Thing 12: Social media reflections

As discussed in previous posts, I have long been a social media naysayer. A combination of Luddism, privacy-lust and the probably erroneous belief that I have better things to do with my time has kept me away from Twitter, Facebook et al. Since I've been taking part in cpd23 that attitude is slowly changing, although in truth it's really only Twitter that has captivated me so far (but I do still intend to make the time to join and participate in LinkedIn, LISNPN and CILIP Communities at some point).

The advantages of social networking

The major draw of networking online is that you can do it at home, sprawled on the settee, wearing your most comfortable, least aesthetically pleasing jogging bottoms. Er, not that I do that, of course. I just mean that you could. If you wanted to. Ahem.

Could you attend the AGM of your local CILIP branch "dressed" like this? Well, could you??

But there are some situations where the usefulness of social media is not just based on the fact you don't need to change out of your jim-jams to participate. 

If, as I currently do, you work in a large organisation, in an established sector or branch of the profession, and your professional specialism is fairly common, then you are probably well-catered for in terms of physical-world networking and development opportunities. You have colleagues to talk to and ask for advice or help. There may be national and regional conferences you can attend. If you're a CILIP member there will most likely be a special interest group for you, with newsletters and training courses and the opportunity to get involved on the committee, if that's your bag. In this situation, social media platforms are a nice addition to your professional life, but not absolutely essential.

However, I've also worked in a job where I was the only librarian/information professional in the building, in a sector where there were only a handful of other people across the country performing a similar role to me (and they were in Leeds and Luton). In circumstances like these, without a ready-built community, you either have to do without or create your own, and social media can be the most effective, cost-efficient (and sometimes just the only) way to do this.


Any disadvantages?

But of course. 

In some ways, the convenience of social networking is also its biggest drawback. A real-world conference or meeting is a limited-time event: you turn up, with a bit of luck you manage to prise yourself away from the coffee urns and pluck up the courage to have conversations with a few other people, and then you go home. You might follow up the meeting with a bit of note-writing or email chit-chat with the other participants, but essentially all of your networking activity is confined to the actual day of the event itself. 

Not so with online networking: the conversations on Twitter and on the forums are always going on, and with them the possibility that you might have a new message or a new follower/friend. The fact that you never know when one is going to pop up only makes the urge to keep checking more compulsive, even when you really should be doing something more pressing or productive instead. If your social media accounts are based largely around your professional contacts and interests, you might even be able to kid yourself that you are doing something productive, even though you are just aimlessly passing time by repeatedly switching between browser tabs and pressing f5.

(NB: In the preceding paragraph, every time I say "you" I do, of course, mean "me".)

There's a nice little article here, from Oliver Burkeman's excellent "This column will change your life" series in the Guardian, on the effects of such "intermittent variable rewards", including how they can be used to reinforce positive behaviours. Ultimately, however, I don't know if the only way to overcome this compulsive activity is to get a grip and turn the bloody laptop off. 

 Can't look away?
(Picture by jypsygen)

Does social networking really help to foster a sense of community? 

I'm not entirely sure what this question is getting at, but if I were to bring my own preconceptions to the table I would guess that it's asking how concrete, long-lasting and ultimately meaningful are the connections made via social media? If introducing yourself to someone is as simple as clicking a "follow" button, how much of a relationship can you really build? I must confess that, among the people I follow on Twitter, the ones I feel most connected to and am most likely to converse with are those I have met or worked with in real life. 

Of course, connections made via social media can be reinforced if you later meet your online friends in person. I've booked a place at the Repositories Support Project's Autumn School, which takes place in a couple of months' time, and one of the things I'm most looking forward to is meeting people who I currently only know via Twitter.
 

A-meeting and a-tweeting new people 

As a final part of this Thing we are encouraged to make some new contacts on any of the social media platforms we're using. I am gradually increasing the number of people I follow on Twitter. When I first joined during Thing 4 I wondered how it was possible to follow hundreds of people without getting lost among the flow of information and conversation. However, I'm currently following 183 people or organisations and have not found it too overwhelming at all (or perhaps many of the people I'm following just don't tweet very often), so I will keep following interesting and funny accounts as I come across them. Once I'm following 500 or so people I reckon it will be time to start using Twitter's list feature to manage them, so that's a learning activity for the future.


 

Thing 6: Got my mojo networking

*rushes in, wild of eye and hair* Sorrysorrysorrysorry. I know I am ruinously behind on all of my Things. I offer two, only slightly flimsy, excuses.

First of all, I have recently been applying for (and getting – squeee!) a new job. This meant that time I would have devoted to Thing 5 was instead spent freaking out about preparing diligently and calmly for my impending interview; consequently I am currently running approximately a week behind the programme.

The second reason is that I have never used or signed up for any of the online networks mentioned for Thing 6 and I therefore wanted to spend a bit of time exploring them before writing this post. I realise that I am saying the same about every thing that comes up on this programme – “never used that”; “nope, don’t do that”; “have never even heard of that” – which kind of makes me conclude that it is a ruddy good job I signed up for this as I am expanding my knowledge and armoury of professional tools with every week that passes.

Anyway, enough of my yakking: online networking, let’s boogie.

Facebook
As previously mentioned, I’ve never used Facebook. This is for a variety of reasons: I’m a bit shy; I’m wary of splashing my personal details all across a public domain; and I already spend quite a large chunk of my leisure time piddling around unprofitably on the internet and am reluctant to sign up for what would no doubt be another massive time drain. I take Phil Bradley’s point, made in his discussion of Google+, that as an individual (or institution) you need to be where your peers (or users) are in order to connect and communicate with them – I just don’t want to put it into practice in the case of Facebook. And every story I hear about how hard Facebook makes it to protect your personal details and how difficult it is to extricate yourself from its clutches if you try to delete your profile makes it less and less appealing to me. So, soz, but me and the big FB are Never. Gonna. Happen.

LinkedIn
I’ve been aware of LinkedIn for a while now, but have always assumed that it’s not for the likes of me because:

1. I thought it was full of business people having business-y conversations about important business things. Business. I had not realised that there is a large population of library and information professionals on there.
2. I also assumed that it is most useful for freelancers and contract workers – people who change jobs frequently and therefore need to make sure they have a presence where employers can see and get in touch with them.

That said, roles in the librarian and information sector (along with, I guess, every other profession) are increasingly offered on the basis of temporary or fixed-term contracts: I myself have spent the last two and half years working in a succession of temporary posts, albeit at the same organisation. It was also quite an eye-opener to see, during the discussions of personal branding and online presence for Thing 3, that LinkedIn usually comes near the top of any Google searches you might run on yourself or other people.

So all these things considered, I will be signing up to LinkedIn. I need to sort myself out with a suitable profile picture first. I hate having my photo taken and indeed have only done so a handful of times in the last decade, which is why my current picture on Twitter and this blog is a hastily-snapped webcam shot in which the lower half of my face is cunningly concealed behind the 1986 Whizzer and Chips Christmas annual. Alas, this doesn’t quite convey the levels of gravitas and professionalism necessary for LinkedIn, so I will have to procure something a bit more suitable. I also need to tidy up/completely overhaul my CV. I’m going to designate “joining LinkedIn” as a work in progress, which I hope to complete in the next few weeks.

LIS New Professionals Network
I hadn’t heard of this before cpd23, but upon investigation it looks like it will be really very useful. I already recognise a lot of members from their cpd23 blogs and from Twitter. The forums seem pretty active, and the topics cover an interesting mix of practical advice and information about chartership, job opportunities and suchlike, and more general discussion points (is there a “new professionals clique”; how far would you travel or commute for your dream job; erm, do you like drum and bass). I also love the downloadable resources section and will definitely be referring to these in the future. I am not, by even the most elastic definition, new to the library sector (having worked in it on and off for 11 years) and I am currently in a para-professional rather than professional role, but what the hell – they seem like a welcoming bunch anyway. I have therefore registered with this network this week, will probably consult the forums quite frequently and, once I’ve pimped my profile a bit, may even contribute to it.

Librarians as Teachers Network
I don’t do any teaching as part of my current role. Which is not to say that I will never do any teaching in a professional capacity, nor that I couldn’t make use of some of the advice and resources posted here. Therefore, although I don’t think I will join this network at the moment, I have bookmarked the site for future reference.

CILIP Communities
I am a member of CILIP but must admit that I am not currently a very active one, have not even looked at the website for quite some time, and was only vaguely aware that CILIP Communities existed. The forums don’t seem terribly fast-moving and overall I’m not convinced that it offers a great deal of information or networking opportunities beyond those which are already available via other channels, Twitter in particular. However, I haven’t yet delved very deeply into the various individual networks on offer from the site. I will try to find some time do so in the coming weeks and will reserve final judgement until then.

So that’s two networks that I am definitely joining and will hopefully be participating in and two networks bookmarked for further investigation (Facebook, however, can continue to do one). As it turns out, this has been quite a productive and involving Thing for me.

Thing 4(c): P-push it: real good?

I’d not heard of Pushnote before signing up for cpd23 and, judging by others’ tweets and blogs this week, neither had many other people. Moreover, most people seemed to be distinctly underwhelmed by their first interaction with it.

I don’t know - I kinda liked it. It’s quite interesting, although of dubious professional utility, to learn that on Wednesday the third most popular webpage among Pushnote users was Bill Bailey’s message to Metallica. I’m still puzzling out how most of the features work (for example, I haven’t rated or shared anything yet), but I think I’ll continue to fiddle with it for at least a couple more weeks, before probably forgetting all about it. (The icon that appears on your toolbar after you’ve installed the Pushnote add-on is curiously easy to ignore.)

I think Pushnote’s problem is twofold. Firstly, although it’s a truism, to be successful an application like this has to fill a need (sometimes one that users didn’t even know they had until the application came along). RSS feeds obviously do this, in that they eliminate the need to trog repeatedly around the internet visiting your favoured websites and instead deliver new content straight to you. Twitter also does this, by providing a way to converse with others, share links and ask for help or advice, all in real time and in a much more immediate way than other applications.

Does Pushnote work on a need-to-use, as opposed to a nice-to-use, basis? It’s doubtful: there are already plenty of ways to share recommended websites with friends and colleagues. And if you’re a visiting a particular site or page under your own impulse, then it’s just as easy to have a quick look at the site yourself and come to your own conclusions, rather than relying on the comments of a bunch of people you don’t know off the internet.

Secondly, any social networking or sharing tool obviously works better the more users there are to network and share with, and I don’t think Pushnote has reached that tipping point. From the various websites I’ve looked at, even ones that must be heavily visited such as the Guardian’s website and IMDB have not received many comments. In many cases, comments that have been left mainly date from January 2011, when the service was first launched; there are comparatively fewer recent comments, which probably tells its own story.

Lord knows I am nobody’s idea of an early adopter, so it is a bit strange for me to be kicking around in an application that has yet to reach a critical mass of users. I don’t think at the moment that Pushnote is anywhere near as indispensable as Twitter or RSS feeds (or, no doubt, other tools I’ve yet to discover) but I’ll hang on for a little while longer just to be sure.

Thing 4(a): Twitter sweet symphony

I appear to have got a bit carried away writing up this week’s task, so I’ve decided to do three separate posts, to break up the text a bit.

Thing 4 of cpd23 is about current awareness and suggests three tools to help today’s busy information professional keep on top of news and developments. Since at the moment my current awareness activities extend to randomly visiting bookmarked websites and failing to remove my copy of CILIP Update from its polythene wrapper every month, I figure I could do with some help in this area.

First up is:

Twitter

Up until now I have been a Twitter abstainer on the twin assumptions that:

1. It’s full of people broadcasting banalities about their day-to-day business

2. I don’t particularly want to broadcast banalities about my own day-to-day business (and you can read below to find out how that’s working out for me).

However, the point of taking part in this course, and the point of professional development in general, is to discover new sources of information and ways of working, right? Also, the impression I’ve hitherto had of Twitter is that it is solely a means of spewing out your own thoughts; I had never even considered the possibility that it also functions as a sort of news feed, allowing you to receive other people’s opinions and news.

So now I have a Twitter account (@dianajwright). I wish I’d read thewikiman’s 3 essential things to do AS SOON AS you join Twitter before setting it up, since I had comprehensively failed to do any of them. This has since been rectified and I must say that I have really, unexpectedly, enjoyed my first week on Twitter.

I am following an assortment of real-life colleagues, cpd23 participants, other library and information professionals (principally those tweeting about open access and repository issues) and a few media types and famouses. From them I have picked up an astonishing amount of news, ideas and useful links, and I also feel much more engaged with my peers and my profession than before (for example, I don’t think I would have found out about the proposed North East cpd23 meet up, or at least not so quickly, if I wasn’t on Twitter). I am also following a few hashtags and saved searches: #cpd23 (natch), #uklibchat, #libday7 and #openaccess.

In spite of my hatred of the term “profersional” that’s approach I’m taking with regard to my own tweets, partly because a feed of nothing but library/work stuff could end up being a little one-sided and dry, but mainly because, with the zeal of a new convert, I’m finding it too damn hard not to broadcast my every random thought. (It took me just three days to begin tweeting about my lunch and, what’s more, I don’t even care.)

I do have a couple of caveats:

1. I’m still not au fait with all aspects of Twitter etiquette, such as having a direct conversation with another twitterer and properly crediting people via retweets, but I’m sure I’ll pick it up soon enough; and

2. I am a bit concerned about its potentially deleterious effects on my already-ravaged attention span.

Nevertheless, I have found Twitter about a million times more engaging and useful than I anticipated. I will definitely keep using this, at least for the duration of the cpd23 programme, by which time I will probably have a Twitter monkey the size of King Kong on my back.

I can quit anytime I want, right?! (Picture by carrotcreative)

Thing 3: Brand of Gold

First off: I was totes going to call this post “Brand on the run” until I Googled that phrase and learned that everybody who has ever written an article about branding or marketing has had the same hilarious idea – blast their eyes.

Secondly: from reading other people’s blogs this week I know I’m not the only one who felt a bit sceptical – not to say downright icky – about thinking of myself in terms of my “brand”.

But having read Jo Alcock’s introductory post on the subject I can agree that it is sensible to present yourself in a consistent, distinctive yet professional manner in your online communications. And just as in the real world most people would attend a job interview wearing a smart suit and a polite smile – as opposed to, say, turning up in a “Federal Boob Inspector” t-shirt and belching in the interviewer’s face – so on the internet we’d do well to keep some of the more, ahem, “frivolous” parts of our personality under wraps.

Jo asks us to run a web search of our names and see what results are returned. As I expected, there were almost no results related to me, just a couple of links to a directory I compiled in a previous job and a mailing list including my current work email address. Both are work-related examples, but they are buried in the third or fourth pages of results. 

This online absence has been a conscious decision on my part. Ramblings of a Trainee Bookshelf Prowler sums up the reasoning behind this better than I can.  Suffice it to say that even in the physical world I am somewhat reserved and private; online, just revealing my first name and a potted employment history on this blog has left me feeling unnecessarily exposed.  I’ve never signed up for Facebook or MySpace or LinkedIn.  I do have a Last.fm profile, which I tend obsessively as though it was my own child, and a LibraryThing profile, which I neglect like an unwanted step-child, but I don’t think you could identify me from anything posted on them. 

However, my reading and reflections this week have led me to wonder if maybe I am missing a trick by taking this approach.  Among the links to further reading that Jo provides, Danah Boyd and Dave Fleet both suggest that whatever the pitfalls of presenting yourself for public inspection on the internet, declining to do so entirely is not an option – or not an advisible one at any rate. There was also an interesting interview in last Friday’s Guardian with Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, about his new book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.  The author has misgivings about the fact that today’s digital information will most likely hang around forever waiting to embarrass our future selves, but even so states:  

I don't like digital abstinence. I want us to embrace participation in digital culture and global networks. Just not at any cost. 

The internet is where people live and forge relationships for much of the time now and withdrawing from it is like withdrawing from the world.

The good news is that, if I decide to build my online “brand”, I will be starting from scratch and so should be able to implement some of Jo’s suggestions – choose a meaningful user name and if possible use it consistently across all your profiles; decide how much you want your personal identity to overlap with your professional identity – from the off.  The bad news is... I’m starting from scratch.  I am going to see how this blog evolves over the coming weeks, although at the moment I am quite happy to use it mainly as a kind of personal diary in which I reflect on my cpd23 activities and basically amuse myself.  I also see that a future “Thing” is going to cover online networking, where your online identity is obviously of crucial importance, so I expect I’ll be returning to these issues – and possibly trying out some other profiles and platforms – then.

Although... as a final thought for the time being: I wonder if it is ultimately a bit futile to manage your brand too closely, as you try to second guess (often incorrectly) the impression you’re creating on other people.  A case in point: a previous commenter referred (in a nice way) to this blog’s title as “girly”; in the real world, I am as ungirly as it’s possible to be while still being in possession of two X chromosomes.  Before you’ve typed a word, every little decision you make about your online communications – what platform or software you choose, your user name, blog title, colour scheme – will say something about you, and usually they say different things to different people.  So you may as well just do what you like (within reason) and, in the words of many a tedious indie band giving their first NME interview, “if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus”.

Thing 2: Single and Ready to Mingle

Thing 1 on the 23 Things programme was to create a blog (done). Thing 2 was to have a nose around and comment on some of the other participating blogs.

I’m not naturally sociable and consider myself pretty hopeless at networking (in fact, one of the reasons I’m taking part in this course is to pick up some tips and ideas in this area). As the list of participants swelled alarmingly (there were around 100 when I first clocked in on Monday morning, increasing to about 350 when I got around to creating this blog later on that day, and at the time of writing there are now 576 people taking part) I felt like I was at a party where I knew no-one and was destined to spend the evening hugging the wall while nervously sipping at a lukewarm glass of white wine.

A useful tactic in such situations is to find somebody – anybody – you vaguely recognise and cling to them like a limpet, so I was relieved to spot my colleagues Christina and Louise and made a beeline to say hello to them. Suitably emboldened by these encounters, and by some comments left on my first post, I felt able to venture a bit wider.

Although I fiddled around with the tags on the Delicious list, I mainly picked blogs to visit at random. I was struck by Rhythm & Knowledge’s somewhat meta but very enjoyable post about the self-consciousness engendered by writing a blog and having your potentially cringe-worthy prose open to examination (not least by yourself). The Weeded Librarian and AngleD both touched on the issues of privacy and confidentiality that need to be considered when writing a blog about your personal or professional life; this is something that also concerns me slightly and is one of the things that has stopped me from writing a blog before. Younggeekylibrarian made me feel less guilty about my admission that I attend training and then frequently fail to implement the lessons or advice from that training, and wondered if we may be suffering from information overload, which certainly sounds like a better reason than my previous excuses of incompetence and/or laziness. Odd Librarian Out noted that the tendency to lurk rather than comment on blogs is a strong habit to break – as a perennial lurker myself, I have certainly found this week’s activity challenging but I’m glad to have begun the tiny babysteps from passive reader to active commenter.

On a side note, Dots & Loops is among a handful of people I noticed who are using tumblr to host their blogs. This is a platform I more usually associate with caffeinated teens furiously reblogging animated Harry Potter and Lady Gaga gifs. However, the cpd23 participants using it all appear to be stalwart bloggers who are giving tumblr a go as a bit of an experiment, and it will be interesting to see what use they make of it as a professional tool. For my own part, I am already ruing my choice of Blogger which, even for a blog novice like me, feels a bit clunky and offers mainly unlovely design templates to work with. I intend to faff around with the design and layout of this blog at some point in an attempt to make it a bit more visually pleasing, but at the moment I wish I was hanging with the kool kidz over on WordPress instead. Still, never mind, onwards to Thing 3.