpt from a good post Why You Need a Social Media Champion from Search Marketing Gurus that is important for libraries, non-profits, and business: 

“Lets face it, Social Media can be pretty tough sell to the senior management or to clients who have just gotten their arms around the whole ‘SEO and PPC thing’.  Trying to force them into putting social media into a marketing plan can be a pretty tough sell if you are just looking at it from a dollars and cents perspective, or even a links & search engine results perspective.  The toughest thing with social media is that its rough on seeing the immediate return – except when it’s ‘bad’.

I use the term ‘bad’ loosely as it could be PR-wise, bad because something went viral and the traffic took down your server to you couldn’t sell anything, or bad because it just doesn’t seem to be working.  There can be a thousand other references to ‘bad’ and when things seem to go down hill with online marketing efforts in social media, ‘bad’ is usually how it ends up being described.

This is why agencies or companies need a person or a department that is their social media champion.  Social media is a vital part of marketing as a whole, not just online or offline.  It’s not something that can be attempted lightly, without resources being attributed to it, otherwise it will end up ‘bad’.

These are just a few of the reasons that if you don’t have a social media champion on your team you should consider getting one:

Dedicated to Creating a Presence & Conversation in the Social Media Circles Your Audience is in…

Understanding Your Audience & Objectives to Measure…

Help Set Social Media Policies…

Promotes Social Media Throughout the Company – Everyone Has A Stake…”

Social Media in 2009…04.17.09

Here is an excerpt from a Mashable! post today titled The Web in Numbers: The Rise of Social Media with some very interesting figures:

“2009 is the year of social media. Once, Twitter was a place where you could read about someone else’s cat. Now, it’s the first place you go to when there’s breaking news. Sites likeDigg, Reddit, and Facebook can now leave a huge impact on the real world; lives are changed, important questions are asked (and answered) there. Many milestones have been reached; the growth of nearly every aspect of social media has and continues to be enormous…

In March, YouTube reached 100 million monthly viewers in the US. 6.3 billion videos were viewed on the site. Its competitor, Hulu, is also growing fast, but not nearly as fast as YouTube. In March alone, YouTube has grown almost two Hulus in size. According to some calculations, YouTube will serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009…

Finally, here’s another sign of the times: Nielsen Online’s latest research shows that social networking is now more popular than email. According to their study, 66.8% of Internet users have used social networks, while only 65.1% have used email…

Twitter itself is growing at a crazy rate; although it already has a very large audience, it grew 76.8 percent just from February to March. Its yearly growth rate? 1,382 percent. According to Nielsen, Twitter currently has 7 million unique monthly visitors. If it keeps growing at this rate, it’ll have nearly 100 million visitors same time next year…”

Essentials of Combining Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing Tactics…04.15.09

This is an excerpt from a good posting today on Mashable! titled Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success by Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and editor at Online Marketing Blog:

“…Making the most out of combining SEO insights with social media marketing tactics can be accomplished with a road map that identifies the audience you’re after, the goals you’re trying to reach (and can measure) as well as a strategy that sets the stage for the tactics you’ll use to execute your game plan…

SEO and social media work well together as long as there is a framework for doing so. One way to build SEO and social media programs efficiently is to follow a social media road map:

1. Find the audience; understand their behaviors, preferences, methods of publishing, and sharing. Most companies that are involved with the social web in the channels where their customers spend time have a good sense of where to start. Many companies are ahead of the game by tracking their audience via social media monitoring software that identifies keywords, conversations and influencers…

2. Define your objectives. Objectives are often driven by marketing or sales, and SEO has long been directly accountable to substantial improvements in web sales. Social media is not direct marketing though, so different objectives and measurements apply. The role of SEO in a social media effort is to directly influence discovery of social communities or content via search…

Indirectly, social content can boost links to website content, improving search traffic and online sales.

3. Establish a game plan. The game plan for reaching objectives in a combined SEO and social media effort will often focus on content and interaction, since it is content that people discover and share…

4. Create a tactical mix. The tactical mix for a social media marketing effort is based on doing the homework of finding where the desired audience spends its time interacting with and sharing content…Much of the content creation and promotion for a social media marketing effort happens within the tactical mix and, of course, that means optimizing content for keywords.

5. Measure your goals. Goals measurement should roll up to the specific objectives, both direct and indirect. Leveraging both social media monitoring services as well as web analytics can provide marketers with the insight to improve results…marketers can use specific measurement tools to monitor the effect of their social web participation as well as the search engine performance of SEO efforts…”

7 Social Networking Tips for Librarians and Other Professionals…04.15.09

Excerpted here is good advice to follow for any social networking activity from 7 Social Networking Tips for Professionals:

“Recent headlines read: Twitter Gets You Fired in 140 Characters or Less, Facebook Photo Convicts School Aide of Drinking Charge, and (Philadelphia) Eagles Fire Disabled Game-Day Employee for Facebook Comments.

It would be wise to heed the warning that these headlines project: be careful how you use social networking.

The way people communicate is changing. Status updates on social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn or tweets on Tweeter are often used instead of phone calls and e-mails…

1. Think before you post. Things you put on your sites can and will come back to haunt you. Any pictures you show or updates you write are public. Even if your account has privacy settings activated, your information is never completely secure…

2. Make sure you have an online presence… You and/or your business need to stay up-to-date. Present and future clients, customers, business contacts, and potential employers will look you up… .

3. Remember that your online presence is part of your professional image. The content on your social networking sites creates your online presence…

4. Follow company guidelines…

5. Do not post negative comments about your employer…

6. Do not let social networking take over your life. Stay productive. Some people become so involved in updating their virtual presence that they let their other responsibilities slide.

7. Remember that phone calls and in-person visits are still an important part of doing business. It took four Facebook exchanges with a colleague to determine where and when to meet for lunch. If she had called me, the decision would have been made in seconds!”

How Not to Fail at Social Media for Libraries and Others…04.13.09

Here is a great excerpt from Liana Evans of Search Engine Watch today in her post Most Corporate Social Media Efforts Will Fail that is relevant to libraries, non-profits, and business:

“Last October, Gartner unveiled a study that stated that by 2010, 60 percent of the Fortune 1000 companies with a web site will be involved in some form of online community that is utilized for customer relationship purposes. What the research also goes on to state is that 50 percent of those that set out and establish or become involved in these communities will fail in their efforts.

…By following a few simple steps, you can avoid the fate of those 300 Fortune 1000 companies that will fail at social media over the next couple of years.

1. Identify Your Audience

Before you set off down the road of social media, it’s best to take the time and do some research into where your audience is holding conversations about you, your brand, or your industry…

If you don’t do the research to find out where your audience is engaged, you have no chance of connecting with them.

2. Define Your Success Measurements

How will you decide whether your social media efforts are truly successful?…

The area of social media you are focusing on will determine the types of metrics you’ll need to look at…Companies have to step back from gauging success of social media with the amount of traffic generated or products bought in this case.

3. Plan a Strategy that Includes All Stakeholders

…A social media strategy helps you plan for both the expected and unexpected. A social media strategy also helps to get all the key players on the same page, it brings all of your resources together and helps to make sure they are working with each other, rather than operating as separate silos.

…Anyone engaging customers in any medium needs to understand the company’s overall marketing goals, messaging, and customer service strategies.

In addition, if different stakeholders in your company are not communicating, you will eventually run into trouble when your social media efforts bear fruit…

Without a cohesive strategy, major blunders like these are more likely to happen, and the risk of your social media efforts failing increases tenfold.

4. Be Transparent

One of the quickest ways to fail in social media is to not be transparent about who you are and why you are ‘here.’ Social media is really about building relationships in communities and the conversations you have. Relationships are built upon trust, and if that trust is broken in any way, your efforts are wasted…

5. Recognize that It’s Not About You

Companies can be very egotistical when it comes to marketing. For years, it’s been all about getting your message out there so the customer will buy your product or service. With social media, this kind of thinking will get you ignored, or could even cause a backlash against your company.

Social media is about building relationships, and it’s about conversations. Conversations involve more than just you pushing your carefully crafted message onto the consumer. Social media is about a community sharing experiences, and companies listening to that…

Perhaps if companies take the time to work on some of these elements with their efforts in social media, fewer failures will be seen in 2010 than what Gartner has predicted. Social media can be a very effective way to get instant feedback that’s more ‘true’ than even a focus group could give. Social media can also be a very effective and successful marketing tool, but only if companies take the time to strategically plan for it and not just rush into it head on.”

Librarians and Others – Learn How You Are Being Evaluated By Your Social Media Footprint – Prepare to Be Judged!…04.08.09

This excerpt from Boris Epstein, CEO and Founder of BINC, a Professional Search Firm that specializes in the Software Marketplace, on his post today on Mashable! titled Do You Pass the Social Media Recruitment Test? is great to share with everyone who is or who will be in the job market:

“…So in today’s world of information overload where talent is literally available by the truckloads, I thought it would be relevant to write a post about how we evaluate a candidate’s social media footprint to determine (when all else is equal) which candidates we would contact and which ones get left by the wayside. I posed the following question to make it simple:

If all else were equal, like education, work history and general skill set, and I had to evaluate the social media footprints of two candidates to determine which one of them I would contact, which one would I contact and why? In my experience, I would contact the one who:

On Linkedin:

1. Has genuine recommendations from peers, managers and colleagues
2. Has the more complete profile
3. Is a member of more groups pertaining to their respective field
4. Has a picture
5. Lists interests, hobbies and other information related to their life outside of work
6. Participates and highlights their involvement in non-paid projects related to their field (open-source, community, volunteer, conference)
7. Updates their status more often
8. Asks and answers more questions
9. Links to their employer, blog and other projects of interest                            10. Has the larger network

On their blog:

1. Has interesting things to say about their respective profession and industry
2. Provides glimpses into their life outside of work – family, friends, hobbies, etc.
3. Does not bad-mouth their current or previous employer
4. Provides links to their other social networking profiles
5. Includes a link to their current resume
6. Updates with new posts regularly
7. Keeps it non-controversial – minimal discussion of sex, politics, religion and other such controversial topics.
8. Is more genuine and honest
9. Has a blogroll with link to other interesting blogs

On Facebook:

1. Respects the overlap between their personal and professional lives
2. Updates often
3. Posts pictures of friends and family but keeps them pg-13
4. Keeps it non-controversial – doesn’t take extreme positions on sex, drugs, religion, politics or other topics that could cause an employer to be wary of hiring
5. Is a member of groups relevant to their profession

On Twitter:

1. Tweets often (between 2-10 times per day is considered reasonable)
2. Has a healthy followers/following ratio
3. Has the biggest network
4. Keeps a healthy balance between personal and professional tweets
5. Doesn’t just update, but also responds to others and generally seems to get Twitter

When Googled:

1. Does not lead to something controversial like arrests
2. Leads to profession-related discussions and commentary on other social media sites
3. Leads me to their online blog, webpage or social media profiles
4. Doesn’t come up blank…”

Establishing Social Media Guidelines in the Workplace…04.07.09

Social Media Murk is a good post today by Helene Blowers on her blog LibraryBytes on a very important issue to libraries and others which is excerpted here:

“… I stumbled across this great little tool that helps outline the issues and impacts of defining soft media guidelines in the workplace. Truth be told, this is murky landscape for most organizations to tackle and it’s hard for a lot of folks to get their head around issue, especially when it comes to policies & procedures.

Personally, I like to think of policies and procedures as being separate and different from guidelines for personal social networking best practices. Both have there place, but serve the needs the organization differently.Policies and practices help to define the organization’s parameters for engaging in social media channels. Guidelines help to provide best practices for individuals who engage in social media channels on their own behalf while employed by the business.

…I might recommend looking at this great resource [Corporate Social Networking by Sacha Chua]- which helps you not only identify many of the questions to ask, but to also understand some of the implications for yes and no responses. Very helpful indeed!”

5 Essential Traits for Online Community Managers…04.07.09

Stuart Foster‘s good post today 5 Essential Traits for Community Managers is very important to libraries, non-profits, businesses, and anyone generating an online community to service our clients/customers/patrons.  Here is an excerpt:

“Community manager is the new it position in social media. To establish hardcore communities of evangelists around your brand, you need to have one…

I spoke to some of the best in the business to get their thoughts on what makes a great community manager…

1. Loving your job

This is absolutely essential and cannot be faked with any amount of money, time and effort. You have to absolutely love doing your job…

2. Abliity to promote others as well as yourself

It’s great to push content and provide awesome information about your company to your community, but you need to provide more…

3. Ability to empower and support your community

This is essential. You can’t use your new-found powers and access for evil (you can’t go against the will of the people – some circumstances excluded)…This requires a time commitment…

4. Transparent, fun and engaging personality

The ability to be yourself in print, on Twitter, and via other types of communication is extremely important…it essentially comes down to people skills…

5. Extensive knowledge about the company

Be able to answer any question, concern, or thought directed your way…Often you will need to break down cultures ingrained within your corporation’s DNA and this can’t happen without a buy-in from management…

Community management is a delicate balance; you need to be able to serve both your company’s needs and those of your company’s community. A lot of trust, respect and responsibility comes with being the voice for your brand. It’s a lot of power, but if you use it wisely it could be a boon for your company and your community…”