Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

IL2009: Micro Interactions, Conversations, & Customers
Speakers: David Lee King, Amy Kearns, and Julie Strange

DAVID’S TALK
David Lee King started by talking about the different types of interactions with customers that happen in libraries: commenting (positive and negative), status updates and comments on Facebook, Tweets, ReTweets, following, and friending.
David listed 5 Ways to Achieve User Engagement Nirvana

1. Say the stuff in your head: if you disagree with something, say it.
2. You have to give to get: you have to give participation to get participation
3. Ask and ye shall receive: ask for input, solicit participation
4. Listen first: listen to what users are telling you before jumping in with responses
5. Dangle a carrot: tempt people to engage (offer something for responses like cutting fines, free coffee, etc.)

Also, don’t be dishonest–hawking, tricking, and lying only hurts your online identity
There are a lot of tools that will help you get statistics.  Facebook page administrators show you a lot of data on who is using, visiting, and participating on your page.  Flickr tells you what your most popular photos are, how many views each photo has had, etc.  TuneMobile.com for video stats (upload it there first, then to YouTube). Radian6, ScoutLabs, Buzz, ShareAVoice, and Viral Heat measure social network participation and mentions about your institution.  Most charge, though.
The simple goal is to connect with your online community.  And it’s OK to focus on your online community because they’ve probably been neglected.  This group likes to participate – Twitter users by default are already participating.  In the question & answer period, David also mentioned two good Twitter statistical tools: http://tweetstats.com/ and http://twitteranalyzer.com/

AMY & JULIE’S TALK
Twitter was born out of a developer’s need to connect SMS messages with online activity. Twitter is just another tool to help us make connections, collaborate, and create conversations.  Twitter is often about pushing information out to our users to let them know what they should be paying attention to in a particular area.  If you go to Twitter’s Advanced Search, you can search for Tweets on particular topics, with particular emotion, and many other characteristics–all in real time.  They showed a couple of eamples from NLC_Reference’s Twitter account, Grand Rapids Library’s, Zappos stream, and Maryland’s virtual reference stream AskUsNow.  On the AskUsNow stream, the library posts questions that they get in from their other online reference services (anonymously).  They are talking with their vendor to see if there is a way to link back to their knowledge database from Twitter to point people to the answer through Twitter.  They gave examples of Duke University giving a Tweet warning people of a massive copier failure, Hillside Library Tweeting their upcoming events, and McMaster University Library’s Twitter feed showing up as a scrolling feed on the bottom of their large LCD screen displays in the library building itself.  You can also use Twitter as a way to solicit feedback from your followers – example of IBM asking about a new service.  You can also use it for crowd-sourcing (oooh, the hive mind!).  You can connect with customers for customer service.   You can broaden your professional network on Twitter as well to help get information to help you do your job better.  Twitter Lists is a new feature that lets you create lists of the people you are following.  This is a fast way to find other people to follow by finding lists that others have made and allowed to be public (much like public blog rolls work for RSS feeds).

IL2009