Social Networking Changes Blogging–from Michelle Kraft

Those of you on Facebook or Twitter can attest that many of us are now sharing links to news and blogs and commenting on them to our own “friends” on Facebook and Twitter.  conducted a study and found something interesting, most of the blog post awareness and commenting is now happening “off site,” (not on the blog itself).  People are increasingly being driven to blog posts by social networking, according to their study Facebook, Twitter and Digg were the top 3 traffic drivers to blogs.

Since 2007 PostRank has been looking at the top 1000 most engaging feeds and found they experienced a 30% growth in engagement, despite onsite engagement (commenting on the blogsite) falling by 50%.  Previously people followed a blog post through RSS feeds on their feed reader and through links (trackbacks) sent to them by other people or within body of another blog post.  PostRank’s study found that engagement from trackbacks has fallen from 19% to 3%.  So how are people finding blog posts?  Referrals from Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and other sites have gone up from 1% to over 29%.

You would think that with everybody sharing stories on social networking sites would cause an cause engagement in stories to increase and make it even more necessary to have timely posts.  Yet according to PostRank’s study there is a steady increase in the lifespan of a story.  In 2007 PostRank observed that the over 94% of all engagement occurred within the first day publishing and 98% of that all occurred within the first hour.  In 2008 and 2009 a story’s lifespan increased.  In 2008, engagement with in the first hour was 83% and in 2009 it was 64%.

Of course all of this information from this study comes from PostRanks, a company that has a dog in the fight with its own “social engagement” analytical software.  So I can understand why one might initially question the data.  Those of us in the medical world are trained to scruitinize data from drug companies and their products….read the whole story here: http://kraftylibrarian.com/?p=290

Finding Our Little Black Dress in the Online World–by Michelle Kraft

November 19th, 2009

Monday was spent attending the New England Journal of Medicine’s Library Advisory Board meeting.  This is only my first full year on the board and my second meeting but I have to say I have learned a lot about things that impact the publishing world and the medical library world.  As different as our two groups are, there are also quite a lot of similarities.

Of course we talked about the economy and its impact on libraries and publishing in general.  We also talked about what we saw in the future for libraries (everything from online expansion, smaller physical spaces, different librarian roles and services) and the future for STM publishers (enhanced online articles, different roles for the publishers, and licensing issues).

I found our discussion on social applications in medicine, libraries, and publishers to be extremely interesting (naturally).  When we met in the Spring, this topic was hardly discussed, but now 8 months later social media has exploded all over the Internet for the medical community.  Funny, we talked about what the future held for libraries and publishers at that Spring meeting, but honestly I don’t think anybody mentioned Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or any other social platform.   Yet it is now the must have PR and marketing tool. I think it is the little black dress, of the healthcare world.

A year ago if you asked me about hospitals getting on Twitter or Facebook I would have laughed.  Hospital IT networks are notorious for locking things tight, I still know of hospitals where the network is so closed the medical professionals can’t use the clinical workstations to access MedlinePlus to give consumer health information to  patients.  So to have hospitals actively using something as “frivolous” as Twitter in public relations, marketing and consumer health information, is quite a departure from the tradition and honestly completely unexpected to me.

But change is constant and we are not where we were 8 months ago and everybody in the medical world is hitting the social networking world big time.  Just like women searching for that perfect little black dress, hospitals, libraries, publishers, societies are all hitting the Internet looking for the social media application that is the right fit and style for them.  Just because they are little and black does not mean that all little black dresses are the same, au contraire.  One dress maybe too frilly and over the top to work for one woman, but it may just the right length and style for another who finds a simple sheath too plain.  The same can be said for social media applications.  Facebook might work for one organization but may not yield good results with another.

So it was interesting to learn how in just the 8 short months the folks over at NEJM have also been trying on their little black dresses of social networking.  Many things were discussed but the  things that stuck in my head were NEJM’s H1N1 site, health care reform Twitter feed,  Facebook page, Interactive Medical Cases, and CardioExchange.

The  H1N1 site was established by The New England Journal of Medicine in conjunction with Journal Watch to help monitor the outbreak.  The site contains research reports, commentary, news, updates, and a map of H1N1 cases through out the world.  Also included are articles from NEJM’s Archive about the epidemics in 1837, 1918, and 1976 as well as review articles on the management of seasonal influenza.

The H1N1 site is a great flu resource, but what I found most interesting is the neat way NEJM used blogging software to host the site.  Most people still think of using blogging software to run blogs such as the Krafty Librarian.  NEJM’s site while technically a blog offers so much more than just a regular old blog.

NEJM’s Twitter account is link to their Health Care Reform site.  You can find the feed if you search Twitter for NEJM or go directly to the Health Care Reform site ( link to the feed is located on the left side toward the bottom).  The NEJM Twitter account just focuses on information and stories pertaining to issues of health care reform in the United States.

Important to note the content on both the H1N1 site and the Health Care Reform site is free.

The New England Journal of Medicine’s Facebook page is aimed at a different set of users than their Twitter feed.  The Facebook site has over 25,000 fans many of which are from the United States and Asia.  Most of their fans are very interested in NEJM’s Image of the Week  and their Interactive Medical Cases.  Both of these things as well as other topics are posted on their wall for people to read and comment on.

NEJM’s Interactive Medical Cases site is new and offers CME.  To mistake it as another CME site would be an unfortunate error.  Each case is presented in a way where the patients’ history and information evolves and the doctor taking the Interactive Medical Cases is presented with a series of questions and exercises to test their skills.  Through the use of video, animation, and other interactive content, doctors are given immediate feedback on their answers and treatment choices.  At the end of the case doctors are given the opportunity to compare their final scores with their peers. It still is in a limited time pilot phase and is currently free.

Last but not least is CardioExchange which was just unveiled last week at the 2009 AHA Scientific Sessions.   It is an online community for medical professionals dedicated to improving cardiac patient care.  Just from the brief view I got of it on Monday the design is way more professional than Facebook and more robust than LinkedIn.  It has the look and professional feel of LinkedIn but it is way more interactive than LinkedIn’s glorified rolodex feel.  There a slew of online communities vying for medical professionals to populate their virtual spaces, Sermo just being one of the many.  Unlike Sermo, CardioExchange is for medical professionals engaged in the delivery of cardiac patient care, it is not limited to physicians.  It is limited to subject matter not specifically job description.  (Personally I like this, physicians do not practice in a void, but within a health care team. So it makes sense that it would be open to the members involved in the cardiac patient care team, not just doctors.)  Unlike many online communities, members profiles are their real names, they are NOT anonymous and members are expected to be forthright about potential conflicts of interest.  Unlike Sermo, personal information is not shared with third parties.  (I think this is also important.  I have always been a little disconcerted by Sermo’s ties with drug and medical device industry.)  As I mentioned there are a lot of professional communities out there, it will be interesting to see how CardioExchange evolves and whether it is successful, it is too early to tell right now but it looks like it is on the right track.

The New England Journal of Medicine is not the only publisher or medically related company to be hitting the racks of little black dresses in the social networking mall, nor will they be the last.  What is interesting is that they are trying on their dresses just like the rest of us.  They are evaluating what is too frilly what is too plain and what works best for each occasion.  As you or your library starts to peruse the racks as well, remember to have a critical eye in the dressing room, because not everything works for every body type.  What works well in one library and institution may not work at another.  It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try it out, it just means that when you are trying things out be prepared to evaluate it to see how it is being used, who is using it, and its usage statistics (if possible).  For example there are a lot of applications and sites that help you monitor your Twitter account, Facebook’s Fan Page provides lots statistical information as well.  Most importantly if it isn’t working don’t be afraid to try something different that matches your needs.  That might mean a different social networking tool, it also might be mean something entirely different and not related to social networking.

From NPR: How To Job Hunt In The ‘Twittersphere’

by David Gorn, Posted Here 11/2/09

With the job market still in the doldrums, the tech-savvy unemployed are trying to figure out new ways to use Twitter to find jobs.

Twitter can be used to post a job, ask around about one, learn more about a potential boss or keep your network of former co-workers and friends updated on your job hunt.

Best of all, it’s free, and faster than Facebook.

Microblogging services like Twitter sound simple, but it can be really hard. If you’re a serious “Twitterer,” you have to fit incredibly complicated opinions into a compact 140 characters. That’s a real art. So why shouldn’t it be considered a job skill, as well?

Becoming An Expert On Twitter

Jen McCabe says she got her current job in San Francisco through being an avid Tweeter.

“I absolutely would not be where I am today without the following and support of the people I meet on Twitter,” said McCabe.

In fact, McCabe has been called the Queen of Twitter among her health care colleagues. She used it to become an expert in a niche field inside the health care industry and would tweet updates from conferences and comment on breaking news. Powerful people in that niche field started to notice her and follow what she had to say.

For many, Twitter is a meritocracy. You are known for what you tweet. If you come across as a smart, hard-working thoughtful person, people are going to pay attention. That’s one way to get a job.

Twitter As Networking Tool

I absolutely would not be where I am today without the following and support of the people I meet on Twitter.

- Jen McCabe

The other way to use Twitter and other microblogging networks like Pownce and Jaiku is to simply network. These sites used to be mostly used by youngsters — but life on Twitter has changed. A significant percentage of users now are 30 and older, and they’re using Twitter to network for jobs.

That’s according to Josh Bernoff of the Forrester Group, a technology research firm. And for him, one particular feature of Twitter makes it invaluable for job hunters.

“The thing that makes a difference for people looking for jobs is the ability to retweet,” said Bernoff.

That’s when people pass along your tweet to other people in a different network. Bernoff says it’s a cyberextension of the adage, “It’s not what you know, it’s whom you know.”

“That creates a real echo effect for people who’ve got friends who have a lot of friends,” said Bernoff.

Filtering Out The Twitter Junk

Rich Trombetta has another idea. He co-founded a Web site called TweetMyJobs.com.

“We connect job seekers and job posters instantaneously via Twitter,” said Trombetta. “We take the noise out of the twittersphere.”

The idea is, there may be dozens of companies you want to follow on Twitter, but if you get every piece of info those companies tweet out, you could be swamped. So Trombetta filters out only the job-related info and sends those out as alerts. Microblogs, he says, are not just for fun anymore.

“You’re going to see that perception change as more and more businesses realize that … this could be the most powerful tool since e-mail,” said Trombetta.

So if you’re job hunting on Twitter, it’s not whom you know, or even what you know, but how you say it — 140 characters at a time….Read more here:  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120015220&ft=1&f=1001

From Michelle Kraft (again)-getting institutional support for Web 2.0

A few weeks ago I [Michelle] was a part of the Technology Forum for the Midwest MLA Annual Conference in Columbus, OH.  I spoke on libraries using Twitter and Facebook.  Later I wrote a blog post linking to the slides as well more of my thoughts on the topic.

Ever since then I have gotten a few emails from people asking how they can convince their IT departments to allow Facebook and Twitter so they can reach out to library users.  I have sat down and thought of a few good arguments for librarians to use with their IT people, however upon reflection I don’t think that will be very productive.

The short of it is, the IT departments are not going to deal with security perceived issues because the librarian wants to use social networking tools.  We can plead and beg all we want but in the minds of the IT people Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. are either security risks or bandwidth hogs that have no real world use in the hospital world.  We are spinning our wheels to approach them on this, we would be better off trying to get them notify us when they mess with the IP ranges causing all sorts of havoc with the authentication systems of our online resources.  At least we can easily and directly show how that (IP ranges and the changing of them) impacts our work and that of the employees doing research at the hospital.

Recently (within the last 4-6 months) my institution opened up Facebook after years of it being blocked.  The library had no part in Facebook being unblocked.  Facebook, Twitter, and few other social networking sites are being used by my institution and other institutions for marketing, public relations, patient relations, and alumni relations  purposes.  Often an institution’s head of marketing or the CEO is the driving force behind these sites magically being unblocked.  When the Chief of Public Relations and Marketing sees that a competitor’s hospital is using Facebook and Twitter to effectively communicate to patients and market the hospital, you better believe he/she is going to want their hospital get involved too.

Who do you think IT is going to listen to, the librarian who wants to set up a Twitter feed from the catalog to the library website or the CEO who wants to use Twitter to help distribute institutional news and information?  If the CEO wants his/her institution to use these applications, IT has a little more reason to investigate and make sure these resources don’t pose a security or bandwidth threat to the institution than they do if the librarian asks.

So what do you do if your hospital hasn’t adopted these social networking applications?  I guess it all depends on the size of your hospital and how well you know the big fish.  There are a lot of recent successful examples and articles of hospitals using these things.  Perhaps if you are in a small hospital and know the big wigs fairly well you might begin sending them some of these articles.  If you are in larger hospital or you don’t have a real working relationship with your CEOs then perhaps you can start by contacting someone in marketing.  That person in marketing may not have enough clout but they might know somebody else who does.

While you as the librarian may not have the direct power to get your hospital to unblock social media sites, you might be able to influence those who do.  Social media hits many more areas than libraries.  It is a huge marketing and public relations tool that many hospitals and academic medical centers are persuing with specific marketing plans and goals….read entire post here: http://kraftylibrarian.com/?p=263

Social Media Revolution

Lots to think about in this little video!

Thanks to Brooke for the nudge!

From Michelle Kraft–Libraries Leveraging Facebook, Twitter, and Other Social Media

Monday afternoon I was a part of the Technology Forum for the Midwest MLA Annual Conference in Columbus, OH.  I spoke on libraries using Twitter and Facebook.

You can see my slides at http://bit.ly/hA9g0.  I specifically wanted to show examples of what other libraries were doing with these two social networking sites.  I tried to find as many medical library examples as possible (I even found one example of a hospital library).  But there were also neat things being done by other libraries and I went with those examples when I found they were doing something that the medical libraries hadn’t picked up on yet.

Some of my favorite examples:

• Weill Cornell and Loma Linda both have tied their catalog new books feed into their Twitter account. So when a new book is added to the catalog a tweet is sent out with a tinyurl.  Clicking on that tinyurl gets you to that record in the library catalog.  I thought this was cool.  I don’t know how difficult it is to set this up, perhaps somebody who has done this could comment.
• Health Library & Resource Center of El Camino Hospital put their patient education material up on their Facebook page under Notes.
• UTS Libraries (University of Technology, Sydney Libraries) use Twitter’s tweet poll feature to create a quick survey and ask for feed back on an issue.  In this case it was the use of QR codes, but almost any question could work.

I notice a lot of libraries out there dipping their toes into the social networking arena, but as I was researching this topic for the presentation, I started to notice that a lot of libraries good efforts seemed a little disjointed.  What good is having a Twitter account if you don’t list the feed on your home page.  I’ll even go a little further with that idea.  What good is even having the Twitter icon on your site if you don’t have the feed displayed anywhere on your website.  There are tons of libraries that are using Twitter as a sort of “what’s up at the library” news service.  Yet, I really couldn’t find all that many that tied this news feed into their own news feed on their own library web page.  Why?  Why do these libraries have two different news feeds?  Which on should a patron pay attention too?  We spend so much time on authority records in our catalogs and databases, yet where is our authority control on our Twitter and news information feeds?  I don’t mean specifically what they are posting but the fact that there are two (or more) sources of different news information.  This is extremely distracting.  So a library patron has to subscribe to the Twitter feed to get information and check the library’s site for information, not good….Read entire post and other great articles here: http://kraftylibrarian.com/

Who, Why & How We Serve: Healthcare Communities, Librarians & Social Media

I did not attend the MLGSCA Technology Symposium in LA in March but did view this slide presentation more than once. It did make me think, and I hope it will provoke you as well.  It told me to learn about and selectively use social media.  While I have seen and heard others, this slide show was helpful and focused. JDD

Social Networking Literacy Competencies for Librarians

Michael Stephens’ blog led me to this thought provoking presentation.  Let me know what you think!

Online Social Networking Sites and Privacy: Revisiting Ethical Considerations…

Peter Fernandez
Agricultural Sciences & Natural Resources Librarian
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, Tennessee USA

Introduction

Before libraries can act ethically with regard to social networking sites, they must first have a nuanced understanding of the potential consequences of these sites. Social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are ultimately motivated by profit, a goal that can undermine user privacy, and that actively relies on the sharing of personal information. In contrast, most libraries in the US have an ethical commitment to patron privacy. Yet libraries are also committed to outreach and social networking sites provide a forum where libraries can create an online presence and spread awareness about their services. These diverse motivations provide a recipe for conflict that is too often ignored. Libraries may be able to appropriate the outreach opportunities of social networking sites while simultaneously maintaining ethical standards; however, responsible appropriation of technology requires that librarians reevaluate their commitment to privacy in the context of social networking sites that have a different conceptual understanding of privacy….See entire post at:  http://libr.unl.edu:2000/LPP/fernandez.htm

Are you LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a social professional network designed to enable members to connect, find industry-specific answers and solutions, find former friends and colleagues, and advance one’s career. 

A group  called Phoenix Friends of UA SIRLS has been established to share information and wisdom about librarianship and to support students, potential students, and friends of the University of Arizona School of Information Resources and Library Science.  to join this group, register with LinkedIn and search for this group.  You might find colleagues and friends who might be of assistance in your job search or career advancement. 

For more information about LinkedIn, go go:  http://www.linkedin.com/home. To join the Phoenix Friends of SIRLS visit:  http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=710457