The Ideas About Communication Blog — Ned Potter

social media for libraries

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Risks and Rough Edges: Building Genuine Relationships Through Library Social Media

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Here we are with another regular blog-post, following on from the last one a mere [checks notes] 418 days ago!

I was recently invited by Royal Holloway to present at an event they were organising on academic library social media. RH themselves were also presenting, as were representatives from MMU and Liverpool Uni Libraries. The other presentations were all great (see below) and I learned a lot.

My presentation was about the work we do at University of York Library, and in particular how we’ve seen a monumental spike in social media engagement over the last 18 months or so. The slides are here.

The whole thing was recorded on Zoom so if you’d rather you can see and hear the slides here:

The video above starts from my talk, but I’d really recommend checking out the Nathalie Rees’s talk on MMU, Patrick Walker and our host Greg Leurs’s talk on Royal Holloway, and Amy Lewin’s talk on Liverpool University too.

It was great to hear talks from four different libraries with four varying approaches (I felt we at York had the most in common with Liverpool but everyone came at it slightly differently. There were so many conferences and events centering on social media a few years ago but you don’t get so many now - it’s still a really key issue though!

Thanks again to Greg for inviting me to present.

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Tweeting for libraries: a handful of useful tools and examples

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I ran a webinar on building engagement on Twitter during this strange lockdown times we live in, for the Living Knowledge Network run by the BL.

I ended up finding some useful tools and examples I’d not seen before as part of the research for it, so I thought I’d share those (and some classics) here, if you’re interested…

Image Resizing

Tweeting images is good: 80% of social media use happens on mobile devices, people scroll at speed - images help slow them down and engage with your stuff. (That said, I see some libraries including an image with literally every tweet. Conversely I actually wouldn’t advise this as it reduces the impact of all of them. Think of images as punctuation to your timeline, rather than the words.) If you make images the right size, people can see all of the image in your tweet, without needing to click on it to expand - which many people won’t do, so it’s good to make the most impact from the image without the need for a click.

The short version of resizing is, make your images 16:9. These are the right proportions to display correctly in a tweet. You can achieve this by using a PowerPoint slide as a template - these are 16:9 in default (since Office 2013 anyway) and you can Save As and choose .png rather than .pptx to save a slide as an image. Or, take an existing image and use photoresizer.com to get it exactly right for Twitter.

Going a step further with this, check out @nanobop’s really handy guide to posting multiple images in the same tweet. The first one in the thread below we’ve already covered, but click on it and read the follow-ups for guides to posting, 2, 3, and 4 pics at once, and the ‘open for a surprise!’ technique.

Twitter Moments

Sometimes you do something on Twitter and it goes well and you want to capture that success. Storify and a number of other tools have been great for that in the past, but are no longer available.

Step forward Twitter’s own Moments feature. It allows you to pull together the tweets of your choice into a little narrative, with an explanatory note at the top - then share it with whoever you like. Here’s a Moment I put together for my own place of work about a new space we’d launched: I used it to share all the positive feedback with non-twitter-using colleagues (and to make the success story easy to come back to later when I do an annual social media report) - you can view this Moment here.

Another example of using Moments is below - this time just to collate our own tweets and easily share them, rather than documenting feedback. We asked our users to draw our buildings, a challenge they took on so well I ended up using the fabulous Photofunia to put their images into gallery settings… This went down really well, I’d recommend trying it with your own library.

View this moment here or by clicking the image below.

A @UoYLibrary Twitter moment

A @UoYLibrary Twitter moment

Battles and other threads

There are millions upon millions of tweets every day (there’s more than 350,000 every minute…) so it’s easy for your own attempts at engagement to get lost amid the noise. One way to help them stand out is to build something more tangible and substantial than separate tweets.

Sometimes friendly institutions ‘war’ with each other on twitter - this epic #AskACurator battle between the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum drew so many eyes to it that it ended up in the papers, as did this more recent ‘creepiest object’ thread. (There are merpeople in both which are just off-the-charts horrend.) In the Library world, the ongoing good-matured spat between the Orkney and Shetland libraries twitter accounts is excellent and benefits both parties.

Threads are just a series of related tweets. If you reply to your own tweet they are connected; if someone finds one they can find the rest. You can build a thread in three main ways - all in one go BEFORE you tweet any of it (by clicking the little + symbol to add another tweet as many times as you need before you click ‘Tweet all’), in real-time where you just add your tweets as you go along - this is good for incorporating feedback and questions from your followers - and over a series of days, weeks, or even years. This example from the Glasgow Women’s Library is a thread tweeted over a month - every day more and more people found out about it and got involved, and because it was threaded rather than discrete tweets, they could find all the previous tweets very easily, whatever point they came in at…

Happy tweeting everyone.

By the way the header image of the balanced stones (from Pexels) was in reference to a bit about balance which I took out of the post above, but I really liked the picture so I left it in, if you’re wondering what that was all about.

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Upcoming presentation skills workshops and library marketing training

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Just a quick post to say here's the current list of open workshops I'm doing this year - if you want to see if I'm doing something at your organisation specifically then the full listing is on the Upcoming Events page, but below are the non-in-house events currently in the diary. Hope to see you at one of them!

You can see a whole load of feedback from previous workshops via the Training page.

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(updated) Training up North! Presentation Skills workshop coming up

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UPDATED 1st OCTOBER:

I now have confirmation of the location and details on the October 16th workshop. I've deleted all the stuff about the York workshops in the post below, as those dates are now past.

Oct 16: Presentation skills workshop, Liverpool

This is the full-day Making Your Message Stick workshop, which I've just revamped, for CILIPNW. It'll take place at the Library at the University of Liverpool. All the details, including how to book, are on the CILIP website - in essence we'll be covering how to make a very effective presentation indeed (which, as it happens, will also look really nice!).

There are also two free student places available, with a deadline of October 5th for application - if you're currently enrolled on a LIS course, click here to see how to apply.

Some feedback from the two most recent Presentation Skills workshops I've run, for CILIP NE and the Bodleian:

““Tips and tricks about perfect presentations - it was fantastic! Very informative, very attractive content of the course. I’d recommend it to anyone.”

”The trainer’s knowledge and approach to the presentation were outstanding. We received numerous references for further learning and finding resources, which is greatly appreciated.”

”It was excellent. It is a particularly difficult topic to present on, as the audience is looking to see excellent presentation skills in action. The trainer succeeded in demonstrating presentation skills as well as talking about them.”

”It was just perfect.”

”Ned is very engaging and was able to get across his enthusiasm and expereince of presenting at a high standard.”

”The trainer gave lots of useful tips and could draw on own experience in libraries to illustrate points; there as a good balence between written and spoken input and time to practice new ideas.”

”The course was really fantastic, I came away with lots of practical ideas and feeling enthusiastic about sharing them with my team.”

”The best training I have ever been on.”

“I found the day very useful - a very practical session with time for hands-on practice and a lot of good advice given. I have heard a lot of about Ned’s presentation expertise. He was great!”

”Really useful and informative. Good to have practical sessions as well as demos.”

”Ned was fantastic, and there was a great balance of practical exercises, and presentation of examples and tips.””
— Bodleian Libraries 2015, and CILIP NE 2015

You can see all of the upcoming workshops on my Upcoming Events page. Hope to see you at one of them!


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Visitors and Residents: Useful Social Media in Libraries

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V&R

Visitors and Residents (or V&R) is a really useful way of thinking about how people interact online and use social media. In short, people in Visitor mode come online to complete a particular task, and then leave - with very little trace of their activity remaining. People in Residents mode are more likely to identify as themselves and use the web as a social space, sharing as well as obtaining information. Visitors and Residents is a continuum which all of us are on, moving between the two according to our needs at any given time. It was first proposed by Le Cornu and White, and (David) White has a very useful section of his site to introduce the topic in more detail.

As libraries, it's really useful to think about how we go about catering for users in both modes. Social media isn't all about social networks - we can use social media platforms to provide easy entry points for Visitors seeking information (a lot of the platforms I've set up at York should provide utility even for students and staff who don't use social media at all), AND we can use it to add our voice to a more Residential space and provide help and information as part of a community. Led very much by Donna Lanclos's views on the subject, I now see V&R as a far more constructive lens through which to view peoples' online behaviour than the 'Digital Natives' idea, which is extremely prevalent and asks us to make assumptions about our users based on their date of birth.

I was invited to give a keynote at the Interlend conference, and asked specifically to talk about social media. As I've mentioned before I think a keynote is a very specific thing, and has different requirements to a regular conference presentation where I could, for example, just report back on what my institution is doing to engage users online. A keynote needs an overarching theme which gives people a way of looking at the world, as well as specific ideas and things for people to try out. With this in mind, my #Interlend2015 talk was entitled Visitors and Residents: Useful Social Media in Libraries.

The Presentation

The actual slides I used will be available on the FiL website shortly, but they won't make that much sense without me talking over the top of them so I've redone them to stand alone online. Here they are. (I get really excited about slide design. It's the one part of me that is remotely visually artistic, and I loved using a slightly different style for this slide-deck and learning new tricks. I found new sources of images - listed on the final slides - and a couple of new fonts, used a lot of darkening and blurring of images so I could write directly onto them, and generally tried REALLY hard with these!)

Screw Digital Natives

Inspired by Donna I've become quite militant about the whole digital natives thing.

It can't be left unchallenged - when people use it uncritically we have to pull them up on it! It's dangerously reductive. There's two major problems with it: firstly anyone who's thought about it for more than a second would agree that age doesn't actually determine technological know-how. How exposed we are to modern tools and computers depends on place of birth, environment growing up, privilege, and other socio-economic factors - we know that. So to assume that students entering University now have a set of skills that they just have (how do you Snapchat? You just Snapchat. Hello to Jason) is to ignore the messier reality in front of you in favour of a very simplistic alternative - an imagined present, as Donna eloquently puts it. So we don't assess the students in front of our very eyes on what they can and can't do, we just plough on and risk a dereliction of our educational duty. And secondly, even those that ARE excellent with the tools don't neccessarily know how to use them in the academic environment (or indeed for life-skills type purposes). Technological literacy does not imply digital literacy! Being deft with a touch-screen and quick to find information is a great first step, but then comes all the (again, messy) business of critically evaluating that information, and potentially re-purposing it.

My 1 year old can - genuinely - do things with our iPad which we can't recreate, to do with swiping in a certain way. She's born into the technology. She's what the people who talk about Digital Natives are imagining ALL children are like. But that doesn't mean she can use the tech to achieve goals and complete tasks and understand how information works. Of course it doesn't.

On talking then leaving

I strongly dislike when people give talks at conferences and then leave straight after. It implies arrogance - it says I am here to give out knowledge, but there's nothing you guys can teach ME.

With the Interlend Conference, the timing was awful - it was in a run of the most stressful and stupidly busy 7 days I've ever had professionally. I really wanted to do the talk though - I was supposed to do it last year but had to pull out because of my daughter's illness, and it was an honour to be asked to do a keynote. The only way I could do it was if I went back to work in the afternoon, due to a massive deadline looming - so essentially I did what I hate people doing: I showed up, gave the talk, and left.

I wanted to stay - especially after the really interesting conversations I had with people over coffee after my talk - but I had to choose between talking and running, or not talking at all. I chose to talk and run, but next time I would make a different choice and not do the talk at all unless I'm able to attend the full day on which I'm speaking. I just felt awful - sad to miss out on stuff I would have found really interesting and useful, and my insecurities running wild about what people must think (fired further by a few tweets which confirmed my worst fears).

So huge apologies to the delegates - I wish I could have stayed and carried on the conversations.

CPD as a way to get some learning done

One of things I like most about CPD is choosing paths which force me to invest proper time in understanding something relatively new. Over the years I've often submitted a title of a talk knowing that it would involve some serious work  and research to actually be able to deliver the finished article... What normally happens is I do this and feel excited about it, then about 2 days before the talk is due to be given I curse my past self in great and sweary detail because I'm still learning about a topic rather than planning how to create a presentation on it, and then afterwards I'm really glad I forced myself to do this because I learned something valuable and lasting. That's basically exactly what happened here.

When I was planning this talk and knew it had to be about social media, I was really drawing a blank in terms of an angle for it - I didn't want to just repeat the same old same old. If I read one more conference tweet that says 'social media is a great way to connect with our users!' I will probably despair.

So I asked Twitter what I should call the talk, and got loads of good suggestions, before ultimately realising that this would be the perfect opportunity to go from 'being interested in that #vandr thing I've read a lot about from Donna Lanclos' all the way to 'knowing enough about #vandr to actually talk about it at a conference' so I settled on that, and am really glad I did. (Although it was, as predicted, massively stressful.)

But I wanted to give an honourable mention to the best twitter suggestion in response to my plea for ideas for possible titles for my talk:

I wish I could have used it...