Hi There,
My name is Roxanne Kalenborn and as you can see from my blog title, I am an MLIS student who lives in Vancouver. I just moved here last August from Minnesota and right now there’s nothing I am enjoying more than this rainy Vancouver winter, because compared to what I’m used to, this is downright tropical.
I’m really looking forward to taking this class and taking my social media skills to the next professional level. My previous experience has been both personal and professional. Personally, I have an account with all the usual suspects…Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, and Pinterest. I use these sites as a digital photographic record of my life, but I tend to shy away from sharing anything too personal or emotional as I know that basically anything I post has a possibility of staying online forever, so you probably will not see posts from me airing any sort of dirty laundry. Even though I am emotionally gun-shy on my own social media, I do find the subject of online sharing of personal lives fascinating, especially where people draw the line on what is appropriate to share with the world, and how our concept of privacy is changing. In my academic background, I kept a blog while I studied abroad in Dublin during my last semester of college as a way to keep my friends and family updated back home, and my school used my posts as well on their study abroad site. I’m really glad I worked on that project as it was a great way to document my experience and enhance it with photos that I may not have done on my own using a travel journal.
In my professional background, I have been the creator/maintainer of a few social media sites while at my previous job at the Minnesota Historical Society. The project I had the most responsibility for was the project “Tweeting the Civil War” where I used letters and diaries of Minnesotans who had experienced the Civil War and condensed them into tweets to correspond to the current date 150 years later. Although I have since passed the project on, it felt really good to get positive feedback from teachers using the site as an educational tool. While I worked in the marketing department of the Historical Society, I worked on the institution’s Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest feeds, and I really enjoyed it, although I found it to be quite stressful whenever I made any sort of slight factual error, because I could be sure that over a dozen strangers would be sure to call us out right away. So while I enjoy working on social media, I always feel like the stakes are higher because there is the feeling that you are being fact-checked down to the comma placement sometimes. I’m hoping by taking this class I can gain more of the theory of social media marketing and build my confidence in sharing online.
Hi Roxanne-
I was able to get to “Tweeting the Civil War” bu googling it (the link didn’t work for me). This project is amazing! I’ve sent the link to some of my family in Minnesota. This definitely one of the more ingenious ways I’ve seen social media used by an information organization.
Paige
I don’t want to minimize your experience of stress or anything, but I find that over time I actually appreciate the public’s ability to correct my errors. I feel like it’s less on me to make sure all my research and thinking is accurate if there’s a bunch of people willing to point out where I’m mistaken; my work improves, and so do my own logic and research. (But I’ve never done so representing an organization before, which might well change things; after all, it’s the parent org. that then has to deal with the consequences to reputation.)
Hi Roxanne,
Cool that you worked at the Minnesota Historical Society. I actually worked (and still do some contract work) for the Colorado Historical Society’s Publications/Marketing department which included some social media stuff. Your tweeting the Civil War project sounds pretty neat!
It must have been really interesting to be involved in “Tweeting the Civil War,” and I think it will be a valuable educational resource. But I can see that being responsible for such a fact based social media could be very stressful professionally.
Colleen, yes, it could be very stressful! While I had primary sources like letters and diaries to directly pull the content from, with Twitter only affording 140 characters, it was frustrating at times to pare down and paraphrase amazing passages of writing to a very simple tweet at times.
I wondered just the other day whether Foursquare was still operating (and indeed it is, I checked).
That “Tweeting the Civil War” project must have been satisfying. I’ve had several students over the years from Minnesota. I wonder why that is? SLAIS seems to be a destination for Minnesotans.
Hi Dean, sorry for such a late reply to your comment, it took me a while to realize how to use the comments feature! Yes, I really enjoyed implementing the “Tweeting the Civil War” project. It felt good to know that I was using our state’s archives to put our Civil War history into a modern context. The most challenging part to be sure was creating tweets for characters that didn’t leave their own letters or diaries, so we only had their biographies to draw on, and left the rest to hope that we could do them justice.