A course for librarians who want to explore the institutional application of social media. Based on an established academic course at St. Cloud State University “Social Media in Global Context” (more information at http://web.stcloudstate.edu/pmiltenoff/lib290/ ).
Critically examine the institutional need of social media and juxtapose it to its private use. Discussion about the mechanics of choice for recent and future SM tools. Theoretical introduction to the subculture of social media. How to streamline library SM policies with the goals and mission of the institution. Hands-on exercises on creation and dissemination of textual and multimedia content and patrons’ engagement. Brainstorming on suitable for the institution strategies regarding resources, human and technological, workload share, storytelling, and branding.
This is a blended format web course:
The course will be delivered as 4 separate live webinar lectures, one per week on:
Wednesdays, September 21, 28, October 5 and 12
2:00 – 3:00 pm Central
You do not have to attend the live lectures in order to participate. The webinars will be recorded and distributed through the web course platform, Moodle for asynchronous participation. The web course space will also contain the exercises and discussions for the course.
‘Shark Tank‘ investor Robert Herjavec reveals the biggest mistakes small businesses make:
know your numbers. If you don’t know your accounting, problem
branding and marketing. Most people think branding is your logo. Branding is your whole package. Everything that your customer sees, feels, touches and interacts with.
success is in failure. if you cannot absorb failure, you will die
the difference between small business and academic institution, being that the library or the entire university, is that small business is reliant on itself; if it does not well, it perishes. The library and the university are reliant on external funds and can fester for a long time. But eventually it dies. In that sense, learning from the lessons for small business can help:
Branding is not mimicking someone else (another library[s)). It is not a superficial activity. It is not slapping pictures on social media. “Interact” is the key word. “Likes” in FB does not reflect complete interaction
know your numbers. Analytics is not about “likes” and “visits.” it deeper datamining, which can explain behavior and predict behavior
if success is failure, why safeguarding the social media in particular and the entire behavior of the library from “failure.” Isolating students or staff from acting with the excuse to safeguard from failure is practically isolating innovation.
Social media has the potential to facilitate much closer relationships between libraries and their patrons. Current usage of social media by the library community generally remains ad hoc and somewhat experimental, but the uptake of these tools is accelerating, and they will likely play an increasingly important role in library service provision and outreach in the future. Taylor & Francis has produced a white paper that analyzes current practices relating social media’s use in the library and how this differs by librarian job role. The sample was taken from academic librarians around the world, which also allows us to examine differences by geographic location. The goal: to establish how librarians are currently using social media in their roles, the most useful social media tools and best applications for these tools in a library setting.
explores a variety of social media tools in terms of how they can be used to organize information and communities. Together, you will survey and use a variety of social media tools, such as Delicious, Diigo, Facebook, Goodreads, Google Hangouts, LibraryThing, Pinterest, Storify, Twitter, and more! You will also explore how social media tools can be used to organize and disseminate information and how they can be used to foster and sustain communities of learning.
With the widespread use of library technology that incorporates social media components, intelligent objects, and knowledge-sharing tools comes the ability of libraries to provide greater opportunities for patron engagement in those discovery systems through user-generated content. These features may include the ability of users to contribute commentary such as reviews, simple point-and-click rating systems (e.g. one star to five stars), or to engage in extensive discussions or other social interactions. This kind of content could transform authoritative files, alter information architecture, and change the flow of information within the library discovery system.
Across generations, concerns for privacy may dissipate with time as specific technologies take hold or as people become aware of a technology’s benefits and value those over their value for privacy.
Library Privacy Guidelines for Students in K-12 Schools
On Facebook, go to Insights > Posts > Post Types to review the engagement by the type of content you posted (post, link, image, video). On Twitter, you can see a snapshot of each post you’ve made by going to Settings > Analytics > Tweets.
#2: Fine-tune Your Posting Schedule
On Facebook, go to Insights > Posts > When Your Fans Are Online. For Twitter, you can use a tool such a Tweriod to find out when the bulk of your followers are online.
#3: Inform Your Messaging
On Facebook, open the Ads Manager and go to Audience Insights. On Twitter, you can check your audience data by going to Settings > Twitter Ads > Analytics > Audience Insights.
#4: Boost Your Engagement
On Twitter, go to Settings > Analytics > Tweets and take a look at which post topics get the most engagement. On Facebook, go to Insights > Posts > Post Types and then switch the engagement metrics in Facebook to show reactions, comments, and shares for each post rather than post clicks or general engagement.
p. 1 definition of social media for libraries
six primarytypes exist: “collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites,” and two types of virtual worlds: “virtual game worlds, which ask users to follow the rules of the game, and virtual social worlds, wherein users can behave without rules in almost any way they like” (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010: 59) it is not that I disagree with such definition, but i wish there was a “door” mentioning “flexibility” and “necessity to reassess” what social media is every year, 3 year, 5 years
p. 2 definition what is strategic planning
identify the needs of your target audiences,
identify the ways in which you can meet those needs, and
identify ways to respond confidently and proactively to changesin those needs.
Where the organization is
Where the organization should go
How the organization can get there (McNamara, 2011)
It must be:
Flexible
Based on data
Maintainable
Regularly cared for
covers and confirms my notes to the SCSU library use of its social media:
p. 83 ask uncomfortable questions
in planning, we must be prepared to ask, critically consider and answer questions that make us uncomfortable (not only that I was not let to ask questions, I was ousted from any body that was making decisions regarding social media. I was openly opposed and rebuked for asking why 3 reference librarians will keep the passwords to the account for the library SM)
p. 83 Communicate
If your team communicates honestly and thoroughly, then positive feelings and advocates for your social media endeavors will grow. In the span of 6 months, I had to ask three times where are the notes of the social media committee kept and eventually i will receive an answer, which in it nebulous and apologetic form was practically not an answer.
p. 83 Don’t rush to conclusions
Satisficing often works, but it can also lead to conclusions that are less then optimal. In the fall of 2013, I had to fight an overwhelming majority opposing my proposal that social media needs to include student representation, since SM is about dialog, not broadcasting (see page 86) and the current staff and faculty see SM as another form of broadcasting. In the span of six months, by the summer of 2014 library staff and faculty had fallen in the other extreme, letting one single student run all library SM. That student did/could not have understanding of the scope and goals of the library resulting in satisficing.
p. 84 aim for consensus, but don’t require it Consensus was the leitmotiv of the dean; it failed in general, and it failed in SM.
p. 84 get an external reviewer
p. 84 value and celebrate small success
a strategic plan will be realized through a series of small actions, not one or two pivotal plots.
p. 84 create accountability
p. 86 maintain a consistent tone and brand
visual and tone based consistency. This library DOES maintain consistency by posting Instagram pictures of people covering their faces with books, so part of their face compliments a face on cover of books. It is done by other libraries and it would have been cute and original if not overdone. If the SM activities of a library consist mostly of such activities then the “branding” part definitely is hurt. Yet, the faculty in this library vehemently adhere to “let’s see what other libraries are doing,” but does not understand that it needs further conceptualizing to figure out how to transform into “brand.”
p. 86 capitalize on the strengths of social media
“in many cases, business and libraries use SM exactly as they use their websites: to push content. This has been the main criticism from the start: the three reference librarians holding the passwords to the SM account were using Facebook as a announcement board and kept dormant the other accounts. The resolution of the library faculty who was called to arbitrate the argument with these three librarian: “I don’t understand very well Facebook.” The interim dean, who, subsequently had to resolve this dispute: “I don’t use Facebook.”
p. 87 Metrics
Analyze and tweak plan
measuring success is about maximizing time and efforts, not about laying blame for shortcomings or failures. this applies to daily tasks and responsibilities and shuffling time, but when the organization does not have a clear overarching goal and clear strategy how to achieve it, then issues must be raised up. which leads to:
p. 92 Plan for conversation
the inclusion of conversation. incorporate your patrons as primary content creators (not appointing just a single student worker to broadcast)
p. 92 use SM as an assessment or feedback tool
p. 93 plan to monitor your brand
if you decide to start watching these types of mentions, you’ll want to consider whether you’ll adopt a passive or an active role in responding to them.
Beyond social media, there is also a clear disconnect between how college admins reach out to their students and what students actually pay attention to. While the average college admin, like most adults, is used to reading and sending emails, students are quickly moving away from using email in their daily lives and getting them to check it regularly is painful.
A fantastic New York Times article in the fall examined college student use of technology and the results were fascinating.
While some faculty members are hesitant to contact students on whichever social media platform is in vogue, others have explored texting as an alternative to email.
The paper, which is being presented at next month’s Information and Telecommunications Education and Research Association conference, also recommends colleges should consider using texting and social media platforms to reach students. However, the findings still suggest email can be an effective method of communication.
How Millennials use and control social media, Published
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Social Media Usage Trends Among Higher Education Faculty ;
Since developing his theory of liquid modernity in the late 1990s – which describes our age as one in which “all agreements are temporary, fleeting, and valid only until further notice” – he has become a leading figure in the field of sociology.
Q. You are skeptical of the way people protest through social media, of so-called “armchair activism,” and say that the internet is dumbing us down with cheap entertainment. So would you say that the social networks are the new opium of the people?
A. The question of identity has changed from being something you are born with to a task: you have to create your own community. But communities aren’t created, and you either have one or you don’t. What the social networks can create is a substitute. The difference between a community and a network is that you belong to a community, but a network belongs to you. You feel in control. You can add friends if you wish, you can delete them if you wish. You are in control of the important people to whom you relate. People feel a little better as a result, because loneliness, abandonment, is the great fear in our individualist age. But it’s so easy to add or remove friends on the internet that people fail to learn the real social skills, which you need when you go to the street, when you go to your workplace, where you find lots of people who you need to enter into sensible interaction with. Pope Francis, who is a great man, gave his first interview after being elected to Eugenio Scalfari, an Italian journalist who is also a self-proclaimed atheist. It was a sign: real dialogue isn’t about talking to people who believe the same things as you.Social media don’t teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy… But most people use social media not to unite, not to open their horizons wider, but on the contrary, to cut themselves a comfort zone where the only sounds they hear are the echoes of their own voice, where the only things they see are the reflections of their own face. Social media are very useful, they provide pleasure, but they are a trap.
The proposed social media privacy law, scheduled to be considered by the state Senate Wednesday, bars any institution from asking or requiring an applicant or enrolled student to disclose a user name or password for a personal social media account.
Under the bill, a student could also not be prevented from participating in extracurricular activities if they refuse to disclose social media accounts or provide a list of contacts associated with those accounts.
Yochai Benklerexplains: “The various formats of the networked public sphere provide anyone with an outlet to speak, to inquire, to investigate, without need to access the resources of a major media organization.”
Democratic bodies are typically elected in periods of three to five years, yet citizen opinions seem to fluctuate daily and sometimes these mood swings grow to enormous proportions. When thousands of people all start tweeting about the same subject on the same day, you know that something is up. With so much dynamic and salient political diversity in the electorate, how can policy-makers ever reach a consensus that could satisfy everyone?
At the same time, it would be a grave mistake to discount the voices of the internet as something that has no connection to real political situations.
What happened in the UK was not only a political disaster, but also a vivid example of what happens when you combine the uncontrollable power of the internet with a lingering visceral feeling that ordinary people have lost control of the politics that shape their lives.
Polarization as a driver of populism
People who have long entertained right-wing populist ideas, but were never confident enough to voice them openly, are now in a position to connect to like-minded others online and use the internet as a megaphone for their opinions.
The resulting echo chambers tend to amplify and reinforce our existing opinions, which is dysfunctional for a healthy democratic discourse. And while social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter generally have the power to expose us to politically diverse opinions, research suggests that the filter bubbles they sometimes create are, in fact, exacerbated by the platforms’ personalization algorithms, which are based on our social networks and our previously expressed ideas. This means that instead of creating an ideal type of a digitally mediated “public agora”, which would allow citizens to voice their concerns and share their hopes, the internet has actually increased conflict and ideological segregation between opposing views, granting a disproportionate amount of clout to the most extreme opinions.
The disintegration of the general will
In political philosophy, the very idea of democracy is based on the principal of the general will, which was proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century. Rousseau envisioned that a society needs to be governed by a democratic body that acts according to the imperative will of the people as a whole.
There can be no doubt that a new form of digitally mediated politics is a crucial component of the Fourth Industrial Revolution: the internet is already used for bottom-up agenda-setting, empowering citizens to speak up in a networked public sphere, and pushing the boundaries of the size, sophistication and scope of collective action. In particular, social media has changed the nature of political campaigning and will continue to play an important role in future elections and political campaigns around the world.
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more on the impact of technology on democracy in this IMS blog:
