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:
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
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
by David Lee King on October 29, 2007
Integrating Libraries & Communities Online, Glenn Peterson, Marilyn Turner
Marilyn Turner
bookspace.org – they made this. It’s cool. It brings together book lists, author lists, librarian tips, etc… many genre guides
it’s only focused on books – so it still has the traditional librarian bias to content
they include a librarian’s blog on each genre page
assign 2 people per genre pages
not volunteer activities – instead, they say it’s part of your job. Part of performance expectation! Awesome! Web Services Manager works with other managers to make sure web content is part of review process
Glenn Peterson:
Customer Contributed Content
user comments on books and other titles
harry potter and the deathly hallows – 234 comments! wow. they had 60 comments while the book was still on order – talking about how the stroy line would go. neat.
social features:
user comments
blogs
book lists
browse a list of recent comments
user profiles
name, about me, reading interests – that’s neat. theya’re looking at librarything’s profile for ideas
they have a wall-of-books – images of book jackets to see what books each user has checked out…
wanting to do: users wo are reading X are reading Y
wanting to create a friend’s list, a facebook-like wall
challenges – control issues – what can people leave on their profile
John Blyberg:
The Social Catalog
why bring social tools to the catalog?
three social catalogs:
pseudo-social – authority presented as collaborative (ie., Innovative’s ncore)
Syndicated social – third party data (librarything)
individually social – user-direct (hennepin, sopac)
il2007
Tagged as:
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online communities,
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