Evan Williams, co-founder at Twitter, gives a Ted Talk about “listening to Twitter users:
“When you give people easier ways to share information, more good things will happen.” -Evan Williams
It is not always about giving people more information, it is about giving them ways to share their information. Information professional have the opportunity to take social media and use it to share information and engage users anytime, anywhere. It is the culture now to update status’ and give real time information.
Not only can sharing information take place through social media, but “listening” to individuals and what they are sharing promotes involvement which leads to collaboration. Listening and becoming aware of the information being shared and becoming apart of the conversation in real-time is where we are with social media.
So, as an information professional, these cultural changes through using social media should be encouraged throughout libraries. Using social media to share information and developing easier ways for users to share information should be added to the job description.
Some ways to effectively share information and promote collaboration using social media at an academic library:
1. Twitter
- Create a Twitter account and search for keywords to discover what student’s and professors are talking about.
- Share events and special programming happening at your library.
- Create a hashtag for events and tweet real time information so students can follow along.
- Ask questions for fast responses
- Watch for trends through hashtags being used.
2. Facebook
- Create a Facebook fan page and like other campus organizations.
- post events and photos to the Facebook page.
- Use Facebook as a way for students to get involved in any decisions to be made.
- Link to articles students and professors would be interested in.
These are just a few suggestions, but collaboration and participation can be achieved through a number of platforms. Libraries are still hubs for information, the way it is being shared is what is changing.
3 replies on “Collaborating and Sharing Information”
I think this is such an important point to remember – just because we can aggressively promote our institutions or our brand online, doesn’t preclude stopping and actually finding out what people want. I really appreciate it when the organizations that I follow post interesting articles – while I’m interested in what they themselves have to say, the articles provide other viewpoints and ideas.
No one commented on this 🙁 the TED talk you linked was quite interesting. I wanted to add in that people could use tools such as TweetDeck, to help them sort, filter and take control of their twitter feeds, especially as they start following more and more persons and get more involved with the network, They could also use tools such as Buffer, which covers Facebook as well, to schedule social media messages ahead of schedule, which is really good for when you want to keep engagement, or presence at least, active, even when you would not be able to use the platform personally, such as when you’re sleeping.
Nice, succinct post!
Thanks for re-sharing the “Gotta Share’ clip. I saw that a few months ago and it put a smile on my face. I think you have a good point with listening on social media. It is a much more powerful tool if media is responded too rather than just retweeted,