social networks

Google Plus – Should you and your Library be there?

by David Lee King on July 15, 2011

Google Plus is all the rage this week – invites have started spreading around (here’s a link to my Google Plus account – feel free to friend me!).

Some tech leaders have been making big claims about Google Plus, saying things like it will replace blogging, they’re moving from Facebook to Google Plus, it will take over Facebook or Twitter, etc.

Ok … Google Plus is only a week or so old. WAY too early to predict the demise of anything – especially of something like Facebook, with its 600 gazillion followers. Also remember that this is a third try for Google – Waves and Buzz both sorta fizzled out. let’s give it a good 6 months to a year to see if it survives.

On to the more important questions – should YOU be using Google Plus? Should your Library/organization?

You – this one’s easy. If you get an invite (or have an account already), by all means sign up and play around with it. Friend people, do some posting, try a video chat. Get familiar with the tool. Then either use it or not … that part really depends on you. But since it has some early potential in becoming another useful social media tool … why not at least play with it a bit?

Your library/organization – this one’s a bit more tricky. Or not – Google Plus isn’t supporting organizational accounts right now, according to this article from Search Engine Land. This article from ReelSEO goes one further, saying Google Plus will shut down an organizational account (though there are ~~a couple out there~~ [DLK - oops. Google found those, and they're now 404-nothing found pages. You might check this out for some news orgs, from Moonflowerdragon in my comments] anyway).

So for the time being anyway, Google Plus is an individual-only network. That’s great, because it gives you time to play with the new tool, and gives Google time to see if it’s a winner (translation = profitable) for them.

Once that happens, and Google OKs organizational accounts – should you be there? The answer is … it depends. Are your users there? If so, then yes. Recent national stats claim that 51% of people age 12 and up are on Facebook – that’s 51% of your community, so it definitely makes sense for most libraries and organizations to have a Facebook presence.

But for other social networks, it really depends on your organization’s goals, and on where your customers tend to gather. If they start gathering in Google Plus, then yes – you should figure it out and be there for them.

If not? Maybe not so much. Time will tell!

And a question – are you playing with Google Plus? If so – what do you like/dislike about the service? Let me know in the comments!

Tagged as: google, google plus, googleplus, social media, social networks

25 comments

Facebook and Privacy – is this REALLY a big deal?

by David Lee King on May 17, 2010

I’ve seen lots of posts on Facebook privacy issues the last couple of days, some taking about sharing, some about privacy, some just confused about the whole thing. Me? I’m of two minds about Facebook and privacy.

So I ask – is the privacy you [think you] have on Facebook REALLY that big of a deal?

On the one hand, of course it is. They should at least TELL you they’re going to do something before doing it. And they should let you opt in, rather than forcing you to opt out.

We are, after all, their bread and butter – no people, no Facebook.

On the other hand …. what are you trying to keep private on Facebook, when it comes down to it? Let’s take a peek at what you can share [or not] in Facebook:

First, there’s the “update me with your stuff” things, like status updates, new photos, and new videos:

If you want those to be private, you shouldn’t post them. Period.
Hello! Nothing’s private on the web. Even on Facebook.
If you want to share a status update with just some people, you can do that. Which is more than Twitter gives you.

Basic info, like:

Name: um … don’t open a Facebook account if you don’t want to share your name.
Gender: That’s rather apparent, isn’t it? Is it bad that you know I’m a guy?
Birthday: Hmm. I don’t really care. Should I?
Relationship Status: OK – so I have a recently divorced friend, and it was rather painful to watch his relationship status go from married to single to it’s complicated … back to single, etc. Maybe a case of sharing too much info, rather than one of privacy. So if your life’s on a rolloercoaster ride … don’t fill that one out.
Current city: big whoop. Google already knows this.
Hometown: That’s sort of important when connecting with past schoolmates.
Religious and Political views: I have em. So does everyone else.

Work and education:

Seeing that I have my resume online and brag about what my library does all the time, this obviously doesn’t bother me.

Likes and interests: stuff like music, movies, etc.

Oh man. You’ll find out that I like U2, Fountains of Wayne, and a weird, old-school christian alternative group (Daniel Amos Band). Will my life be ruined if you find this out? Nope. Will yours? I’m guessing not.

Contact info: So … the whole POINT with Facebook is to connect with people …

email: already published in many places online, including my website.
Mobile phone number: Not had a problem yet.
AIM, GTalk, etc IM: Already out there
Website URL: I want that shared.

Your friends list:

Is it bad that you know who I’ve friended? I don’t really think so. Then again, I’ll probably friend you if you ask, just for kicks.

************

Ok. It really doesn’t bother me that you know some or all of this stuff. At the same time, I DO know how to hide certain things – for example, most of my contact info is only available to Friends (as in people who friend me).

But – isn’t all this sorta beside the point? My basic contact info is already scattered all over the web. In fact, it was BEFORE I even had a Facebook account. My resume’s online. These days, I tweet, flickr, and Youtube you guys like crazy. So if you really want to know more about me, you can – with or without Facebook.

Want to talk about privacy? How about that credit card all of us plunk down in front of lots of 20-year old strangers every day at the mall or Walmart or a restaurant? Besides the kiddo who now has access to your credit card (not that anything’s ever happened to my credit card yet), every time you swipe, that company finds out more about you. Or how about your cell phone – your phone company knows where you are. Or Google? All those searches you just did? Yep. Google knows you.

Facebook and my taste in bands or what I said in a little text box? Not really on my radar.

How about you?

Tagged as: facebook, integrity, privasy, responsibility, social networks

28 comments

Humanizing your Facebook Pages

by David Lee King on February 9, 2010

A “Book and Digital Media Studies” student (wow – what a cool-sounding program!) emailed me last week, asking about my favorite university library Facebook Pages. Well … to be honest, I can’t say I frequent university library Facebook Pages much.

But I followed up a bit, and did a search in Facebook for university library then narrowed the search to Pages, and found over 500 university libraries with Facebook Pages.

As I browsed through the list, I started noticing that some Pages had low friend counts in the 0-30 range, and many were in the 70-200 range. And there were a handful that had thousands of friends:

TSDAS Digital Library, Open University Malaysia – 2141 fans
Green Library, Stanford University – 1438 fans
UP Diliman University Library – 4630 fans
Silliman University Library – 2789 fans
UCD (University College Dublin) Library – 1433 fans
University Of Warwick Library – 1529 fans
Yale University Library – 1167 fans

Why do these Pages have more friends? Glancing through them, it looks like they are doing one thing – they are humanizing their Facebook Pages. What do I mean by that?

They’re “doing stuff.” Stuff like this:

Posting regular status updates
Interacting with visitors in the comments of status updates – some status updates have 20-30 comments, as well as “Likes”
Pointing to stuff that’s happening in the library (ie., lectures)
Regularly add photos and videos – sometimes hundreds of them.
They use Facebook’s Events feature to list events.

How about libraries with a low fan count? Here’s one example – the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Main Library, with 7 fans. What are they doing? Nothing. They have 1 status update, from August 2009. Their most recent activity was adding the library’s website url, mailing address, and phone number.

So, to answer the question “Do students friend university library Facebook Pages?” (I hear that one a lot) the answer would be yes – IF those pages are being humanized. Looks like the pages with high fan counts have constant activity streams. Pretty much every day or so, something is happening on those Pages – there are regular status update posts, photos or videos are being added, and event reminders are being posted.

Basically, activity attracts Facebook users. Think of your Facebook Page like a party. Anyone ever attended a dead party? If there’s nothing going on, the party goers quickly find an excuse to leave, because the party is boring, right? In the same way, if your Facebook Page has no updates … your party is boring, and you are inviting your students to go do something else.

This is easily fixable if you do one simple thing. Post an update every day, and make it interesting. Examples from the Fan-heavy pages above include helping students out – pointing to a book/resource that has the “answers” for an assignment, just sharing an interesting tidbit of university or library news, sharing quotes, etc. Pretty normal stuff – just shared with Facebook users.

But if you’re not human, if nothing’s going on … no one will show up to your party.

Bunny by Alyssa Miller

Tagged as: digital experience, facebook, facebook pages, friending, friends, social media, social networks, status updates

22 comments

Making Connections – the Institutional Version

by David Lee King on May 29, 2009

Last post, I covered things I think about when making personal friend connections in a bunch of social networks I use. I also said “for MPOW, it’s slightly different – I might cover that in another post.” Here’s that other post.

As an institution, who should you friend? Why? This is pretty subjective of course, but here are some general guidelines to get you started:

Friend patrons/customers/members. Friend people living in your service area, or who are likely to use your services. Find them using tools like Twitter’s Find People search or any number of third party search services. Your goal is to share your stuff, your events, and yourselves with other people and organizations who can actually use and benefit your content in a social network.

If someone friends you, check them out. Look at their posts, look at their bio, and where they’re from. If they live close by, friend them. Then start sharing.

Friend other local organizations. Again, the goal is to share your stuff with other organizations that can potentially partner with you, or otherwise send people your way.

Friend others who are interested in your stuff. Have a local history collection that focuses on a certain individual or era? Friend others who are interested in the same things. This should hold true especially on social networks that focus on multimedia, like Flickr and YouTube.

Other Considerations

Facebook Groups – these can have a narrower focus, so you might be friending fewer people in a group, especially if it’s more of a niche group. For example, if you have a Facebook Group focused on teens, you’ll want to friend actual teens, rather than just anyone of any age.

YouTube – do your local news media outlets have YouTube accounts? Make sure to friend them, and favorite some of their videos.

Finally, be friend-neutral. Don’t agree with what the person says, or don’t like their content? Remind yourself that this isn’t your personal social network you’re developing, but your organization’s network. And most likeley, you take all shapes and sizes of friend connections.

Further reading: my set of posts on attracting friends, starting with Don’t Friend Me.

What am I missing? Any other groups it might be good to friend? Not to friend?

photo from sausyn

Tagged as: connections, facebook, flickr, friend, friending, social media, social networks, twitter, youtube

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SXSWi2009: The Future of Social Networks

by David Lee King on March 14, 2009

#sxswfsn is the hashtag

Charlene Li

Her paradigm – social networks will be like air. They will be where/when we need them – not site-dependant

Shopping as an example
- walk into a store, you see people.
- “walk into amazon” – who do you see?
- Showed a mockup of filtering reviews to people you know

Even TV is getting social
- newscasters have been inserting twitter hashtags into the news ticker feed
- Charlene really wanted to just see what her friends thought
- some set top boxes have this functionality

Enterprise networks are starting to be social, too.

Three things are needed to make social networks like air
1. Identity – who you are
2. contacts – who you know
3. Activities – what you do

Two sets of standards/rules that exist right now
- Facebook
- Open Stack

Many, myriad identities:
- she’s an author/writer person
- she’s a mom
- doesn’t want to blend necessarily

Friend management is tough
- facebook now lets you sort friends into groups
- she friended her co-author … at least 20 different times in a variety of places – why isn’t is just once?

Have to put our trust in someone
- with identity, with contacts, with activity stream

Talking about social algorithms
- ex. gmail showing your top 20 contacts without you asking for it

What gets everyone to be open?
- the money
- ex – Facebook Connect taps into offsite – this gave them more awareness, more people, more views
- ex – earthwatch trip

Talking about ads that can appear on many different networks

The Rise of the personal CPM

What should you be doing to prepare?
1. evaluate where social makes sense
2. think about your back end
3. prepare to integrate social networks into your organization

The idea of a flipped org chart with customer on top, ceo on bottom

I sent a twitter hashtag comment/question – her whole point is that social networks are like air. But then she’s basically suggesting that we should control where the “air” is and is not. So my comment – But if it’s like air, you can’t choose where SNs makes sense and where they don’t – it would be everywhere no matter what, right?

Tagged as: charleneli, future, social networks, sxsw, sxsw2009, sxswi, sxswi2009

4 comments

Don’t Friend Me!

by David Lee King on November 7, 2008

Libraries… stop friending me! What???

I’m noticing that when a library decides to start a flickr account, a twitter feed, or create a Facebook page, they naturally want to start “making friends.” So what do they do? They friend me. Or you. Or they friend other libraries.

This is bad.

Why?

Social networks exist to connect with other people, right? When your organization decides, say, to create a Facebook page … who are you trying to connect with? Me? I don’t live in your neighborhood. Another library on the other side of the world? They’re not going to use your services.

Who are you trying to connect with? If you can’t answer this question, take a breather from the web for a couple of days and figure out your answer. Think about it for a sec – you wouldn’t open a new branch if you didn’t know your target audience, would you? Do you invite people to a book group with no idea of what book to read or who the target audience is? I hope not.

It’s the same with social network sites – you need to establish a target audience, and then work on finding that audience. Once you do that, my guess is this – the friends you want to attract probably don’t include me or a library from the other side of the country!

Another way to look at this is from your customers’ point of view. If I use [fill in your favorite social tool here], and I discover your page, one of the first things I might do is check out who your friends are. If they are mainly other libraries, I might decide it’s a librarian thing, and not for me. I’m gone!

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great to get ideas from other libraries, and to spy on their social media tools to see what they’re doing. But if you can, try not to accept too many friend requests from other libraries … or your friend page will look more like an ALA reunion rather than a true reflection of your local community.

Update: This is part of my slowly-growing series on organization-based friending in social networks. Here’s what I have so far:

Tagged as: friend, friending, social media, social networks

41 comments

Jeff: Whatever. The campaign seems to have worked.
Jeff: Facebook is soooo….ten minutes ago.
davidleeking: You’re very kind – thanks for giving me the benefit of the doubt! Let’s see –...
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