Social Media – Challenges, Benefits, and Best Practices

On Friday, January 25th, 2013, I was able to attend a free workshop that was organized by the MARS and RSS sections of RUSA and sponsored by OCLC QuestionPoint (I thank Susan McGlamery again for that!). It was held in Seattle on the campus of the University of Washington.

The full workshop was titled, “New Tech for Reference: From the Reference Interview to Roving Reference, Challenges, Benefits and Best Practices.” Here I’m only going to focus on the first presentation by Michelle Chronister, “Social Media – Challenges, Benefits, and Best Practices.” Michelle is the supervising librarian for USA.gov, and her experience gained through managing their Facebook and Twitter services is where most of her presentation content derived. Though she was presenting here at UW independent of her day-job.

You can find a great one-page handout posted at bit.ly/smrefnotes and her presentation slides are at bit.ly/smrefslide

She began by simply getting a read of the room on who’s doing what. I learned something here that I somehow didn’t already know. Google Docs can not only be used to create a web survey, but you ALSO project the live responses on screen for everyone in the room. Since most of us in attendance had some kind of web connectivity, this worked well. This was the Quick Survey she had us go to.

On to the content of her presentation: She strongly recommended that your library have guidelines for your providers on the type of content they share and how they engage with those using the library’s social media. It’s very important for everyone to understand how to represent the organization. She shared USA.gov’s Social Media Guidelines – Making Content Social. These apply to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and any other social media that USA.gov might use.

http://www.howto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/socmed_editorial_guidelines_010411.pdf

Some of the themes she discussed should be familiar to many of us by now, such as the importance of making sure that the tool you’re using is a clear fit for the audience you’re trying to reach, and the need to post content regularly. She went further though to also highlight ways to build your brand and have all of your providers speak with a consistent voice and tone (which gets back to why it’s important to have guidelines).

There are essentially three strategies for providing reference service through social media. The library can somewhat passively answer questions only when asked, it can solicit questions on the channels already used, or it can go out and proactively seek questions on question answering sites.

Comparing the social media platforms, Michelle observed that Twitter has a much larger audience (followers), but generally they’re less engaged than those on Facebook. When someone asks a question in a certain channel, use the same to respond as best you can using that same channel. Don’t cop out and give them nothing and tell them to call or come to the library. Point to a resource that will get them started and offer a follow-up if they need anything else. Assume it’ll be 1-time response back, which would make a reference interview impossible, unmanageable, and unwelcome.

A practical consideration: Make sure to post a comment policy so that it’s clear under what conditions the library will remove a comment by a user.

Michelle did a really nice job and included info that was relevant to newbies at using social media in libraries, as well as those with lots of experience.

-Joe