Social Media Breakfast #SMB14

This morning I had the opportunity to attend Social Media Overload - Making Sense of It All, one of a series of monthly Tweetups held in the Boston area for social media professionals and others to network and talk about social media issues. I found out about the event through @BostonTweetUp, a Twitter account that advertises these kinds of local meetings.

I attended because like many of you I'm interested in social media- its applications, its trends and its future. Held at Communispace Corporation, the event was divided into three sections- a meet-and-greet at the beginning, a presentation and some more meeting-and-greeting at the end.

Speakers are listed on the event page; I won't repeat that information here.

They spoke on various tools and trends in social networking, including the importance of

• aggregation and integration of different social networking services,
  
• knowing where you want to go as you set out in the social networking world,
• experimentation with new social networking tools,
• keeping control of your online brand.

There was also a little disagreement on, for example, whether or not one should shut down one's accounts on sites and services that no longer serve one's goals; some people felt that closing down such accounts prevented dilution of one's personal brand, and others felt that maintaining ownership of one's online real estate would prevent impersonation and the potential for fraud.

Personally, I'm on the fence on this issue. I have several social networking accounts for Boston Bibliophile that I do not actively use, but I am loathe to give them up because I want to keep my online "property" in my hands. On the other hand, if one went to one of these sites and saw that I had not updated it in over a year, one might get the wrong impression about my online activity.

There was also some discussion about how to "sell" social networking to people who are hesitant to expose themselves or their brand on the Internet, or who are simply unfamiliar with its benefits and uses. I blogged about this very issue last week, and the speakers made many of the same points I did.

One of the most striking points to come up was actually quoted from last week's 140 Characters Conference. This point was that Twitter and Facebook will soon account for more website referrals than Google searches; I didn't get the documentation on this claim but if it's true it's a very compelling argument for maintaining an active social network presence.

I found myself bubbling over with ideas and information; it was a great event and I strongly encourage attendance at these events in your area.

How do you use social networking? What do you see as its benefits and liabilities?

Sharing Social Media with the Uninitiated

As bloggers, many of us are conversant in the online world- Facebook, Twitter, GoodReads, LibraryThing, Flickr, Deli.ci.ous, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. Nobody uses every online tool but most of us by now have picked a few favorites. My favorites are the ones that provide the most benefit for the time I have spend online- services that help me organize information, connect with friends and family, and meet new people in the library and book world.

Not every tool gets the same emphasis. I use LibraryThing, for example, to keep track of my reading first and network second. And some profiles are completely restricted to people I know personally. But other tools, like LinkedIn and Twitter, are all about reaching out, and while I'm hardly a superstar I've had some nice successes here and there. One example- The BostonBEA Tweetup. A group of book people acquainted with each other through Twitter decided to have their own get-together when they couldn't make it to a national publishing conference. We shared information, made new friends and forged connections. And felt pretty cool doing it.

When you're accustomed to doing business online, you'll find the tools and learn to use them; the online world is, after all, all about entrepreneurship, self-promotion and self-starting. And there are plenty of folks willing to offer advice.

But how do you promote online tools to people who aren't used to living online? Recently I've been fielding a lot of questions from colleagues and friends about how the online world has helped me and how it might help them. Here are a few things I've learned about how to make a persuasive case for the online world.

• If at all possible, be at a computer for these conversations, so you can demonstrate sites live and show them in action. A hands-on lesson is so much more powerful than a description.
• Start with the best thing the online world has done for you- in a single sentence. In my case, my online activities have put me in touch with book-industry professionals to whom I would have no access any other way.
  
• Avoid jargon, even if you think your listener will understand. Clear, plain-spoken enthusiasm will push your message further. If your listener doesn't understand, you will isolate yourself and diminish your effectiveness.
• Point to the specific benefits of a given service. "Deli.ci.ous is so cool" is less helpful than "Deli.ci.ous helps me find new sites for shopping/hobbies/business."
• Emphasize that most sites give ample privacy options. Privacy is a big concern for a lot of people and it means a lot to know that users can set some limits.
  
• Tell a brief story about a specific accomplishment or contact that came from an online connection. "There are so many cool people on Twitter" says less than "I met a great publishing rep who pointed me to her podcast, which I now listen to every week."
• Make your examples relevant to your listener. "You can keep up with all your old high school friends on Facebook" might not appeal equally to all.
• Be honest about the amount of time you spend online. Let your listener understand what you put into it, so he or she can set realistic expectations for him- or herself.

What about you? How do you talk about the online world to people who aren't in as deep as you? What strategies work or don't work? What kinds of attitudes do you encounter, positive and negative, about our online life? What else do you think is important to say to skeptics? What are your online success stories?

Search Engine Review: Covering Photography

Covering Photography is a search engine I heard about in a recent edition of Research Buzz, a great newsletter that comes out every week. If you don't have a subscription and you're interested in keeping up with the world of search I highly recommend it.

But anyway. Covering Photography covers book covers- the photographs on them, anyway. From the home page:

Covering Photography is a web-based archive and resource for the study of the relationship between the history of photography and book cover design. The images / book covers contained in our database may be accessed via a number of categories including by Photographer, Author, Publisher, Publication Date and Designer.

It's a neat little resource. The home page is illustrated to look like a flattened book cover. It features a keyword search and allows users to browse by photographer, author, publisher, publication date and designer. There's no information on the about page as to the specifics of the scope or coverage, but from browsing I can see that the database covers classic authors like Thomas Hardy, bestsellers like John Grisham, literary highbrows like Margaret Atwood and popular figures like Pamela Anderson. Publication dates range from 1949 to the present although not every date in that range is represented.

Searching by keyword seems a little tricky. I'm not sure how keywords or search terms are assigned to the covers and it took me a few tries to get results. The words that seemed to work best were terms that described the photos rather than terms of images that appear in the photos- "nude" worked well, for example; "cat" did not. Terms that describe the genre of the books worked well also, like "poetry" or "mystery". Keyword searches will also pull results from words in the title. The advanced search allows a user to exclude words and search by phrase, also helpful. Users can also search by phrase in the simple search by enclosing the terms with quotation marks.

If a user browses the results come back as a list of cover photos; if the user is searching by keyword or in advanced mode, results come back as a text-based list of titles. Since the engine is meant as a database of photos, I think it would be neat to present all results by cover photo instead. But as the creator says in the about page, it's a work in progress so maybe that's something we have to look forward to.

Covering Photography is likely a good resource for photography and book professionals; for the average, non-pro bibliophile, it's a fun resource for browsing and time-killing. Go take a look.

Search Engine Review: LazyLibrary.com

A new search engine launched recently, designed to help readers find short (200 pages or less) books on the topic of their choice, called LazyLibrary.com. The premise is simple: "read less. get more," the site says. From the home page:

"Ever read a book that was a few hundred pages longer than it needed to be? Yeah, so have we. Fortunately, there are authors out there that would rather have a concise and effective book than a lengthy and diluted tome, and that's where we come in."

The interface is simple and easy to read. The home page includes the search box, a brief description of the site and a clickable cloud at the bottom with sample "popular searches."

Simply type your topic into the search box at the top left and the engine returns results on a new page. Additional features include new and used Amazon.com prices, a link to buy the book from Amazon, rating stars (this feature is not yet enabled in the beta version), number of pages, graphics to indicate the length in visual terms- one page for each 50 pages- and a link to get a blurb.

It's cute, although the results seemed a little haphazard. A search for "russia" returned some good, on-topic results- the first two results were Afghanistan: A Russian Soldier's Story and Adopting Alyosha : A Single Man Finds a Son in Russia. The rest of the hits, nine in all, made sense. I did a couple of other searches that also returned reasonable hits. The results made sense to me if the engine was doing a topical approach but then I did a search for "library" and "libraries," to see how the engine would handle a search that might not get as many keyword-in-title type hits. The results seemed to confirm that the engine was using the search term as a keyword and not as a subject.

The first result was The Prophet (Kahlil Gibran Pocket Library Series), which has nothing to do with libraries and probably was included because the word library appears in the title. The next four books were children's books and I couldn't figure out what any of them have to do with libraries, especially the second one, Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type. I did several other searches for words like "quilting" and "Woolf" (as in Virginia) and "embroidery" and got a variety of mostly-useful results.

I think that LazyLibrary is a fun little tool somewhat useful for finding quick reads in nonfiction, if only because fiction tends to be longer than 200 pages and might be tougher to search by topic. It might be of interest to librarians for light readers-advisory work and to general readers for quick searches and entertainment. I would be interested to know more about the folks behind the site and exactly from where they're pulling their results. How closely is the site affliated with Amazon is one question I have. I'll check back on it now and then and see how it's coming.