O, the shame of it all!

Thursday evening, the Social Media Club Columbia had a roundtable on blogging. I sat there with some kind of facial grimace that I hope resembled a smile, all the while remembering that my last post here was, to put it mildly, ancient.

Does it help at all that I poked around to read the blogs of some of the other participants, only to discover that the majority were as neglected as mine? No. I take no comfort in that at all.

In my goal planning for this year at work, I determined that I should create 48 blog posts over the year. That's not an unreasonable goal for a business blog. So far, I'm on target.

I hate to admit it, but sometimes I'm a much better theoretician than practitioner.

I'd appreciate it if you would skip over to the business blog and read the post I wrote for Clean Out Your Computer Day. It's one of those that writes itself for me.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Going emo over emoticons

Smiley face 2 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) 

When I was a kid (shush!), it was the rage to dot your i's with hearts, and punctuate most things with smiley faces.
Somehow I did end up with a pair of yellow smiley face earrings, and a rather large metal smiley face necklace. I'm not sure how that happened-- must have been a gift. Probably from that person who always used to tell me to smile.
I was a serious holdout. In my weaker moments, I played with the bubble writing, but natch. To this day, I've never used a heart as the dot over an i. Or a flower.
What I do go all curmudgeon about is the smiley face.
The logic is simplistic: Readers can't always glean the substance of the personal written word, and need a hint to understand the emotional overtones of an email. Hence, the proliferation in the use of the emoticon; i.e., the emotive icon.
Yes, I use the :-) quite a bit, and I cringe each time. Actually, I tend to use :) . The big yellow ones didn't have a nose, and it's easier to type. :P
I do have a certain fondness for :P .
But what are we conveying by punctuating our emails with smiling emoticons? Are we saying, "Hey, don't take it personally"? I think sometimes we are.
Just as frequently though, I think that little emoticon is an attempt to pull the wool over the reader's eyes, as in, "Yes, I just said something really nasty, but I'm going to put this little smiley face here so we can both pretend I didn't really mean it that way." Who are we fooling?
I wonder why we feel so inadequate in our written communiques-- both as scribers and as readers-- that we must resort to using a visual representation of our meaning.
Interesting.

WoW Librarian

I'm No Chatty Cathy

Working in social media is a bit of a paradigm shift for me. The fact is, I'm one of those people who can go a very long time without talking. I worried that my children would not learn how to talk, because no matter how good my intention, I would stop vocalizing. My internal dialogue would be going full steam, however.

I'm not much for small talk; I'm capable, but it's not an enjoyable exercise. One of the primary goals of a social media strategy is to engage people in conversation. Now, one might think that the 140 character tweet could circumvent the small talk issue. Um. No. Not for me.

For example, the pundits advise not merely tweeting the link to an article you've found interesting, illuminating, or otherwise noteworthy, but adding a few words to say why you found it noteworthy. My inner voice says, well, I wouldn't have forwarded it if I didn't find it of interest, now would I? Then I sigh and remind myself that ESP is not an ability shared by very many people, and someone else may not find said article as enthralling. Save the time of the reader, whispers Ranganathan.

It's not that I don't have anything to say: I do. My internal dialogue is very busy, and can be very opinionated. Perhaps I censor that inner voice a little harshly.

By this time, if you've stayed with me this long, and you haven't been living under the rock next to my cave, you might suggest I have the classic symptoms of an introvert. And you would be right.

But here's the paradox. A social media platform can be a wonderful mouthpiece for the clown behind the curtain. "I am the great and powerful Oz!", one could bellow, and no one (except that confounded little dog Toto) would know that the voice comes from someone who dreads the prospect of going to a gathering of more than five and having to exchange small talk.

A Google search for "social media introverts" results in a wealth of hits-- 1.4 million. Who knew there were so many introverts out there expressing themselves through Twitter, blogging, and curating content?

I had one of those Chatty Cathy dolls. The novelty wore off with astonishing speed. It was a small talk nightmare. Those eleven sentences were not at all entertaining after the third or fourth repetition.

And that just might be the cause for my silence.
WoW Librarian

Trending in LinkedIn Today

LinkedIn (Photo credit: Christopher S. Penn)

A quick snapshot of my "LinkedIn Today" for March 30 at 11:24 am:

• Six Ways to Acquire New Customers via Social Media: 1505 shares
• The One Skill All Leaders Should Work On: 984 shares
• Cultivating Charisma: How Personal Magnetism Can Help (Or Hurt) You At Work: 805 shares
• Don't Dread Tomorrow's Mandatory Switch To Timeline, Studies Show It's Good For 95% Of Facebook Pages: 408 shares, tied with
• Can Too Much SEO Be a Bad Thing?: 408 shares
• Experience Is The Next Frontier In Marketing: 402 shares

By the time I finished putting this together at 11:32 am, the top story rose to 1527 shares.

Hm. It's all pretty social. 'Magine that.

WoW Librarian

An ex-pat finds a home in a bookstore cafe

I've joined the forces of those who use the neighborhood bookstore cafe as their home office. We hover around the electrical outlets, plugging in our laptops so that we can work at full power. We pay for our seats with extra large coffees and bookstore memberships so we can access the wi-fi. We ask complete strangers-- our office mates-- to watch our things while we head for the restrooms and do a quick browse on our way back.

What brought me to my office away from home? Mostly it's the realization that once I'm home, the distractions are overwhelming and chaos seems to reign. My creative output slows to a trickle, and even dries up. And so I've fled my refuge to find a place where distractions are more easily shut out, including my neighbor who is singing while wearing headphones. I'm an ex-pat from my house.

The ambiance here is casual but studious. The piped-in music is soft. I’ve learned that eavesdropping can be fun. The typical drivel I block out by second nature. But every now and again, the most fascinating conversations tickle my ears; quiet discussions between complete strangers who are just whiling away some time, relaxing and sipping their coffees.

The new strategy is working out thus far. I've set up a schedule, and I'm ticking things off my to-do list. I've updated my LinkedIn profile, and re-written the About page on my website. I've caught up on some other writing; I've made notes for some new blog posts.

I look forward to my nights in the bookstore cafe. Do you have a special place where you find you are more productive? A bolt hole to escape to? Tell us about it in the comments below.

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.

Atzilut hits 80!

Yes! I have a level 80 night elf druid! Just moments before I earned the 1500 Completed Quests achievement. I leveled when I turned in The Broken Front quest. I am so very happy. <do happy dance> <-- Gee, I ought to be able to write some code there... Signing off... May the stars guide and watch over you!

WoW Librarian

New website platform

After a bit of deliberation, I've decided to move my website (wowlibrarian.com) to a new platform. It's been in Joomla! for a while; now it's in WordPress. I've often used my website to test Joomla! updates and plugins; my website at times suffered for this. (Yeah, that's a "duh" statement.) I learned about an online sandbox for testing software packages at LITA last year. Now if I can find my notes...I'll be testing from there instead. I've just downloaded a WordPress plugin called CrossPress. This plugin should allow me to "post once, publish many". I guess we'll see in a minute. If you read this on wowlibrarian.blogspot.com, you'll know it worked. Atzilut is at level 78.5! I've been playing more regularly lately, and it's done wonders for me. Looks like I'll get to 80 before Cataclysm is released.

WoW Librarian

A Digital Native's Demands

A Digital Native's Demands

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time, I worked for a business management consulting firm in Boston, and I learned at lot. A great deal. I truly had some embarrassing times; I was, after all, a newly graduated philosophy major. Nevertheless, I learned a great deal about private industries and how they worked. It was quite enlightening, but I was not truly ready to be enlightened. I had children instead.

Now, no one can really say having children is not enlightening. It is. New lessons in humility. In hubris. In despair. At any rate, I had three beautiful, smart, talented children.

I worked at several jobs. During college, I had worked in bars, as a waitress, for a cobbler, made candy, worked a shrimp boat... there were some other jobs in there. I also worked in the print shop, on the college's literary art magazine. During my childbearing years, I worked for a newspaper, first in classified ads, and eventually as the feature editor. I worked at a bookstore; I volunteered at my children's media center; I sold craft kits; I edited a book; I did many, many things.

And then I went to graduate school. The first day after class, I was walking to the bookstore to purchase my text, and I had an intense experience. I KNEW I was doing the right thing. I just knew it. To this day, I remember walking to that bookstore, and suddenly, I felt like I was in a snowglobe... Everything coalesced, and I was certain-- more certain than I had ever been-- that I was doing the right thing. I was in the right place at the right time.

During grad school, we had a speaker from the SC State Library. Now, it had not taken long for me to realize there were job paths I really wasn't interested in. And there were places I felt I really wanted to be. Did I want to be in public services? Ah, no. I didn't know what "public services" really meant, but I was pretty certain that, if it was like retail, it was not the place for me. I felt this should be a very secret thing... I mean, after, wasn't a librarian supposed to want to work with the public? What if "they" found out, and kicked me out of library school for not wanting to work with the public? This was a disturbing thought for me. Seriously.

As it was, this was an amazing time to be in library school. Oh, sure, for some people it was a nightmare. It was the early nineties, and the Internet-- the World Wide Web-- was brand new. I started grad school after the Internet began, when we were still learning how to use Archie, and gopher, and Veronica. And then there was Netscape.

OMG!! The dreams I had as a kid were suddenly becoming true. Information was just about at my fingertips. Literally.

We had a visitor from the SC State Library, who told us what a state library was; and how no two state libraries were really the same. And she told us what the state library did in SC. I knew right then, I wanted to work for the SC State Library.

When I graduated and finished my advanced certificate, I was a little concerned. Time to start work. Those student loans would be coming due soon. I applied for two jobs: one was with OCLC, and the second wasn't even an MLIS position, but it was in a library-- the SC State Library. As it was, I was interviewed and offered the position of Automation Librarian at the State Library.

Talk about a dream come true. You see, as an employee of the state library, I would be acting as a consultant to the state's public libraries. Wow. I knew what a consultant was... remember, I had worked for a business management consulting firm way back when.

Let's talk a little about family history. I am the granddaughter of a USAF Lieutenant Colonel. He graduated from Clemson as a civil engineer, at a time when Clemson had many ROTC students. My grandfather later joined the Army Air Force, which eventually became the USAF. He finished his career as a civil servant, still in the same position. His last duty post was at Cape Kennedy.

I am the daughter of a USAF air policeman. He was the first to predict that I would become a librarian. I wasn't even a teenager at the time. He was proud of my abilities.

Suffice it to say, I have a strong leaning toward civil service.

This used to be a good thing.

It's not now.

Now, I wake up every morning wondering if I'm going to have a job by the end of the day....

(to be continued)

I Resolve

Happy 2010!

I've been thinking a lot about this post, and about posting in general. I noticed I have a few drafts stuck away; I doubt I'll go back and finish them, but then one never knows. I've spent the past couple of months clearing backlogs and preparing for new things.

Before I go further... Atzilut is now level 75. Still a long way to go til 80, but my pace has picked up.

I thought for a change I would take some time to think about some changes and some goals, not just in observance of the "new year". A few years ago, my job description changed, resulting in a strong focus on innovation, or research and development. Immediately after, other changes occurred, and I assumed additional duties. The focus on innovation was stifled by the immediacy of those other duties.
In December, I was relieved of those additional responsibilities. I spent the month tying up loose ends, and thinking about new directions for the division.

I thought about tasks I had neglected: Professional reading. Writing. Getting my hands under the hood. The most infuriating thing is those actions are exactly what prepare the ground for innovation! Not to have the time to pursue those occupations was the most difficult part of the past 18 months.

I resolve not to hoard Computers in Libraries, Library Technology Reports and Online.
I resolve to resume reading professional literature both print and online.
I resolve to write more, with Twitter, on my blog, and in the good old fashioned journal.
I resolve to meet monthly with my division.
I resolve to network.
I resolve to focus on technology competencies and training for staff.

I think that's enough. A quick Google search for definitions of "resolution" indicate that a statement identifying the resolution is not enough; a resolution involves analysis and a game plan.

I've set up RSS feeds to alert me when the aforementioned journals are available online; this should prompt me not to hoard them. (BTW, I put myself last on the routing list already, noting that I would collect them.)

The Innovation and Technology division met for the first time last week. In the course of discussion, we discovered we had some action items... it was most exciting. I have to say this is a great team.

And thus ends my first blog post of the year.

Open Source Software in Libraries

Very good, balanced discussion of OSS in libraries.

Open Source Software in Libraries

View more presentations from Sukhdev Singh.

Socialnomics

OK, I understand we can make statistics say anything, but this is so much fun!

Level 71 At Last!

Haven't had a chance to play much in eons, but finally got back to it a bit these past few weeks. Tonight (this morning?) Atzilut finally leveled. Atzi was in Valiance, picking up Grand Master training for skinning, herbalism and first aid. Also picked up the Writhing Longstaff. Well, off to bed. May the stars guide you...