Social media is relatively easy to publish to and free or low-cost, making it genuinely accessible to any type of organization. This ease, however, can come at a price — more and more often we hear stories of businesses dealing with fallout from a poorly thought out post.

In 2018, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, as well as companies like Miele and Dolce & Gabbana received backlash for insensitive or offensive posts. We also hear of employees accidentally posting to the wrong account, inadvertently sharing their personal thoughts to their employers’ pages. So, how can libraries avoid these difficult situations? The first defense is a strong social media policy. 

Social media policies frequently guide employees on the following:

• Who maintains the library’s social media accounts. Will your library have a specific public relations or marketing department for social media-related tasks? Is it up to each department to promote its own services? Is posting restricted to higher-level administrators? How are absences covered?
• What should be posted. Is there a specific brand voice your library is striving for? For example, some organizations thrive using informal, colloquial language, while others are taken seriously through more authoritative language. Should graphics follow a specific color scheme, and should routine types of posts such as program announcements follow a consistent format? A written brand strategy can also be helpful in addressing these questions.
• How to address problems. A specific crisis response protocol is important to establish before a controversial issue arises. For example, how will your library handle negative patron comments, or a post that inadvertently offends users? What will happen if one of your library’s accounts gets hacked? Try to plan ahead in case your library is ever tasked with the question of whether or not to remove user comments or photos.
• Security guidelines. Should two-factor authentication be enabled on the library’s accounts? Who has access to login information? Should passwords be changed regularly, and how are accounts secured when employees leave?

While employers are somewhat limited in the restrictions they may place on employees’ personal social media profiles that are maintained outside work hours, many policies request that staff explicitly state that their opinions are their own and may not necessarily reflect the official stance of their organization. For specific guidance concerning employees’ use of social media, it is always best to consult with a trusted attorney.

Other procedures to consider that may not necessarily be part of a formal policy can include the frequency and scheduling of posts, which may vary by network, and whether posts are planned ahead of time. Will your library dedicate specific days to certain types of posts? For instance, some popular routine postings include #BookfaceFriday or #ThrowbackThursday. 

Looking for some examples of strong social media policies? Check out these library and nonlibrary guidelines. Note that some organizations place their social media terms within a larger communications or internet policy. 

• Oradell Free Public Library: NJ
• Cook Memorial Public Library District: IL
• Roanoke Public Library: IN
• The Coca-Cola Company
• Dell

Some organizations have implemented public-facing policies governing user behavior on official social media accounts:

• Brooklyn Public Library
• Sno-Isle Libraries: WA
• Pima County Public Library: AZ

For additional help creating your own social media policy, two great resources are WebJunction and ALA.

Does your library have a social media policy, or are you thinking of creating one? Sound off or share yours in the comments! 

The post Staying Social: Why Your Library Needs Social Media Policies first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

James LaRue, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom weighed in on this issue, stating he, “…did not find anything objectionable to them.”[3] He said the tweets were only reflecting current societal topics and did not push a certain political view. LaRue said this is the first time the Office for Intellectual Freedom has come across libraries scrubbing tweets due to patron complaints.[4]

Here is the text and picture description for two tweets:

• Picture of Hillary Clinton with the words ‘I Believe in Science’: “We believe in #science too! That’s why we’re partnering with @coschoolofmines for a Girls in STEM Competition.”
• Pictorial collage of medical terms relating to reproduction: “Want more information on women’s healthcare reform? Here’s 9 books that will take you beyond the headlines.”

First, before we start analyzing whether the library’s removal of tweets was ethical, we must remember a fundamental fact: libraries are neutral places and must not be biased in any way, blatant or perceived. Biases include all things religious, political, age related, content related, gender related, and racial. Perception of bias is the key. There does not have to be a bias actually there, only the perception of one.

If we look at the tweets in question, a simple solution to the library’s problem is obvious: remove/change the pictures accompanying the text of the tweets. Tweeting about science and a partnership for STEM is not politically biased; but the picture of Hillary Clinton is. The photo of Clinton should be removed and replaced with something else. The tweet about women’s healthcare reform and the graphic itself are fine, in my opinion. Women’s healthcare reform is a current topic in today’s news. Is the topic debated in politics? Yes, but that does not mean that a tweet about library materials on the topic is a push for a certain political party. The text of the tweet is encouraging people to read books on the topic in order to go “beyond the headlines.”[5]

The decision to remove the tweets was perhaps rash. They could have been removed and then reposted with other graphics (if the graphic did indeed need replacing), seeing that for the most part, the text is unbiased. The library community needs to mull over ethics for social media and come up with a game plan for future similar incidents. For more information, ALA has a webpage concerning social media and ethics that librarians can refer to.

References

[1] Aguilar, J. (2017, February 23). Jeffco library scrubs tweets after getting complaints that posts are politically biased. The Denver Post. Retrieved from http://www.denverpost.com/2017/02/23/jeffco-library-tweets-county-commissioner/

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

The post Library Ethics and Social Media first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

We realized cooking shows, cooking podcasts—cooking everything—are very popular these days. Tutorials, demonstrations, and photos of cooking are all over television, social media outlets like Facebook and Pinterest, and sites like BuzzFeed and Tasty. We thought, why not appeal to the masses and give them what they want, and  decided to move forward with this project. I teamed up with two of my staff members and we got to work. Honestly, the whole process was very simple.

We pulled out multiple cookbooks and found some pretty easy recipes. When we decided what we wanted to make first (pancakes and a smoothie), we took a trip to the grocery store. The total cost of supplies was only about nineteen dollars.

We then set up shop in one of our library’s storage rooms with our library’s Canon XA10 camera and ZOOM H1 microphone. Very primitive, I know, but the result was actually quite spectacular. After our two-hour shoot, we were ready to post to our YouTube channel and Facebook page. Our initial episode was so raw and unscripted that it made the whole experience more appealing. The comedy of it all sucked viewers right in, and we had over one thousand views on Facebook in under twenty-four hours.

The video was shared over twenty-five times and had more than sixty likes. Since we are not the largest library, these numbers were staggering, and they let us know that we were on to something great, or, as we started saying, “We’re going viral.” Our second episode, in which we cooked up a southern-style grilled cheese sandwich to pay homage to our region, was just as popular. We now have the community asking about and recommending the dishes we will be making next.

The community engagement has been great. Not only do we get to cook up some great food, but we also have the opportunity to promote our library’s cooking literature. Since we aired our first episode, we have seen an surge of cookbook checkouts. Our goal had been accomplished.

Libraries are constantly innovating and coming up with new services and programs to appeal to their communities. It is a smart move to take what is trending and incorporate it into your library’s events and programming. We felt food and cooking were trending, so we made something unique and simple out of it. Millennials love food, and they love to gather ideas from social media on a daily basis. In an interview with Eve Turow by The Atlantic, the food writer demonstrates how college perspectives towards food have changed in just five years:

Back when she was in college, she was content subsisting on “gelatinous brown rice, pre-cooked mushy pinto beans, [and] blocks of bouncy tofu.” But if she were in college now, she says, she’d be taking rice-bowl inspiration from Pinterest and making good use of the nearby farmer’s market and the greenhouse attached to the science library.^[1]

The cooking blog Bon Appetit claims that, “On average, Americans spend only 27 minutes a day preparing food, compared to 60 minutes in 1965.”^[2] Those are sad numbers. We want people to get excited about cooking again and show them that they can cook up something tasty and filling with just a few ingredients and in less than twenty minutes. We hope our community gets excited about cooking again and enjoys our future videos.

Our first two episodes:

Cooking With Ben Episode 1

Cooking With Ben Episode 2

References

[1] Eve Turow, “Why Are Millennials So Obsessed with Food?” by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic, August 14, 2015.

[2] Elyssa Goldberg, “Why Americans Don’t Cook as Much as We Used To,” Bon Appetit, February 17, 2016.

The post Cooking With Ben: Our Library’s Cooking Show Adventure first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Diving Into the Survey Results

According to Pew, the majority (62 percent) of U.S. adults gets news on social media, and 18 percent answered that they do so often. These numbers have shifted from a slightly different Pew survey from 2013, where 49 percent of adults reported “seeing news” on social media. The new study removed three sites (Pinterest, Myspace, and Google+) and added one (Snapchat).Here are a few other key results when it comes to news on social media platforms:

• Seventy percent of Reddit users receive news through the platform (up 8 percent from data reported in 2013)
• Sixty-six percent of Facebook users receive news through the platform (up 19 percent from 2013)
• Fifty-nine percent of Twitter users receive news through the platform (up 7 percent from 2013)
• Thirty-one percent of Tumblr users receive news through the platform (up 2 percent from in 2013)

The study also examined the reach of these social networks among U.S. adults. Facebook is the largest social network and reaches 67 percent of U.S. adults. Pew writes, “The two-thirds of Facebook users who get news there, then, amount to 44 percent of the general population [of the United States].” By comparison, at 48 percent, YouTube has the second largest reach in terms of use among U.S. adults. But only about 10 percent of YouTube users reported that they get news from the video platform.^[2]

How Social Media Users Find the News

In terms of news-seeking habits, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram users are more likely to find news “by chance” when they are doing other online activities. On the flipside, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Reddit news users are evenly divided between seekers (those who actively look for news) and non-seekers (those who find it by chance).

This makes sense as Reddit has forums dedicated to news topics (such as an election or a natural disaster). Twitter, on the other hand, has become a favored tool for journalists, professional and amateur, who “live tweet” events as they occur. The Pew Research Center covered the live-tweeting phenomenon after Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast.^[3]

The Impact for Libraries

When libraries are sharing news with patrons, whether it’s about an upcoming program, a local bond measure, or an event relevant to the community, it’s important to consider the right platform. From Pew’s findings, it is apparent that Facebook is probably your best bet for sharing such information.

Libraries should be aware, however, of Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm for pages. Edgerank determines what posts people see and where they show up in people’s feeds. In other words, despite Facebook being the best place to share news, your community might not actually see your posts.^[4] Thankfully, there are a few strategies you can take to use Edgerank to your advantage, which are detailed in this TechSoup for Libraries blog post.

This survey report is also useful for library staff in understanding how patrons find time-sensitive information. If it comes from Facebook or any other social network, however, librarians might need to assist a patron with verifying that the information is factual and correct.

References

[1] Jeffrey Gottfried and Elisa Shearer, “News Use Across Social Media Platforms 2016,” Pew Research Center, May 26, 2016.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Bruce Drake, “Twitter Served as a Lifeline of Information during Hurricane Sandy,” Pew Research Center, October 28, 2013.

[4] Michael Patterson, “A Guide to the Facebook News Feed Algorithm,” Sprout Social, January 26, 2015.

The post Pew Report: Facebook Most Popular Platform for Seeking Information first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

As the application’s tagline suggests, capturing and sharing moments at the library is considerably easy but it requires some digging to uncover inspiring posts. Discovering the accounts of prominent public libraries such as the New York Public Library and your own local libraries can be simple enough. The accounts could be searched for by name using Instagram’s search function, but discovering new libraries and library related trends can be overwhelming.

Hashtags allow content on Instagram to become accessible to a wider audience. Instagram users can explore content that are publicly uploaded by searching the hashtags that the creators have coupled with their posts. Browsing results of the most popular tags can prove to be impractical and daunting. Exploring the popularly employed #librariesofinstagram, for example, yields thousands of images that are related to libraries; searching for #library yields million of hits. As of yet, the only way to browse results on Instagram is through infinite scrolling. Since the results are ordered from the most recent to the least recent, seeing all of the posts for a given hashtag depends on one’s willingness to continue scrolling.

Results that are more relevant to your interests are accessible by searching for specific hashtags. Here is a sampling of hashtags being used by libraries today:

• Examples of tags that encourage participation include #bookface and #bookfacefriday which showcases creative uses of book jackets. #libraryshelfie features library shelves with or without library staff members to accompany them. Newly created #libraryinmyhand promotes electronic resources and services offered by libraries.
• Librarians that are fashion conscious may be keen on viewing posts tagged with #librarianwardrobe or #librarianstyle to see what librarians are wearing.
• Teen librarians may be interested in posts that are tagged with #teenlibrary, #teenlibrarian, #makerspace, and #yalit.
• #childrenslibrarian, #storytime, #flannelboard, and #earlyliteracy are relevant to librarians working with children. Some libraries have also chosen to have Instagram accounts for teens such as Franklin Park Library Teens.
• Anyone seeking inspiration on promotional displays may be interested in those tagged with #librarydisplay.
• Examples of responses to reference questions appear upon searching for the cheeky tag #letmelibrarianthatforyou.
• Posts of programs at the library can be seen by searching #libraryprogram and #libraryevent. (Some nationwide programs have their own tags such as the early literacy program #1000booksbeforekindergarten.)

While hashtags offer a way of accessing Instagram posts from the perspective of the library, location tagging is unique in that it offers a way to re-discover the library as it is experienced by its visitors. Library users on Instagram are publicly uploading their own content and are tagging the library’s location. Regularly reviewing the content allows libraries to assess how visitors are using the library and uncover what patrons like and dislike about the library.

The post Libraries of Instagram first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

First, keep in mind the goal when starting a blog. Do you want to just advertise your book group or talk about every book you’ve ever read? Do you want to announce library programs at your branch or rather discuss librarianship as a whole? Should you document your journey through library school or the last year of your retirement from librarian life? Having a clear, focused objective is the first vital step in starting a blog.

Second is to be consistent—blog on a regular basis—and “be yourself.” This tip is recommended by Wendy Crutcher, blogger of The Misadventures of Super Librarian. Eleven years of writing her blog about romance novels and librarianship has led Crutcher to this piece of advice. She also recommends finding your own personal voice rather than imitating someone else’s. Blog readers will sense any whiff of inauthenticity right away and just move on to another blog.

April Shroeder, a teen librarian with Loudoun County Public Library, agrees that being consistent is a good idea. She recommends setting a goal and sticking to it to get content posted regularly. “In 2012 and 2013 I reviewed on my blog every single book I read. I was bound to blog more than once a week.”

Once the blog is established, how should a librarian be sure to keep momentum going? Giveaways and contests are one way. Crutcher joined a GoodReads Challenge for last year and this year. Her progress on both challenges is recorded on her blog. Another momentum idea is communicating with commenters. “For me, I like to respond to comments on my site and solicit ideas,” says Elizabeth Bird, author of the blog A Fuse #8 Production. For Bird, such interaction leads to new post ideas or resources in the field. Readers often share links with her and her audience on a variety of things related to children’s literature. Jennifer LaGarde, the web’s Adventures of Library Girl, said that a negative comment on her blog led her to respond by writing a post that not only responded to the negative remark but also gained a lot of support from her readers. It led to great discussions amongst readers as well as with LaGarde.

In addition, be sure to include the blog address in e-mail signatures. List it on Facebook pages if you or your organization has one. Word of mouth with book club members or patrons in general is always a good idea.

Muriel Richards of New York Public Library says it best when advocating for blogs. “I believe that blogging, as a flexible forum in terms of diverse writing styles (i.e., brief and formal, creative and lengthy, etc.), is well-suited to conveying information in a variety of formats to a heterogeneous audience.”

The post Why Blog? first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Until now, there didn’t seem to be a good way to leverage the knowledge of your social media connections. However, just released on January 7, 2014 in Google Play and the Apple App Store is Jelly — http://jelly.com.  People utilizing Twitter or Facebook on their smart phones or tablets can use their built-in cameras and a little bit of text to ask their social media contacts a question.  While not a totally unique approach Jelly does raise a question of the social media capabilities of the reference desk. Does Jelly or similar apps like that become part of the chat reference or other online reference services libraries provide ? People have always been able to ask questions of their social networks. However, with Jelly, the app is solely dedicated to asking visual questions. Questions asked through other social media get lost amongst the myriad of comments on the news, photos of food, and videos of cats. Can the library become part of people’s social contacts to ask their image-based questions through the Jelly app? With libraries being in the “question business,” is Jelly a new way to connection people with answers they need?

One “real world” example that the company provides is how Jelly was used by a person who posted a photo and asked if a tv could be mounted on the wall photographed. Perhaps purposefully or maybe by serendipity the question poser was following Lowe’s Home Improvements Twitter feed. Someone at Lowe’s capitalized on the opportunity and responded back with the tools and materials (from Lowe’s of course) that the questioner would need for his project. This example had us thinking, if Jelly were to take off in the next few months, should libraries try to be followed by jelly users? Is this a new avenue for our mission as informational professionals helping our patrons where ever they may be? Much certainly depends on how well the “infant app” grows up. It also seems that currently Jelly is tied to the rise and fall of the sites it feeds from, like Facebook and Twitter. We have all watched the rise and fall of the next big thing, but if we, as librarians, wait will we miss getting in on the ground floor? Perish the thought, will Jelly or something similar finally push us to enter or revisit the world of Twitter?

At the time we are writing this, we are already past our deadline for submission because we were having some issues getting Jelly to install and working on our mobile devices. We are both confirmed Android phone users, and we both got error messages that our operating systems were not the version we needed to run Jelly even though our phones told us we were running the most up-to-date versions. The non-technical one of us had a complete frustration induced meltdown. The tech savvy one, discovered we could successfully install Jelly on the two library iPads. However, we next found that while in theory you can be on Facebook and use Jelly, it really does appear to work best off your Twitter account. Of course, neither one of us are big Twitter-ers but instead Facebook afficiandos. Again, one of us melted down in the face of this next technical challenge, and someone else found this a great reason to start the library Twitter account HE always thought we should have for the library. Thinking the problem was solved, we posed a question via Jelly only to discover that we needed other friends to have Jelly to ask questions to AND we needed to be following people on Twitter, neither of which we had!

The moral of this story we have decided is perhaps it’s worth putting more of an investment into our library’s social media presence. If Jelly isn’t the next big thing, something else will be. Maybe trying this app was a more gentle way for us to realize our patrons are so much broader than the ones who come into the building or even live in within our official geographic service area. We need to become part of their lives, and having a robust social media presence will allow them to invite us into their lives wherever they physically reside.

The post Leveraging the Knowledge Of Your Social Media Connections first appeared on Public Libraries Online.