Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Web 2.0 resources, search engines and their development. These are my personal views and not those of CILIP or any other organisation I may be associated with.
It really makes me wonder if some companies ever learn *anything* about *anything*. Here's the latest social media disaster, and this time it's from a company called Epicurious and you can find them on Twitter. Only you won't find their recent tweets, because they've all been removed. But how is this for a sample: "Boston our hearts are with you. Here's a bowl of breakfast energy we could all use to start today:" Here's a screenshot that I blagged:
Needless to say, the response on Twitter has been fast and unforgiving:
Just another perfect example of what not to do on social media.
This is really something of a shame. I like Netvibes, and have done for years; it's a good stable platform and a really good home/start page. I've encouraged people to try it out on just about all of my courses, and recently suggested that it would make a good replacement for Google Reader. I like to think that I've done more than my fair share of championing a good product. However, they have made a change to one of their really popular widgets recently; a bookmarking one, and it wasn't a change for the better. It was bigger, clunkier and well - pretty awful. I didn't like it, and more to the point a lot of other users didn't like it either. We took to Twitter to complain and see if we could get it rolled back, and we also asked on their Facebook page - again in quite large numbers.
Hidden in a reply to one of the complaints was a reply from a Netvibes staffer who said that there wouldn't be a rollback, and that the new design was here to stay. I posted a couple of times, the last being to try and helpfully point unhappy users to other resources. I checked back a few minutes ago, and my post had been deleted, most of the other complaints had gone, and I'm now unable to post to the Facebook Netvibes page.
Clearly someone at Netvibes has made the decision that they don't want to talk to their users. This is a great shame, particularly as a lot of people are looking around for alternative RSS readers now that Google Reader is no more. Instead of being welcoming and helpful they have instead chosen to make life difficult, block and ban comments and treat their users with contempt. This isn't going to get them more users - it's going to end up with a lot less. I'll certainly have to think about going elsewhere now, and I'll have to rethink my stance on teaching Netvibes in my classes.
I really hope that someone from Netvibes is checking social media, since I am still hoping that they'll prove to be a better company than they currently are.
Qwant was launched in January 2013 having been in development for a couple of years. It's an interesting engine, because it really tries very hard to do a whole range of different things. It says of itself "QWANT offers the first web and social service, where you can dynamically
use the power of your own brain to refine search in classic Web, Live,
Social, Media and Shopping verticals so as to reach exactly the
information and the people you are looking for, those that answer your
exact query of the moment." What this means in practice is that you run a search and get 6 datasets to play with. It looks a little like this:
A series of images/video results across the top, and then 5 columns - Web, Live, Qnowledge Graph, Social and Shopping. They are very cramped, but you see enough to let you make a reasonable choice. However, if you want a different layout, these are available: classic (as above), mosaic, media, people. The results will be reformatted for you according to choice. Results can be bookmarked and saved, which is a nice function and there's also a 'hot trends' feature, which I suspect is being pulled from Twitter.
Searchers can also refine their results as well, though I didn't find this worked terribly well, and I kept getting no results when I should have got several (starting a search with 'library' and using CILIP to refine for example) and I wasn't happy that the engine reinterpreted my search without giving me the opportunity to override - turning 'CILIP' into 'clip' for example, which is irritating and unnecessary. It was also a shame that there wasn't an Advanced Search option, and they really are not clear on exactly where their results are being pulled from.
In summary however, it's a good start, and I'll be interested to see exactly how it develops. Certainly worth giving it a go and if you do - let me know what you think!
If you are still hoping that Google+ is going to go away sometime soon, then I'm afraid that you're going to have to think again. It's now moved up into second place in the rankings for the number of active users, still way behind Facebook, but in front of Twitter, as this graph from Zdnet shows:
Google+, which many people have written off time and time again actually grew in 2012 27% to 343m
users. I can only see this increasing, with the use of the Communities function, which is where I'm getting most of my really good quality conversations now. There's no doubt that Google is going to be pushing the social network even more in 2013 than it did last year.
Well, the news is well and truly out now, and as many people have been predicting, Facebook has launched their own search engine. The video at the end of my post gives you a quick overview of a few of the things that it's goingo to cover, but I'm obviously interested in looking at it in terms of the information professional.
It's being rolled out slowly, with limited testing in the United States, so the rest of us will have to wait awhile before we can start to play with it, but you can request early access as well. It's still very basic at the moment, but the thrust of where Facebook is taking search is very clear. To start with, it's NOT a web search engine. You can't use it to find all the pages on the web where there are references to a particular football team for example - it's designed to leverage the huge amount of content that's contained within Facebook. That's a really big reason on its own as to why librarians and other information professionals will need to have access to Graph Search (as well as the rest of Facebook of course), because it's a huge information resource. To deny access to Facebook is to deny access to an extremely large portion of the internet experience - I'm not going to replay all the figures associated with Facebook here; you can check out my Pinterest collection of social media statistics or run on over to Visual.ly and do a search for Facebook Statistics and either of these resources should give you the information you need.
Graph search is starting out around the Ps - People, Places, Photographs. The idea is that you'll be able to do a search to find out what your friends like, so you could find out which boardgames your friends like, or which boardgames your married friends with children enjoy playing. You could locate a dentist based on recommendations from friends, or the restaurants in a particular area that you'll probably enjoy eating at based on trusted (ie friends) recommendations. You'll be able to explore particular areas and see the photographs that friends or colleagues have taken, so you might decide to grab photographs of London that friends took on holiday, which the pictures that work colleagues took may be of conferences or convention centres because they were in London working.
Don't worry - privacy will still be a big thing, and the information that you can get will be based on whatever settings people have chosen, but you'll also be able to get data on information that people have shared publically, and that's still a large number of people - about 25% of the Facebook community. However, Facebook does have a very patchy record when it comes to privacy issues, so this is something that you'll need to look at when it comes to using the service yourself - or when your friends do!
So, up until now, Facebook has been about you and your friends. There's certainly an element of leverage here in that the Graph Search will collate a lot of that information together in new and interesting ways. Does this make it a Stalkers toolbox? I think that's going to be down to the settings that you choose for yourself, but it's going to make us think really hard about why we want to use Facebook and importantly how we use it. Is it just for 'friends' or are those friends actually 'colleagues'. In the video, one of the engineers makes a really interesting point that in future we're going to be able to use Facebook - not just to find our friends and colleagues, but to find people that we perhaps should know, or who can help us do something that we currently can't.
This is where the value and importance of Facebook Graph Search starts to come into play, and hopefully you're already seeing how a library could utilise this. I would suggest that every library (public, private, corporate, academic etc) needs to be on Facebook. Your library needs to be found. Now of course, it can be found when people are doing generic searches on Google and the rest of the search engines, but the important point here is that if people are already logged into Facebook, they're more likely to use the search option in the future - particularly if they've found that it works well for them. So if you're not there, you probably won't exist or be thought of by the searcher. In exactly the same way that a few years ago I would argue that a library or business needs to be on the internet, because who uses the printed Yellow Pages any more? If you're not on the net, you don't exist. If you're not on Facebook, pretty soon you won't exist either - it really is that simple.
So - the library needs to have a Facebook presence; it's becoming vital. However, that's only stage number one. Stage two is that library and other professional staff also need to be on Facebook, so that they can be found. For example - I have an interest in American History (the Civil War to be precise) and if I'm going to the States to speak at a conference, I'm going to be keen to see if I can pop in some visits to places that will interest me about the Civil War. Yes, of course I can do a general search and get some stuff, but that's still very clinical. However - if I can see who is going to the conference, and they're friends of mine, I can use Graph Search to find out if any of their friends are into the same interests, or work at a useful library and maybe I can get an introduction to hook up to an expert quickly. Because of the friendship element, I suspect that I'll have a much richer experience than if I just wander into the local museum or library.
However for this to work, that person with the Civil War interest needs to be actively talking about it on Facebook - they have to be engaging, writing about it, mentioning the really great restuarant at the edge of a battlefield that's worth going to, or particular sites, and sharing their photographs. So we're going to have to have an entirely new level of engagement with Facebook for that to work well, and we're also going to have to change - to an extent - our concept of privacy, yet again. If that friend of a friend keeps their interest private, I'm not going to have a chance to make that connection. However, if their information is public, it's a great contact for me. This doesn't mean that everything you do on Facebook all of a sudden has to be public - not at all. However it does mean that we're going to have to think very carefully about what we keep private and what we make available to all and sundry, or indeed if we should have different Facebook accounts for different purposes (which Facebook doesn't like of course, but hey, why should they have all the fun?)
If you - as a professional - have expertise in a particular area, you probably want to share it. You want to help people, or to promote your organisation or your library. You want to be able to reach out into a wider community, and Facebook is offering you a chance to do exactly that. If I'm going to a particular part of the country and I have an interest in local history, wouldn't it be great to be able to see a collection of old photographs or prints of that area which have been shared on Facebook by the librarian in the local public library? If I have a few moments I may then decide to pop into that library to look and see what other stuff is available for me to use. Simply by doing what it is that we do - preserving and presenting information, and working with communities to get more stuff available, we're getting out to that wider audience, and increasing our profile.
This also has an advantage for Facebook as well of course. The one thing that Facebook can't cope with is inertia. This isn't so much a problem for Google, because there are always new things happening that it can index and make available to us, but if we're stuck at 6 Facebook friends that's not really adding that much to the Facebook universe, because you're not sharing content widely or making new connections. However, if you're active on Facebook, and doing more, sharing more and contributing more content Facebook is growing. So, if we move away from the concept of 'friends' and more towards the concept of 'colleagues' there's an entirely different option for Facebook to grow, as we make more friends and share more stuff.
Make no bones about it though, there's a huge impact in other areas as well. If we're moving away from an organisational presence to a personal presence (and I've argued that point well enough in the past, as it's the way that we need to go), how does an organisation respond? Sure, someone can still be responsible for putting up the local history photographs but someone needs to decide to do that, at some level. If we're going to encourage professionals to share their expertise for the benefit of both the organisation and the community, we have to let them do it themselves. This is not going to go down very well with the web development team or the people who produce the Council guidelines on internet use. I would argue that it's our role as information professionals to point out that Facebook is not what it once was, and that it needs to be regarded in a completely new way.
I've already seen people complaining that the new Graph Search isn't going to help brands promote themselves; Larry Kim (CTO of Wordstream) says "It remains unclear on how advertisers will be able to use this Graph
Search product to better market and sell their products to Facebook
users." I beg to differ. It's perfectly obvious to see how this is going to work, because it's going to be much more down to individual users of products to market and sell products themselves, based on their own recommendations. If I like a product, I'm more likely to recommend it to my friends, and if I dislike it, I'm going to be fairly vocal about that. Companies may well have to spend more time interacting with people than they've done in the past, and use their budgets to keep people interested and onside inside of using it to spend huge amounts on advertising to people who are not interested. So advertising is going to have to continue to become more personalised. Once again there's a role here for the information professional. We are generally very well trusted by people, so we can help by talking about the resources that we use - the software tools that we like, the websites that we go to and so on. That will further help our members as well as the members that we don't have yet.I can also see that companies such as LinkedIn are going to have very considerable concerns about this move, since we'll be able to use Facebook to find out what jobs are available, do we already know anyone who works there, or is a friend of ours, we can see what that company does, the attitudes of people who work there and so on. Graph Search is going to very quickly become a cross between Yelp, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Amazon and so on.
Graph Search is a really big deal, and there is no doubt that it's going
to really hit Google. Don't also forget the tie in that Facebook has with both Bing and Blekko, both of which integrate Facebook into their search offerings. This move is going to do them no harm whatever, and in fact will be a really big boost for them, but it will further leave Google out in the cold - because who is going to want some list of websites to look at when they can instead get personalised, tailored content?
Does this require us all to sit glued to Facebook at the expense of other methods of communicating? No, I don't believe that it does. It's perfectly easy to share content across social media with a quick click of a button - you can do it at the bottom of this post if you want to try it out! As we are looking for information, then finding it, we can do the next thing which is to recommend it. However, it does also mean that yes, I believe that we need to spend more time using social media, and that has to move further up the list of priorities. I think we'll be seeing Social media (or Real Time media) roles within information centres, and it should be part of the role that everyone has, not just a few people. We cannot escape it, nor should we - in fact we should be actively embracing it. If we don't, we shall find as Jessops, Comet, BlockBuster and HMV have already found - that we won't be around much longer. For a library and it's staff to flourish we cannot expect people to come to us in the building. We have to go to them, and they are on Facebook, Twitter and the rest.
So, in summary, Graph Search is important for the profession because:
It gives us access to more information to be able to do our jobs better and more effectively.
It will quickly put us in contact with people who we can contact for information, and who we may have a link with.
It's a way that we have of promoting our library to both existing and new members.
We can use it to provide more information than we've been able to do in the past.
It's a very positive way to demonstrate our own skills and abilities.
It gives us more control over the information that we have and how we demonstrate it.
There's another way that's now available to us which means that we can virtually leave the buildings behind us, and connect directly with our members.
The people over at Nielsen recently released their 'State of the Media. The Social Media Report 2012' which makes very interesting reading indeed. It makes the point that the web is becoming much more about people than it is about websites, HTML and a bunch of formatted documents. We used to have what could easily be described as a destination web, in which we went to a search engine, got a series of links, visited as many as it took to get the information that we needed, and then we went away again. The web with all of the social media (or as I'm preferring to call it these days, real time media) has evolved into a people based web, in which the main value is not the websites that you know or that you find, but the people that you connect with. Also very importantly, it's not really desk based any longer, it's becoming more mobile than ever, and this is only going to increase in the future. I'd like to look at some of the statistics that they make available in order to see where it is that we're going, and almost as importantly, how we're going to get there. If you're not bothered by statistics (and there are a lot of them) just jump to the end, where I talk about the effect I think this has, or should have, on the world of information.
The statistics
The Internet is becoming more and more popular as people spend longer online. The time spent on PCs and smartphones was up by more than 20% from July '11 to July '12. Access via the mobile web was up by 82%, and use of mobile apps up by 85%, while access via PC fell by 4%. However, PC access is still by far and away the preferred choice for access, with 204,721,000 Americans accessing via that method. (The figures are all US based I'm afraid, so take that into account.)
People are spending longer amounts of time on social networks than anywhere else - with 17% of consumers PC time spent on Facebook, which is the most popular US brand. Most of this social media time is experienced by mobile apps or the mobile web, with users becoming far more deeply engaged with their social media sites, friends and contacts. The top networks are Facebook, Blogger, Twitter, Wordpress, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ among others. The biggest growth has been experienced by Pinterest, experiencing an astonishing 1,047% increase in visits, followed by Google+ with what would seem to be a rather paltry 80% growth. Facebook visits on the other hand have dropped by a tiny 4%. Pinterest has certainly been the single biggest success story of 2012, with the largest increase across PC, mobile web and apps. The US breakdown shows that the average user is female (70%), early middle age (31% of users are between 35-49) and white (86%). These figures are comparable across all platforms.
The use of tablet devices to connect to the internet is on the rise, from 3% in 2011 to 16% last year, with internet enabled television doubling (although that's only from 2% to 4%).
We tend to connect with people for (obviously) various reasons, but the main reasons seem to be because we know the person in real life, share mutual friends or are interested in keeping up with what is happening around us.
The report devotes some considerable time to talking about dual screening - that is to say, watching television at the same time as using social media, with Twitter being a key influencer here, with 33% of active Twitter users tweeting about television programmes in June of 2012, up from 26% in January. However, generally people are interacting with the internet while television watching - shopping, visitings social networking sites, looking up information related to TV programmes being watched, or checking product information from advertising.
Almost half of users (47%) are engaging with companies via social media, asking questions, raising issues and making complaints, with 33% of social media users preferring to get access that way, rather than picking up a telephone. Most of those users will try accessing the company Facebook page first, (29%), followed by a users personal page (28%), an official company blog (15%), Twitter (14%) and YouTube (12%). Other social experiences, or as Nielsen puts it 'The consumer decision journey' include hearing of others experiences (70%), learning about brands, products and services,(65%) complimenting brands (53%), and complaining about brands (50%).
The effect on the information world
It seems fairly clear, at least based on this evidence that information professionals ignore social media at their peril, but then - you knew I was going to say that anyway. The next iteration of the web is undoubtedly social, not site based. Consequently, we need to embrace real time media both as consumers of data, but also as creators of data. Real time media is increasingly going to be how our library members will expect to talk to us. They will expect to find a Facebook page, just as a few years ago they expected to find a website. They want to talk to us using apps and tablets. I was particularly interested in the figures regarding what people do on social media - listening to others experiences for example. Can you find a library 'champion' among your members, who is prepared to write about the information service and to engage across social media, dragging other people along with them?
What the report didn't show, which I thought was a shame, was social and search. For me, figures that shrieked out 'information professionals' were the ones that related to why people connect - because the know someone, are friends with the friends of someone, or want to keep up to date with the news. Shouldn't that be us? Shouldn't we be the ones with the Twitter handles, Facebook pages, Pinterest accounts and blogs? Of course, if you're reading this, you're probably one of the people who is doing just that, so I know that I'm very much in the echo chamber at this point, but if you're reading this at home, because you can't get access at work, keep up the pressure! Visit the article directly, and drag out a few more statistics about how people are engaging with organisations, using them to sort out buying decisions and so on. Should we also start to consider rather more how we can get involved with members by looking at what is on television? I was going to say 'with the exception of things like Eastenders' but why not? Soaps do have very important social stories about a wide variety of issues, and if the BBC puts in links saying things like 'if you have been affected by ...' then shouldn't we? With the recent awful news items about gun crime in the United States, is there no mileage in a library somewhere getting some facts and figures together, and tweeting them, or adding them to a Facebook page? This cannot hurt, and can surely only help to increase our visability, both in our own social circles, but also across the net generally. Wouldn't it have been great if, when people search for information about an event that's happening in the world, the first result that comes up is a reference to work that a British library has done to collate facts and figures together? And when people are searching for information in Google, they can see links and connections with their information staff, who are active on Google+? Or when they search on Facebook, up pops a library page? Or that they feel confident enough, empowered and expectant enough that they will consider going to a Facebook page of a library or a librarian, and asking a question there - AND getting a response?
Let's use 2013 to really hammer home to 'the powers that be' the importance of real time media, and the people in the organisation who should be using it and exploiting it to it's fullest potential are not the technical staff, not the Press department, but the people who understand exactly what information is all about - us!
Keep up with your news! Resultly is a tool that can best be described as a current awareness resource. Simply let it know what you're interested in (this could be a word, phrase, person, event, etc) and provide it with some parameters. These could be anything from the social network that you're interested in, to the length of time a video should be and so on. You can also input your location to get local data (though I'm not entirely sure if this will work outside the US).
The idea is that Resultly will then start checking content for you, and will display it on the screen when it finds anything new. It looks a little like this:
Quite how valuable it will be I'm none too sure. I'm certainly seeing more on Twitter than this tool is returning to me. I can also get Google to run email news alerts as they happen, so I'm not sure it's offering anything new for me in that respect. The value would be in the extent that I can focus searches, and use it to automate the searching of resources that are not made easy, such as Facebook, but I remain to be convinced really.
If you've ever been on one of my Web 2.0 or social media courses you'll know that I am at pains to try and distance myself from both of those terms. Web 2.0 is now very old hat, and it's not something that we use much now. Indeed there were lots of people who always hated the term, and it does have something of a technical taint about it perhaps. The problem with 'social media' is that it's weighed down with a huge amount of baggage. Social Media is Stephen Fry getting stuck in a life, or footballers tweeting nonsense, or hate groups on Facebook. It's no wonder that some middle and senior managers are against the very idea of embracing social media. And really - I can't blame them too much.
So if social media is now dead, because it's become ubiquitous, perhaps it's time that we had a new word for that thing that it is that we do. I'm not sure TTTIITWD would ever really catch on, so perhaps 'real time media' is a better bet. This is certainly what David Scott is suggesting, and I think he may have a point.
If we're having such a hard time getting access to social media, it may be worth trying this little semantic trick. (I like using 'stuff' myself, but that's not going to play well at boardroom level.) 'Real Time Media' implies a whole host of exciting things. Speed for one. It's what is happening now, this minute - and with that comes the implication that if we're not engaged, we're missing out. It also implies discussions - preferably with clients - and that should get people interested. 'Real Time Media' should also play well with the Press and Publicity department, since it begins to bring them back into the game, rather than freezing them out. As for the tech department, there's perhaps a different emphasis on getting things done now, opening them up to allow for faster reaction times, rather than blocking and slowing things down.
Of course, I admit that I could be being hopelessly naive here, but I think it's an experiment worth trying out. If you decide to give it a go, do please come and tell me what happened!
As anyone who knows me knows - I'm a bit of a social media buff. Between that and Internet search that's pretty much what I do all day. I spend a lot of time looking at how search, social and social search are converging at a huge speed, and I like talking about the implications of that. One of the things that people often ask me about - in connection with this - is privacy. For me, privacy is now mixed up with levels of authority, and for most of us, we're going to have to run an interesting tightrope between protecting our privacy and being seen as authoritative.
Websites are decreasing in importance. You have only to look at adverts for new Bond film Skyfall to see that while it has a website, the emphasis is really rather more on the Facebook page. That has 1,335,188 likes with 151,420 talking about it. If I want to interact with a company, I'm not going to go to the website, I'll go to the Facebook page to ask my question, comment, complain or praise. I'll do this for lots of reasons, not only to ask, comment etc but to share that with other people. If a company does something wrong, I'm less interested in a one-to-one email, and more keen on shining a social media light on them. Look at any Google page of results, and you'll often find that most of the results are now coming from social media resources - Flickr, Twitter, Slideshare, Wikipedia and the rest of them. What does Facebook boast about? The 1 billion users of the system. Can Google boast about the type of thing? Well, we don't really do the whole 'we index more webpages than you do) thing any longer. True, they can talk about the number of searches run, but we're not really users of Google in the same way that we are with Facebook. I can expand on this (and often do), but Facebook is powerful because it keeps people on its site, and Google is weak because it pushes them away (as they find a good answer to their question and leave), which is why they're trying so hard with the G+ system.
What we're now seeing is a clear move - and it's for search engines to embrace social media. Google is doing it by linking to G+ accounts, by personalising search, by identifying authors, talking about how many circles they are in and so on. Bing and Blekko encourage you to link your Facebook accounts to them so that they can pull in the data from your contacts. News curation sites and apps also want to know who you follow on Facebook, Twitter and the rest, and they also want to know how many people follow you. Showyou wants to give you content from social media sites, Zite pulls content from people who share material, as do many others. Let's be quite certain here; this is not going to go away. It will increase as we become submerged in more and more social resources. I tweeted recently to say that social media is dead, because it's ALL social media now.
How does this work on the authority level? In 'the old days' it was pretty easy to look at a website and tell if it was a fake or spoof. A quick checklist, tick tick cross and you were well away. However, how are we going to do that now? With the rise of the individual within search it's not quite as easy. I found the idea that Stephen Fry was essentially validated British Celebrity Twitter accounts himself until Twitter got around to doing validation very interesting. If we trust Stephen Fry (no need to like, just trust) that if he says a certain account is linked to the person it is supposed to be linked to, then it is.
Now, a lot of the people that I follow on Twitter are followed because I like what they post, what they are interested in, the links they provide and so on. I am much less interested in where they work. Sure, it's nice to know if it's a University or a corporate, a school or if they're a home worker, but that's not the most important thing for me. I'm moving to a position where the authority that someone has is not really associated with their place of employment, and it's much more associated with their presence in social media. If a person with thousands of followers leaves one company and moves to another, do they gain authority because of their new employer? Or could it be argued that the new employer gains authority because they have employed someone with thousands of followers? I'm more interested in knowing that a person is followed by a million others than I am by knowing that they work for a company that I don't know anything about. If I follow someone on Twitter, I'm more likely to notice them on LinkedIn, Slideshare or Facebook AND when I meet them at a conference. In fact, I'm much more likely to try and ferret them out at a conference because I know them via social media.
You can argue this isn't fair, and I'll agree with you. However, that doesn't change the fact that if I can't see someone via social media, I'm less likely to see them at all - or that they are going to have to work a lot harder to be seen. I work at home, not in an office, and I mainly see people via my screen, or on a course or at a conference, so that's how it works for me - your situation may well be very different, and what I've said doesn't apply, particularly if you're in an organisation that you don't have to stretch beyond. Equally though, your employer doesn't owe you a living, and the jobs for life thing doesn't work any more. You have to be responsible for your career, and part of that now means that you've got to be where other people are. That used to be in citation indexes, or at conferences or on the title page of books. Still is, to some extent, but now - social media is where it's at.
Does this mean you have to been on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest (do you want me to carry on, cos I can!) and spend your time updating locations and status? Up to you really - it's your life, your job, your reputation. However, I firmly belive that in the next few years we're going to carry on moving to the importance of the person, and it's best to get in early. Utilise the tools that interest you, and let other people know that you're out there. A potential new employer, if they have any brains at all are going to be looking at your social media footprint as much as anything in your CV. If you were going to employ someone, and two people had equally good CVs, which would you go for - the one with hundreds or thousands of Twitter followers or the one who didn't have a Twitter account? The one with lots of contacts on LinkedIn, or the one with none?
One of my favourite quotes at the moment is from Erik Qualman, who is the author of Socialnomics: "We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it."
Little Bird is an interesting tool. It's in private beta at the moment, but if you register you get a temporary password/user name so that you take a poke around. It's still very tiny at the moment, but it shows a lot of promise.
The first thing that you see in the site are sets reports in different areas, such as beer, wine, food and librarians interestingly enough. So naturally that's where I went. You are presented with a list of the top 500 experts, which seems to be defined by which librarians are most followed by 'insiders', which appears to be something of a self referential group. LibraryJournal for example comes top of the list as its followed by over 1,000 'insiders'. Then there is a listing of new accounts, but followed by insiders, 'listeners' which are people who are following insiders, the most followed insiders, the oldest and the most active accounts. It's worth spending some time wading through this information, since it does give you a good feel for who is who on Twitter - as defined by the other people who Little Bird thinks are important.
There's a very helpful section on what the insiders are sharing. This is a news curation tool which pulls link content directly onto the page so that you can read it there, rather than having to wander all over the web following up links. Next up is a 'comparison' option, to compare other individuals against 'the experts'. This tells you how many experts your victim is following, how many s/he is being followed by, which experts most recently followed that person, and which experts first followed that person.
There is a 'blogs' option - top blogs by inbound links, with listings on most recent posts. Finally, there is a search option which is powered by Blekko, and pulls up websites.
The main flaw - if there is one, is how the 'insiders' are defined. If you don't have the word 'library' or 'librarian' in your biography, then you don't stand any chance of being in the list. The more followers you have, the higher up the listing you go. So if Lady Gaga suddenly put librarian into her biography, she'd zoom to the top of the list, slanting the rest of the content. I think Little Bird needs to have another way of working this out, because it's an easy system to game if you are minded to. However, to be fair, looking at the librarians list, there weren't that many that I would have objected to, but I still find the WeFollow resource a good one to use.
This is another example of the way that the internet - specifically search and authority is now moving, which is towards the individual, and away from the website or the organisation. We're only going to see more of this happening in the future, and Little Bird is just an early example of where we're going to be going in the next few years.
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