Top Ten Links Week 8

February 28, 2010 · Posted in Links, Read This · View Comments

My personally selected top 10 from the links I shared on Twitter from 2/19/2010 thru 2/25/2010

1. RT @VenessaMiemis: 16 free ebooks about social media via @fredzimny. Just look at this list of titles and authors :

Building a Social Media Team, Amber Naslund,
ContentCory Doctorow
Customer Service, The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media, Brian Solis
Fish Where the Fish Are – Mapping Social Media to the Buying Cycle, Chris Brogan
Getting a Foothold in Social Media, Amber Naslund
Let’s Talk: Social Media for Small Business, John Jantsch
New Media and the Air Force, United States Air Force Public Affairs Agency
Social Media and Network Starting Points, Chris Brogan
Social Media Time Management, Amber Naslund
Social Media Tips: Sharing lessons learned to help your business grow, Jeff Hayzlett
The Art of Community, Jono Bacon
The Essential Guide to Social Media, Brian Solis
The New Rules of Viral Marketing, David Meerman Scott
The Simple Web: A Philosophy for Getting What You Want, Skellie
The Social Media Starter Kit, Amber Naslund
What is Social Media?, Antony Mayfield

2. RT @VenessaMiemis: new post – reimagining human/social capital & how to spark innovation - Tapping the Network to Facilitate Innovation – How can the power and scope of social networks, combined with a human capital inventory, be used to facilitate shared creation and innovation?

3. RT @FluffTheBunny: Unlink your feeds – A Manifesto – as someone who is driving slightly (or slightlier) crazy by friends who dump their tweets into Facebook I can’t agree more!

4. Incredibly proud to be involved in the new Libraries & Transliteracy blog with @Tombrarian & @buffyjhamilton – oh come on, you didn’t think I could leave a mention of this out did you? I’m SO excited about this project!

5. RT @rww: On Facebook, You’re Really You - “Psychologists found that “faking it” online is tougher than previously imagined.”

6. No One Knows What the F*** They’re Doing and Feeling Like a Fraud – great read! via @griffey – I don’t know about you but I feel like this all the time, I’m just waiting for someone to notice I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve discussed it with friends and some people have called it the impostor syndrome (don’t look at wikipedia’s definition its too

7. RT @zephoria: UX Magazine (@uxmag) has published my “Streams of Content, Limited Attention“ today: Hope you enjoy! – An important read from danah boyd on information flow and “four challenges, points where technological hope and reality collide.”

8. Why are you apologizing? – Like all of Seth Godin’s posts this one is short but gets the point across. Don’t apologize for something you’re doing. Either don’t do it, or do it and don’t apologize.

9. How Social Is Too Social? – not everything is better with friends.

10. Empowering Parents & Protecting Children in an Evolving Media Landscape – Another important read from danah boyd et al “The FCC published a Notice of Inquiry (NOI) on the important topic of empowering parents and protecting youth in an era of an evolving media landscape. John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, and I took the opportunity to respond to the NOI on behalf of the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative at the Berkman Center. What we wrote should not surprise any of you who are following our work, but our research-grounded response may be of great value for those of you who are interested in this topic. For this reason – and because we all believe in transparency – we have decided to publicly share the document that we crafted.”

Rating 3.00 out of 5

Tags: <attention span, children, Facebook, fraud, free ebooks, impostor syndrome, information overload, Innovation, Libraries, parents, Social Media, socializing, Transliteracy>

Teaching Tech to the Public – Follow up from Internet Librarian

December 8, 2009 · Posted in Internet Librarian 2009 · View Comments

This Those of you who were in my Web 2.0 for patrons presentation might remember a woman in the audience mentioning the classes she teaches at her library. I promised to get with her and share the follow up. I emailed her and found out that Liz Hubert is a Adult Services Librarian at the Barrington Area Library in Illinois

This is the information Liz shared with me.

We do not currently have a wiki or a blog for our patrons, the program is entirely face to face and people can take (or choose not to take!) what they wish. Very shortly, we’re going to be putting videos of all of our classes on our webpage. Those will be linked with handouts so that people can watch the class and follow a written description at the same time.
I choose classes to teach based on the popularity of the service or website, how often I have questions about it at the desk, and how useful I think it will be to our patrons.
I take a very basic approach to all of these classes. Unless I’ve noted otherwise, in each session (usually an hour) I help students set up accounts and show them the basics of the service (for example, I show them everything from friends to walls to account settings in Facebook). Here’s a list of classes I’ve taught.

Delicious

Bloglines (we started out teaching Bloglines but we now teach Google Reader primarily)

Flickr (we showcase this one because we have our local history collection on Flickr-more than 15,000 items)

Shelfari

Internet Safety (buying and selling online, scams, junk mail, etc)

Blogs

Digital Scrapbooking (we’ve used several services for this)

IGoogle

Facebook (account creation and basics)

Advanced Facebook (account settings and privacy)

Craigslist/Freecycle/Etsy

LinkedIn

Internet Dating (we’re offering this one with a singles mixer in February)

Skype/Meebo

Wikis

Google: Beyond Searching (Images, Maps, Labs, etc)

Shutterfly

Yelp

Web Media (Pandora, Last.fm, Hulu, Boxee, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc)

Twitter

Business Twitter

These classes have really been a hit at my library. They generally fill up right away and there are often wait lists. I do my best to be as casual as possible when I teach them-I want people to feel comfortable asking questions. I have my email and phone number on my handouts so that people can contact me with questions or refreshers. I’m now also offering open sessions a few times a month so that people can come in and ask questions about anything they’re having trouble with.

She said they advertise upcoming classes on Twitter, Facebook, in their newsletter, and plasma screens in the library. Class size is usually 10-12 students at a time, but occasionally as large as 30-40 .

Rating 3.00 out of 5

Tags: <classes, instruction, Libraries, library, patrons, Social Media, social web, teaching, Web 2.0>

Control is an Illusion You Need to Let Go

December 2, 2009 · Posted in Change, Managers, Policies, Social Media, Social Networking Sites · View Comments

CC image courtesy of Bill Gracey - Gone to Mexico on flickr

The issue of control comes up over and over again when we talk about the online world. It recently it came up at Internet Librarian in many different ways, including:

How do I stop a staff member from wasting time on Facebook?
How do we control what staff are saying online?
Management wants everything posted online (Twitter, Facebook, blogs etc) to go through PR.
We don’t want employees to be able to access social networking sites?
What about privacy?
We can’t allow just anyone to post a comment without approving it first.
How do we know a student is who they say they are?

I have answers to all of these questions, but these questions aren’t what this is about, what they represent is, control. Or the illusion of control.

The desire for control comes from fear. Fear of change, of the unknown, of doing things differently, of a situation not created by us, of taking risks. It is human nature to fear these things, it’s how we’ve survived. So is adaptation and times are changing, just as they always do, and we need to adapt.

In the internet age your image/brand no longer belongs to you. It belongs to your customers. The things they have always been saying are now online for the whole world to see. The content and commentary they post about you may rank higher in search engines than your site or content. You can’t stop them. Every attempt you make will be like fighting the Hydra, cut off a head, two will grow back. I promise.

Prevent comments on your website? They’ll start their own blog or Twitter account or website. Implement a filter to block social networking sites? They will find a way around it (and you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face).

Stop wasting time trying to get control, you might be fooling your boss or the board or yourself, but you are not fooling your staff or more importantly your customers. Better yet, when you stop spending time trying to get control or pretending that you have it, it frees you and your time to address the real issues.

Still not ready to let go? Think about these questions from Andrew McAfee :

Are you ready and willing to let more internal voices communicate and shape your brand over time?
If not, why not?
Is it that you don’t trust your people, or your customers?
Is it that you don’t want any negativity at all to appear on your digital properties?
Or is it that you’re afraid there might be too much negativity?

Still not convinced? Or need to convince someone else? Try reading these: