Thing 10: Networking Tools

I have a Facebook page and have had it for years but I keep it strictly private and only share it with family members and a few of my closest friends.  To be frank, I don't really use it for communication as I prefer to keep in touch with friends and family more directly via Skype or email.  At any rate, Facebook to me is more a social thing and I have never considered using it as a professional tool.

As regards Twitter, I set up an account two years ago on the previous Rudai course and picked a few groups to follow but have never used it since.  To be effective, Twitter requires a lot of effort - crafting the post, responding to posts by others, and casting about for news to tweet or retweet - and after all that there is no guarantee that anybody will take a blind bit of notice of you.  It's like being lost in a vast canyon shouting, and hoping that the echo will carry far enough for someone to hear you.  To stand any chance of that, one should send several tweets a day and exercise constant vigilance, and to me personally it seems like an awful waste of time.  The work I do is quite monotonous by nature and I can't see anyone getting excited about news of me finding yet another rusty paperclip or filing a piece of paper in a shiny new folder.  I would only be creating pointless noise, and there is too much of that on Twitter already.

Can anybody hear me?

This is not to say that I don't appreciate Facebook and Twitter as networking tools.  Twitter in particular is brilliant for keeping up with the latest trends and developments, spreading news fast, asking questions, and connecting with people and institutions who share your views or post about similar topics.  As an institutional social media tool I don't think there is anything to beat it.  My department has had its own Twitter feed for the past two years now and it has done great things in raising our profile and making us feel as part of a great network of libraries, archives and enthusiastic information professionals.  The feedback and statistics have boosted our confidence and made our feel good about our collections - it is a great feeling to discover that they are appreciated not just by us but by the wider world!

I have also grown to value Facebook as an institutional social media tool.  When we created our Long Way to Tipperary blog, we set up a Facebook page to go with it.  One of the great benefits of this has been that Facebook allows people to make comment and interact with the project which the blog itself doesn't facilitate.  It has been a curious revelation to me that there are also those who don't read the blog but follow it enthusiastically on Facebook.


Image credit: Jay's Thought Stream