I agree with you, there is a WORLD of difference between the Library being involved in social media and LIBRARIANS being involved in social media. I sure am, as a librarian! I love talking shop on all kinds of social media. But I don’t do it as a library. I do that as an individual with interests. That’s quite different.

I agree with you that it would be an interesting experiment to have someone working in those media as themselves first, but with official purpose. I wonder how that would go. It might not be really authentic enough.

I see your point, but actually I disagree with you here. Conversation by posting tweets happens all the time, and many people use twitter in exactly this way. Sure, the posts are broadcast and then archived as a person’s twitterstream, but they are still very much short written contributions to a conversation, not discreet announcements. Twitterstream preservation was never the raison d’etre of these conversational tweets, only a by-product of the conversation to which they belonged (and for this reason they frequently don’t make any sense in their archived format, since you’re usually only seeing a part of the conversation).

Like you, I happen to prefer Facebook (or — groundbreaking concept here — plain old fashioned e-mail and phonecalls) for this type of conversation, but this type of conversation can still be very much a part of Twitter.

Beyond that, I do agree that institutional Facebook pages are not worth it, but that should never preclude an individual librarian from using Facebook. I’m on FB every day for professional purposses — discussing research and ideas with colleagues, and following up on news items from within the librarian community. Regularly I receive friend requests from other librarians from out of the blue. I’ve built up an extensive network of colleagues around the world this way (and no, I don’t just accept a request and think ‘yay, great, I’m done.’ I do interact with them). In fact, my professional activities in Facebook far outweigh any use I’ve ever gotten from LinkedIn, even though LinkedIn is supposed to be ‘professional’ and Facebook is supposed to be ‘fun.’

Sometime somewhere I would be interested in seeing a library experiment with having an individual librarian set up a FB profile for outreach and promotion purposes on behalf of the library — in other words have an individual fill the role typically assigned to an institutional page. Institutional pages are faceless, but an individual person’s profile has a face and personality. I’m curious if that would make a difference in generating patron interest in connecting to the librarian (my guess is it would depend on how much leeway the librarian had to infuse personality into the profile. And of course university policies addressing the rules of student-faculty interaction would come into play as well. But it’s an idea). If any of you have experimented with an individual profile of this nature, I would love to hear about your experiences with it.

MPOW’s Twitter feed has attracted a lot of good buzz from local media. That’s awesome. But the real use has been to put us front and center among other branches of our own institution using Twitter. The alumni association. The communications arm. Provosts and deans on down.

We couldn’t BUY that kind of awareness or attention before. We certainly weren’t expecting it… but wow, it’s an unbelievable win for relatively minimal investment.

As I’ve said, I’m not so sure about the place of libraries in social media in the long term, though I’m sure it’s got some fun elements right now. I don’t know that those are sustainable, but they’re fun and interesting.

We’re using Twitter because it’s free, it’s easy to feed into the website, and I can get multiple staff to update it from their blackberries. We’re not using the application the way people think we should, but the majority doesn’t get to dictate how the individual employs any medium, I shouldn’t think.

Our users are not in the age bracket that users Twitter. I have never seen Twitter on any of our library computers; facebook, yes, but not Twitter. I don’t want to exclude any of our users by insisting that they participate in Twitter via the application. That would be a profoundly poor use of our resources.

Should users actually attempt to communicate with us via Twitter, we would certainly respond, though not with an @reply. I have not indicated any unwillingness to do so, only that I do not expect that it will happen, and we won’t be measuring success in that way. But we have established far easier and less public ways to communicate with us directly and immediately, so I don’t anticipate that Twitter will be many people’s first choice means of communication with us. Our library is heavily used; we have to watch that we don’t go over our fire capacity on a regular basis. Putting lots of energy into Twitter as a global community isn’t as efficient as using all the tools we have available to us to communicate within our own building.

I’d love to see some research on the power and success of libraries and social media. What I’ve read and heard so far is that a) institutional blogs are often abandoned, and b) institutional presence on social media apps like facebook are resented and ignored. We have a Facebook page; most of the people who are “fans” are staff.

I think there is quite a stark difference between a public library and an academic library in this arena, however: our population is fairly restricted, and given that the library is the #1 study location on campus, most of our population end up within our walls. It’s more important to us to ratchet up that communication rather than to seek out new populations that don’t employ our services.

It sounds snarky (even though I don’t mean it that way) but the operative word in the phrase “social media” is social. That means communication, not broadcasting/narrowcasting. MPOW uses Twitter more than any other social media outlet, and we try to respond to each and every @reply we get, regardless of whether they come from one of our regular users or not. By being willing to engage in these conversations, we are finding that we are reaching people who don’t regularly use the library or those who only use it to check out materials for their children. Because we were willing to have these conversations, our followers are more willing to help us promote events or services by re-tweeting them.

If you only view social media as an alternative marketing channel for your library, I think you may be missing out on what makes using social media in libraries so rewarding. If you haven’t, look at companies who are doing this well and try to model your plans after theirs. Just like in the real world, you have to make use of those social graces in social media if you want people to become your advocates.

(Pardon any typos: I’m typing this from my iPhone.)

I get where you’re going, but I think the way to be truly effective that way is to actually have a class using something like twitter to interact around readings and lectures, and then deliberately monitor that. You’d probably need an institutional twitter clone to do it, but it could be done. The method is good, but in the long run, twitter isn’t capturing much of your community and your ability to respond to their questions is hit and miss. You’re merely giving preference to the people who prefer your favourite social networking tool.

Additionally: what would you do if something tweeted about cheating? Would you alert the instructor? Or what about a tweet about lying to get an extension? Your knowledge of who they are alters the nature of their ability to remain private: they might not be displaying their location anymore. At what point do you become a sort of spy for the institution, preying on social networks to make sure everyone is toeing the company line?

I’d rather demonstrate good practice by having an obvious and deliberate professional voice and leave the personal to the personal.

It would be nice if it were easier to get separate instances of some of these applications to embed and enmesh with existing institutional tools.