76 days have passed since I wrote my first blog post Social Media Beginnings. It was a summer’s afternoon during my holiday. Now autumn has firmly placed its grasp and the year is nearly a quarter gone. We’ve gone through a lot haven’t we? I have learnt oodles during the last 76 days, but I will share 3 thoughts with you here:

1. I need to find out more about danah boyd‘s work.

I was super impressed with her lecture at Politics and Prose. Her research on teens’ use of social media will be useful whenever planning digital spaces or teen programmes. While I’m looking forward to graduating and not studying, she’s definitely someone I want to keep on my radar. And she seems to collaborate with everyone.

danah boyd

Photo taken from:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Danah_boyd,_Writers_on_Writing_about_Technology_roundtable,_2009-09-30.jpg

2. ‘Social ties’ is going to stay in my vocab

I’d been getting around talking about good friends, work friends, old friends, close friends, people I used to work with, my sister’s friends, new friends, friends of friends etc etc etc, but what I really wanted to talk about was ‘Social ties’. I know Erika Pearson didn’t invent the term, but her article gave me the terms weak ties, strong ties, and latent ties, which is way more succinct.

Strong Ties

Photo taken from:
http://pixabay.com/en/neckties-cravats-ties-fashion-210346/

3. Social Media education is really important

This point isn’t particularly from a reading, a talk or a module but comes from the culmination of all we’ve done over the last 76 days. We’ve seen:
– how a social media profile can make or break a career.
– that social media sites are used in workplaces like IBM to enhance collaboration.
– people are really concerned about privacy issues with social media.
– some cool creative stuff is happening in social media spaces.

On and on I could go! But the one thing that stands out is that as information professionals, we have a role to play in educating people about social media. We’ve all tried a few bits and bobs ourselves as they’ve appeared along the way, but it’s getting very complicated now. The public have had info pros supporting them with media changes before and they would greatly benefit if we did it here. I’m surprised that a course like this one isn’t a compulsory unit for an Information Master’s degree, and I suspect that in a few years it will be.

So let’s go forth and socialise medialy 😉

Photo taken from:
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/6772/1888/320/friends.jpg

This is a little game for you. You’ll need to hit the link below to read the post.

Enjoy 🙂

Blog post here

Matt Weber’s description of IBM’s social media platform was fascinating. At the places where I’ve worked, we’ve had a clunky intranet directory for trying to find people. I’ve worked in very large organisations, and for the most part, it is a complete mystery to me who most people are, and what most people do! Sure, I’ve seen some colour-coded organisational charts, and have seen my box appear on some of them, but it seems very formal and rigid. The affordances of a social networking site would be far more effective for finding people.

I love the idea of a Social Networking Site for within an organisation. For me, it would make the other employees seem more human, which may seem slightly counter-intuitive given that it’s a digital space, rather than a physical space.

Traditional organisations have been structured with a head or CEO, with a small number of people who report to him or her. Then there are a number of people reporting to one of the people reporting to the CEO etc. etc., until you make your way down to several people at the bottom. In a library setting, this is usually the shelvers and the library assistants.

Here’s a kind of traditional structure:

Image from: http://1u88jj3r4db2x4txp44yqfj1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/chart.jpg

In the same talk, Nicole Ellison mentioned that it’s important to know who knows what. But she went on to say it’s becoming more important to know who knows who!

Traditionally, those at the top of the hierarchy tend to have more experience and know more (of the ‘what’ stuff). They are usually remunerated handsomely. Those on the bottom of the hierarchy tend to have less experience and to know less (of the ‘what’ stuff). They are usually on or near minimum wage.

If organisations shift to valuing more of who knows who, then perhaps these traditional hierarchies will be flattened. Perhaps this change in value, with the help of the tool of an organisational social networking site, would allow employees to meet others and work on projects that suit them the best, rather than working on projects within the bounds of their rank. If being connected to people is valued, then perhaps this would also have ramifications for how staff be remunerated. Following the recession, I’ve seen more and more highly qualified people struggling to get jobs. Sometimes they are ‘lucky’ to gain a position at the bottom of the hierarchy, despite knowing a lot of the ‘what’ stuff.

I would welcome a structural shift in libraries from being based on hierarchies to wirearchies.

Image taken from http://wirearchy.com/2013/05/09/co-creating-as-disruption-to-the-dominant-cultural-framework/wirearchy-gv-logo-normal-size-jpg/

This would allow the leveraging of social capital to help get things done! It may even help increase the value of libraries. Let’s give it a go!

This post is about experiences related to the course.

Before I took this course, I realised that I spent too much time on my social media accounts. I thought that with this tendency, along with being a member of Gen Y, I would be naturally inclined to take on a role, such as this one.

However, this course, along with an unusual event, has made me reconsider.

If I had to create public content on a social media account, and be responsive to subsequent comments, I think I would be very, very busy! The discussion forum has given me a taste for this.

I enjoy the discussion forum for this course, but it is a lot of work keeping up with it, while I work full-time and take another masters course at home. At times, I have needed to focus on my work or to write a paper for my other course.

Sometimes the forum is very busy, when I am very busy. I left it for two days at one point and there were 56 messages to read when I next logged in! Recently I attended a special family event in Auckland for the weekend. I had trouble logging into UBC connect on my phone and so I used my Mum’s tablet. This wasn’t ideal, but I was at least able to log in while I was out of town. A weekend away is nice, but becomes challenging when you have digital profiles to monitor. I wanted to be meaningfully present with my family, but I had to check in with my online courses. This gave me a taste for what it would be like if I was responsible for a social media account. Am I able to allow myself to switch off?

I love to mull. I love to think about ideas in terms of other ideas I’ve had, especially across disciplines that are not traditionally related. I love to ‘chew the fat’. Being immediately responsive to an idea within a week is a real challenge. Sometimes I don’t have an opinion on something yet, even though I want to. The digital world doesn’t always allow time to chew the fat. A social media professional would need to be able to understand many topics inside out, and be able to formulate a succinct, intelligent response immediately.

Another event this week made me realise that I might not want to be responsible to the media. One morning this week I woke up to discover that I was in the national news. A response I had given to an information request from a member of the public was on page 2 of our local newspaper and the main headline on our national news website! I had not given permission for my name to be published. The words that were attributed to me were actually provided to me by someone else! I was just the messenger! I wasn’t happy at all with the way I was portrayed. What startled me was that the online story was updated and changed every few minutes throughout the morning. The digital world moves fast. I felt completely out of control!

Someone plastered it on my facebook wall (which I removed half an hour later). My phone and email went ballistic. The bombardment overwhelmed me. The General Manager and his office spent the morning trying to control the media. I don’t come across looking bad at all, but I didn’t like the way it played out, especially without my permission. It was a verrry trite story and it was a verrry slow news day to make national news!

But this experience made me realise that being responsible for information that is being smeared around the public domain may not actually be my cuppa tea!

These two recent experiences would not be typical of working as a social media professional. But the taste for it has made me realise that it would be a very demanding job being responsible for an organisation’s online presence!

Social media is one of those things which I’m not sure whether I “love it or hate it”. In the early 2000s, I would set up various accounts as new ones emerged, but didn’t really use them a lot. Ringo and MySpace were two that I used moderately, until they went into obsolescence…

I’ll briefly describe my experience with Facebook, Twitter and Blogs.

Facebook
My first foray into facebook came in early 2006 when I was in my fifth year of university. An American exchange student raved to me about the wonders of it and took me dragging and screaming to the computer lab to set me up with an account. I told her that it sounded great, but that I was already on so many of these things, and I didn’t want yet another one. It seems absurd now, but I also told her that it was great that Americans liked it, but that it would never take off in New Zealand. But there was no arguing with her and for the first couple of months, I had her and her twin sister as my two facebook friends. By the end of 2006, I had some other university friends who were on the same networks as me.

Ofcourse the rest is history. In 2007 and 2008, every man and his cat created a facebook account, even right up and down New Zealand. I’ve been eating humble pie ever since!

I also have to admit that I’m addicted to it and check it over and over again each day. I’m not quite sure why I’m using it, but using it I am. I like to keep an element of privacy and don’t want to be one of those people who overshares, but I do like being able to connect instantly to friends across the city, country and the world.

Twitter
I took a lot longer to get into twitter. I didn’t really see why I needed another social media platform, when I spent so much time on Facebook. However, at the 2013 Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aotearoa (LIANZA) conference, I found over and over again that librarians were using Twitter as a tool to do their professional development. I also noticed that during the sessions, people were tweeting away! (Back in my day you shut up and listened during a talk, and kept your phones in your bag). It was enough to pique my interest and the following week my https://twitter.com/beth_wish account was born!

I’m still not sure what I’m using this for. It’s kind of a mash between a professional account, an interest account (I’m really into tramping, aka hiking), or a holiday photo sharing account. I expect that like Facebook, it’ll evolve naturally over the years.

Blogs
I started a blog with livejournal in 2004, right before I went to live in Canada for a year. I posted regularly about all the adventures I was having, and little differences I noticed between New Zealand and Canada. I had quite a following and really enjoyed using it. However, when I returned home, I found I had a lot less to write about. I wasn’t having the same adventures, and there was nothing fun about writing about the goings on at home. I tried to keep it up for a number of years, but I think I last posted something about four years ago.

I enjoy reading other blogs though, but like facebook, I found that I could waste at LOT of time! I’ve got an RSS feed on Raptitude and I feel that this has simplified things a lot.

So there’s me! I could write about others such as wikis or Instagram, but I fear you have other things to get on with today and don’t need to read much more. I believe I’m also supposed to mention HootSuite and Netvibes, but I’ve never heard of either of these things. Love it or hate it, I’ve got some learning to do, so I’m pleased to be taking this class to learn even more!

Just don’t let me tell you it won’t take off in New Zealand!