SOCIAL NETWORKING AT THE UMHSLConnecting with and informing our clients.

Agenda

Why social network? Social networking sites Looking dynamic with little or no effort Technogeekery (or how it is all

connected) Problems Where can people find us? Next steps

Why social network?

Branding / marketing / promoting the library

Being useful to our patrons in the places where they “live”

Understanding our users better Connecting with clients Getting feedback from clients & responding

Being social

What should we be posting? Promoting library events Promoting library services Linking to new resources Links to articles, videos, web sites of

interest Solicit feedback / polls New additions to collection Marketing Answer questions

Social networking sites

Facebook Large number of staff using this site Anecdotal evidence that clients are using our

computers to access Facebook. Had a UMHSL Facebook Group already

Twitter Lots of buzz about Twitter in the news media Lots of buzz in the library literature about the

usefulness of this site. Little anecdotal evidence to suggest our clients

are using it.

Social networking sites

Flickr Photo archive for UMHSL.

Delicious Possible way to improve link maintenance on our

pages. Still working out some kinks.

Posterous Can post from your e-mail and it will autopost to

a “blog” and a variety of social networking sites. Idea that we might use this site to highlight our

renovations.

Looking dynamic (with no effort) Problem with social networking sites is the

staff time to maintain them, HOWEVER … Almost constant stream of news and events

from nTreePoint sections: Health Sciences Libraries – News Health Sciences Libraries – Events Info-RX Info-RN

Capitalize on this and use the RSS feeds to populate social networking sites.

Why?

To see if we can. To establish a UMHSL presence where

our clients “live”. We think that people would appreciate

receiving the kind of news and events we offer in another venue.

Technogeekery

nTreePoint RSS feeds third party applications which in turn feed Facebook and Twitter RSS2Twitter Social RSS

Posterous feeds: Twitter Facebook page Flickr

How it all works

Twitter

Facebook Page

Flickr

nTreePoint

RSS2TwitterRSS

Social RSS

Posterous

Sit back relax and enjoy the ride!

Demonstration!

Problems

Events RSS feed – displays based on publication date not on event date. Investigate using YahooPipes! to mash the

feed into submission. Social RSS – Facebook page – formatting

is not pretty. Look at other third party apps to see if they

can do any better. What do we do with Delicious?

Delicious

Could feed links into Facebook page Have concerns about number of links …

would this be annoying? Could feed selected links to Twitter

Where can people find us?

Twitterhttp://twitter.com/healthlibrary/

Facebookhttp://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/pages/Winnipeg-MB/University-of-Manitoba-Health-Sciences-Libraries/98627719719

Posteroushttp://umhsl.posterous.com/

Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/umhsl/

Delicioushttp://delicious.com/healthlibrary/

Log in information available at the NJMHSL reference desk

Next steps

Promote our presence. Establish monitoring and updating

procedures. Evaluate our effect or the utility of our

presence on these sites. Consider offering a UMHSL presence on

other social networking sites (MySpace; jUMp)

Additional considerations?