5. Don’t get it?
• It’s ok not to understand why people
appear to be living out their lives
online.
• (Pst... I don’t think most social networkers
think that they are living some sort of
virtual life!)
6. However...
• Don’t let your personal feelings hold
back the library from taking advantage
of the potential goodwill and publicity
social networks offer.
11. • If someone offered your library free
weekly ad space in a hand-delivered
newsletter that would reach a modest
percent of your users, would you turn it
down?
• Probably not.
15. It’s all about Web 2.0
• Online social networking sites use
powerful Web 2.0 technology.
• In the world of Web 2.0, data you
publish is free to travel from the
original site to other accounts you
manage.
16. • Publish it once, syndicate it to multiple
sites.
Welcome to social networking in a snap. Before I jump into online social networks, I want to quickly talk about social networks. In reality, this should be called, “Online Social Networking in a Snap” since, as librarians, we are already social networking pros, right? Let’s think for a minute about our own social networks. Each of us have throughout the years made friends from the people we went to school with, worked with, people in our communities, etc. This is our real-world social network. Now, just because someone is in our social network, doesn’t mean that we’re very close friends, sometimes they are simply acquaintances, but it doesn’t mean that they aren’t relevant to us.
It won’t be relevant to many of your patrons, but it might reach a small segment of patrons for whom traditional publicity doesn’t reach.
Setting up a social networking page for the library takes a fraction of the time as laying out a single page newsletter.
