Subject: Is There A Social Media Librarian In Your Library's Future
Academic libraries are leveraging social networks to increase
opportunities to connect with students and faculty. Facebook or
Twitter are the primary social media tools used for this purpose, but
others are exploring how geo-location sites may play into a social
strategy. It's not clear how academic libraries are tackling these new
methods of marketing and promoting services and resources. Is
oversight for social media accounts and activity assigned to a single
librarian? Is the same staff member who oversees marketing and PR
taking on social networking? Are all library workers empowered to
contribute to the effort? We know little about how social media
responsibilities are handled, but it's unlikely that any academic
library has yet to create a dedicated Social Media Librarian position
- although whenever I say something like this in a post before the end
of the day there's a comment along the lines of "No you're wrong - we
have a Social Media Librarian here". With Facebook reaching its 500
millionth member and Twitter members tweeting over 50 million times
per day these behemoths can't be ignored. Corporate America certainly
isn't ignoring them.
Two trends point to a growing interest in taking social network
marketing quite seriously. First, many companies that market to
consumers are rushing to create positions for social media officers -
and that's at a time when no one is even quite sure what someone in
this position even does or what qualifies someone for such a position.
But who's waiting to figure all that out? Not companies like Sears,
Petco, Ford, Pepsi and many others. Second, MBA programs are adding
courses in social media to provide students with the skills needed to
get jobs as social media officers or at least help their future
employers create social media strategies. According to the article
these courses "focus on thinking broadly about social media, not just
Facebook and Twitter. Topics include the underlying psychological and
sociological foundations of social media and the metrics and
measurement tools for gauging the effectiveness of social media
campaigns. Students are required to participate in social media
marketing projects for big brands."
An important point made in these articles is that someone who is
merely a user of or participant in social media is not the same as
someone who truly understands how to use it in a business or marketing
context. Just because you tweet all day and watch lots of YouTube
video doesn't mean that you know how to turn social media into
proactive tools for getting consumers excited about your organization
and what it offers. For businesses social media is all about
influencing purchase decisions. How does that translate to an academic
library environment? One way in which academic librarians might become
better at using social media to influence library use decisions is to
become more adept at using the tools to get user community members to
do the work for us - by sharing the word about the library with their
friends. That's what happens when your user community members share
your library video with their friends - but you have to know how to
get that started. Another is to pay more attention to what is
happening in the world of business to learn how companies are
leveraging social media. Having said that, I always like to remind my
colleagues that saying we should pay attention to what corporations
are doing is not a statement that libraries are businesses and should
be run like one. Some good ideas emerge from the world of business,
and we should pay attention when they do.
Does librarianship, like the MBA programs, need to provide more
opportunity for LIS students to gain these skills, and if so how
should it happen? I still lean on the side of not dedicating entire
courses to social networking and media tools. There are too few
courses LIS students get to take, and they can learn about the
mechanics of social networking tools on their own time. Perhaps what
is needed is a course dedicated to library marketing and promotion.
Marketing and promotion appear to be the primary reasons to use social
media in the context of library operations. If that's the case we
should be educating LIS students how to leverage social networking and
media tools to create more library awareness and to get the community
to spread the word. That seems like a sensible way to introduce these
increasingly important skills for the Social Media Librarian.
http://acrlog.org/2010/08/03/is-there-a-social-media-librarian-in-your-librarys-future/
--
Regards
Fatima Darries
E-LIS SA Editor
http://eprints.rclis.org
www.highedlibrarian.blogspot.com
www.openaccesslibrary.pbwiki.com
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