Queen of the Free

Queen of the free e-book, that is. It's true. If there is a free e-book out there, I'm bound to download it.

I'm one of those people who never seems to have enough information. I research until the last possible minute. And that's a problem. Jill Chivers calls it "drinking from the information fire hydrant". She's identified two kinds of information seeker personalities: the data gatherer and the data analyzer. The gatherers rarely have enough information; the analyzers may not have it all, but often suffer from information overload.

Am I a data gatherer or a data analyzer?

Both, it seems. Which leads me to the next problem: counter-research. Have you noticed that data are like fish on dry land? Flopping about, impossible to catch. Were they always like that? Slippery devils. For every bit of data that says "X", there's another bit that says "Y". Coffee is good for you. Ah, no. It's bad for you. Except on the fifth Thursday of the month, when it's good for you in the morning, but not at night. Sean D'Souza suggests setting an egg timer when you start your research-- no more research when that sand runs out. The data no longer applies, anyway.

Sitting in my Chrome downloads there are four e-book/whitepapers, a report, an mp3, a zip file, and a jpg. Yes, I've listened to the mp3 (a Daniel Pink interview on employee engagement); the zip file has been installed; and the jpg has been shared. The report is an index of technology wages-- that's a keeper. And those four e-books are all on some aspect of social media strategy.

It's positively amazing how much information is out there. Much of it is very useful. Some is well-intended. Some may be perfunctory-- e-books and whitepapers must of course be produced for a successful social media strategy.

Don't get me wrong. I've certainly benefited from many-- if not most-- of those e-books and whitepapers. I'll be writing a few myself, and I hope they'll fall into the useful group and people will download them. Nevertheless, I think it's time to weed my free e-book collection.

By the way, here's a HubSpot article on why e-books are better than whitepapers. And yes, I've already downloaded the free guide to e-book creation. I'll read it while I drink my coffee this afternoon.

The Knowledge Economy of World of Warcraft

Lean Manufacturing and the World of Warcraft

Social Crush Blast

Social Crush exploded in "Famously Hot" Columbia, SC this week. Hundreds of social media practitioners flocked to the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center in anticipation of upping their social media skills. We were not disappointed.

Tim Moore and Ty Downing brought a host of experts with them, including Michael Brito of Edelman Digital, Silicon Valley; Glen Gilmore, Esq., Gilmore Business Network; Victoria Harres of PR Newswire; Skeeter Harris of Mac Village Pro; Kipp Bodner of HubSpot; and Bostjan Spetic and Tin Dizdarevic of Zemanta.

I'm spending the next few days (ahem... weeks) trying out several of the tools I learned about. I've just installed Zemanta, a content enhancement tool that suggests links, tags, images, and further reading for blog posts. Very nice.

One of the key takeaways from Bostjian and Tin's presentation is: The Web is made for linking.

One might think this statement is self-evident. Based on my experience last week while adding some news releases to a website, I think it's not obvious to most news providers. Perhaps they are still thinking in paper press terms. Just cutting and pasting an article from print into a digital format doesn't work for the web. I found myself searching for links to studies cited and to companies referenced in the articles. Not only is it bad web form, it's one of my pet peeves.

Using Zemanta is a great time saver, doing much (but not all) of the footwork for you. I'll keep tweaking it, but I think this tool is going to stay in my toolbox. Oh-- and it's free.

Related articles

• The Next Generation of Social Media - 14th September event (cambsbusiness.wordpress.com)
• Building Better Business Blogs (zemanta.com)
• Smart Business, Social Business (edelmandigital.com)

You can take the girl out of the library...

For the past several weeks, I've been wondering what to do with this blog. Should I change the name? Start a new one? What?

Why? After working in libraries for the past 13 years, I am now working in the private sector, managing a recruitment and staffing firm's social media program. It's a very good fit: the firm specializes in information technology hiring--something I know a thing or two about, from both sides. Developing the social media strategy is challenging (yea!), and keeping abreast of the changes keeps the challenge fresh. And many of the skills I learned as a systems librarian and innovator are transferable.

In other words, I do not anticipate becoming bored any time soon. (This is a good thing; ask my mother.)

As one might suspect, I've been really delving into the world of branding, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. See my post, Swimming in the sea of social media. I remain impressed by the number of people who are interested in sharing what they know. It's almost overwhelming.

A side note: The title of my last post might have been more accurate if I had called it "Trekking across the social media terrain" - as illustrated by the 2010 Social Networking Map. Note the "Google Information Gathering Outposts". I guess the map will need to be redrawn to include Google+!

So, this week I'm preparing a social media guidelines draft, and reviewing staff profiles on LinkedIn. Here are some useful lists of policies and guidelines:

• Social Media Governance - a database of about 176 policies


• Only 29% Of Companies Have A Social Media Policy: Is Your Company At Risk?, by Jeff Bullas


• Enterprise: List of 40 Social Media Staff Guidelines, by Laurel Papworth

A personal favorite of mine is by SocialVoice. Its simplicity makes it concise, and its tone appeals to our better instincts. Check it out.

So, you can take the girl out of the library, but can you take the librarian out of the girl? That remains to be seen. In the meantime, I'll keep the name of this blog for now. After all, I've spent quite a few years building this brand.

Oh, yeah... Atzilut is level 85! Think I'll work on my worgen now. Play on!

Swimming in the sea of social media

I've had to stop reading about gaming, anthropology and sociology, while I work on a consulting job. I'm developing a social media campaign and training for a recruitment firm. Our first workshop is this Monday. I'm thoroughly saturated now in social media methodology. There's SO much information out there! The good news is there's such a glut of info that people can't sift through it. Enter Catherine stage right.

It's amazing how social media has developed in business and marketing. Quite fascinating, actually. Facebook can be a huge marketing tool. Check out one of the leaders in Facebook innovation, Mari Smith. She's got a YouTube channel, too. I found her through another Facebook guru, Amy Porterfield, and the Social Media Examiner. They are just two of the people I've been listening to this past week.

Before I landed this consulting gig, I picked up the book, Branding Yourself, by Erik Deckers and Kyle Lacy. Great information!

One of my teachers signed my high school yearbook with the words, "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity"--a quote from H.D. Thoreau's Walden. It's been buzzing around in my mind this past week (at least); I think they are good words to keep in mind as I swim in the sea of social media.

Reading about gaming & World of Warcraft

I've been doing some interesting reading lately. I'm listening to Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal (@avantgame), and I'm reading My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft, by Bonnie Nardi. Both are fascinating. I could insert a rant here about the differences between listening to a book and reading a book... but I'll desist (for now). I might mention that I listened to Dan Tapscott's book, Wikinomics, last year, and The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman.

I have been playing more in large part to McGonigal's book. Things IRL haven't been golden lately, and oddly enough, I stopped playing WoW. After listening to Reality is Broken, I realized that perhaps not playing was not the best strategy. Interesting. So I made an effort to begin playing more frequently, and I've found it really does make a difference to me. It's at this point that I find I really wish I had a hard copy of McGonigal's book at hand. I'll get back to this in another post.

Nardi's My Life as a Night Elf Priest is also fascinating. One of the more attractive features is that this book is not a collection of essays, but an ethnographic exploration of World of Warcraft. I'm only in chapter 3, so I won't talk about this book any further.

Last year I read Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft® Reader, edited by Corneliussen and Rettberg (@jilltxt). This is a book of essays by people who actually play WoW. I would like to be in their guild!

I promise all of this is building up to something; it's still incubating, but I guarantee some sort of paper will result. In the meantime, Atzilut is level 84, and that's something to enjoy. (Edited and reposted from The WoW Librarian.)

WoW Librarian

Atzilut Dings 84

W00T!

I've been playing rather sporadically; the last few weeks have seen much more gameplay. My significant other gifted me with Cataclysm in December, and I immediately rolled a worgen, Lunebane. She's level 28 right now. I also picked up a copy of "official strategy guide". If I had realized how different this guide was from the WoW guide, I wouldn't have bothered. At any rate....

I've been doing some interesting reading lately. I'm listening to Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal (@avantgame), and I'm reading My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft, by Bonnie Nardi. Both are fascinating. I could insert a rant here about the differences between listening to a book and reading a book... but I'll desist (for now). I might mention that I listened to Dan Tapscott's book, Wikinomics, last year, and The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman.

I have been playing more in large part to McGonigal's book. Things IRL haven't been golden lately, and oddly enough, I stopped playing WoW. After listening to Reality is Broken, I realized that perhaps not playing was not the best strategy for me. Interesting. So I made an effort to begin playing more frequently, and I've found it really does make a difference to me.

It's at this point that I find I really wish I had a hard copy of McGonigal's book at hand. I'll get back to this in another post.

Nardi's My Life as a Night Elf Priest is also fascinating. One of the more attractive features is that this book is not a collection of essays, but an ethnographic exploration of World of Warcraft. I'm only in chapter 3, so I won't talk about this book any further.

Last year I read Digital Culture, Play, and Identity: A World of Warcraft® Reader, edited by Corneliussen and Rettberg (@jilltxt). This is a book of essays by people who actually play WoW. I would like to be in their guild!

I promise all of this is building up to something; it's still incubating, but I guarantee some sort of paper will result.

In the meantime, Atzilut is level 84, and that's something to enjoy.