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Social Media
More uses for Twitter
Apr 29th
Jason Miller, writing on Social Media Today,gives some insights into using Twitter as a tool for crowdsourcing market research.
Although not a replacement for more formal market research, Twitter does enable you to gather insight into your customers’ genuine thoughts and desires. You can interact directly with respondents without intermediaries and use your followers to help you by retweeting.
Don’t forget the value of incentives either!
Creation or curation?
Mar 21st
Rory Cellan-Jones (the BBC’s Technology Correspondent) was speaking on BBC Radio this morning about Twitter. He called it ‘the most important innovation for journalists in recent years’.
As he was speaking, I was reading this article by Steven Rosenbaum on Mashable who describes how social media has enabled a personal web publishing boom. Now that publishing tools have been opened up, the key challenge lies in getting value from this ‘information flood’. This includes ensuring that content creators gain access to appropriate audiences. As it’s got easier to talk, it’s becoming harder to be heard!
This is where content curation comes into its own. ”Data will be created with staggering speed, and systems will need to evolve to find, gather, and package data so that you can get what you need, when you need it, in coherent and useful bundles”.
This sounds like a job for the information professional!
Networking with NetIKX
Jan 20th
NetIKX (the Network for Information and Knowledge Exchange) hosted a sell-out event at the British Dental Association in London yesterday. Lively debate and discussion followed the presentations (by Nicky Whitsed of the Open University and Hazel Hall of Napier University and the LISRC). You can read more about the presentations and the discussions here.
NetIKX was created in 2006, but its pedigree goes back further to the Aslib Information Resource Management (IRM) Network which was founded in 1992. Members of NetIKX meet six times a year for presentations and discussion. The membership is a balanced mix of public and private sectors, from one-person bands to large multinationals. NetIKX is now in year two of its three-year Programme Framework. The next event, scheduled for March, 2011, will explore whether KM still has a role in organisational strategy (another lively debate, no doubt!). In May there will be a SharePoint seminar hosted jointly with CLSIG.
Further events in 2011 will cover risk management (July); the development of internal capabilities (September); and how Web 2.0/3.0 is transforming information services.
The growing popularity of professional networks like NetIKX demonstrates how keen our profession is on peer-to-peer learning and sharing. It also shows that, no matter how joined up we are through a range of social media, sometimes an animated, face-to-face discussion over coffee or wine is the best possible learning experience.
Blogs in the classroom
Jan 18th
David Ng has written this particularly uplifting article about the use of a classroom science blog by American school students. The students of Stacy Baker can be seen enthusing about their biology blog, which has given them the opportunity to create content that they share with the wider scientific community. Their blog is so good in fact, that four of the students have been invited to blog for Nature Education.
Stacy Baker shares some tips for using blogs in science education here.
More networking in 2011
Jan 4th
Reading the papers over the new year, the general impression seemed to be that new year’s resolutions are not to be taken too seriously. I have already cast most of the papers into the recycling, but I have kept hold of the Guardian’s Weekend Magazine for Oliver Burkeman’s article (Abandon your resolutions)!
Burkeman recommends some ‘unplugged’ time as a way to regain the upper hand over our information sources. He is speaking of maybe one or two hours a day when we don’t feel compelled to check our feeds/blogs/facebook accounts etc. This concept was taken further by Susan Maushart in her gloriously titled Winter of our disconnect (currently book of the week on BBC Radio 4), who imposed six months of ‘techno silence’ on three teenagers. Ouch!
Meanwhile, Burkeman describes the increased interest in ‘self tracking’, using apps to measure anything from your daily water intake to the quality of your sleep. If nothing else, tracking enables us to benefit from the ‘Hawthorne Effect’ – the very act of monitoring something can influence a positive change in your behaviour.
My professional resolution this year is perfectly simple. I am resolved that in 2011 I will create more unplugged time to make better use of the networking opportunities available to me. After being taken to a great event by a friend in December, I have remembered once again the value of face-to-face conversations and interactions. I am already filling my diary with events and am really looking forward to meeting up with old colleagues and making new acquaintances. My first event, already booked, is the NetIKX meeting on 19th January at which Nicky Whitsted and Hazel Hall will discuss social media in the context of IM/KM policies and strategies. I’m really looking forward to it!
‘Educated Change’ to build brands
Dec 17th
Kevin Bryant (@kbrantuk), of Educated Change, stepped in last night for a sick colleague to speak at a Chartered Management Institute professional networking event.
His theme was how organisations can use social media tools to enhance brand value. His organisation focuses on helping organisations make the changes that help them maximise social tools. The tools are a part of a move away from ‘command and control’ to ’collaboration and conversation’ and some organisations may find the changes more painful than others! But Kevin showed that even firms that might be considered ‘traditional and hierarchical’, for example, law firms, are using such tools as Twitter extremely effectively.
The tools can also help smaller organisations, ‘punch well above their weight’.
The key messages of the evening were:
- organisations should aim to get a balance between ‘listening’ and ‘broadcasting’
- the ROI is difficult to measure and will be medium to long term rather than delivering immediate results
- a certain level of ‘personal’ engagement is required – not just one single corporate voice
- appropriate use of the tools us ‘common sense’ but organisations can, if needed, develop social media guidelines for staff
There were plenty of questions from the audience and conversations continued over drinks and networking after the formal event ended. A really good evening!
Person of the year?
Dec 16th
Time Magazine has named Mark Zuckerberg as Person of the year, 2010.
Zuckerberg has, of course, had a box office hit biopic released this year, and the award acknowledges how Facebook has ‘transformed ‘the way we live our lives every day’.
Fortune 500 favour Twitter
Nov 29th
The number of Fortune 500 companies actively using Twitter has increased significantly in the last twelve months.
B2B reports on the results of University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth study showing that 60% of these top companies now regularly use Twitter compared to 35% a year previously (2009).
The rate of public facing blog usage is increasingly much more slowly, with 23% of organisations using blogs, compared to 22% in 2009.
Keeping up to date
Oct 18th
Phil Bradley’s presentation at Internet Librarian International had audience members in a tweeting and note taking frenzy. He explained how he uses a range of tools to help him keep up with new technologies and how he uses social networking tools to share his knowledge and insight with his networks.
He then went on to share his latest discoveries, highlighting tools that can help us perform a range of tasks from file conversion; checking website availability; password security checking; wordcloud generation and much more. Phil has been sharing his presentations via Slideshare since 2006. This presentation (‘What Phil has found’) is, of course, available there too.
ILI 2010- a Twitter trending topic
Oct 15th
Many thanks to our delegates for making us a trending topic on Twitter at #ILI2010!
