The Ubiquitous Librarian (Brian Mathews)

Making a Good First Impression: FaceBook & Incoming Freshmen

I noticed a group on Facebook titled: Georgia Tech Class of 2011. With over 1,000 members, this essentially represents about half of our incoming freshmen class. It’s still a bit early, but I estimate that the number will reach 1,700 by the end of August.

The students are using this forum to share in their anticipation as well as to ask each other questions and find social similarities.

There are nearly 2,500 comments posted on the group “wall” which is like a bulletin board. There are also over 70 photos posted of places around campus-- none of the Library of course, so I uploaded a few interesting ones.

Perhaps the most useful tool is the message board, which is fully searchable, providing insight into their mindset:

• Majors
• Dorm rooms
• Concerts
• Parking
• Printing
• Registration
• “Good” professors
• Football
• Clubs
• Pranks
• Streaking
• Time Travel Theories
• PC vs. Mac   /   XP vs. Vista

This type of group provides academic librarians with an opportunity to “know thy user” but is also a chance to make a good first impression. I’ve started posting answers or responding directly to individuals on topics such as safety on campus and around Atlanta, laptop computer requirements, places to eat, the music scene, trolley and subway transportation, weather, and freshmen orientation sessions.

The students have responded favorably. At this phase their optimism is very high and they seem to like having a direct connection to the school. This illustrates the ubiquitous philosophy – that it doesn’t always have to be about the books, journals, and library services. There is a time for that and this is not that time. For me it is more about fitting into the community, finding genuine needs, and helping out when possible. Student success involves more than peer-reviewed journal articles and proper citation style.

This type of outreach enables us to position ourselves as an open, friendly, welcoming service environment. We’re Disneyland compared with the stress of financial aid, registration, and housing. (Free printing, café, fantastic air conditioning, comfortable couches, lots of computers, cool software, cool equipment.)

Before they even arrive on campus, we have a chance to make a positive impression—to stake out our claim that this isn’t a typical library. I’ve already had a few questions directed my way from seemingly random students, as well as a few friend requests. So for those of you who feel students don’t want to interact with us on FaceBook, maybe it’s your approach. There is something to be said for the subtle art of conversation. Listen first, then talk. (Not the other way around)

See Also: What do freshmen want? (My experiment last year with incoming freshmen.)

FaceBook as an Institutional Repository?

It will be interesting to watch the development of FaceBook Docs, an application created by students for students. Here is the description:

"Facebook Docs is a library of schoolwork where anyone can contribute. Over 50,000 documents have been uploaded, including problems sets, poetry, lecture notes, and random funny stuff. Every year, millions of college papers are produced, and virtually all of them are just gathering dust on people's hard drives. Too bad, because a lot of that is good stuff that other people would find useful. The point of Scribd is not to encourage plagiarism, but rather to help unlock the information on people's computers by making it easy for people to share their creations."

This is an interesting blend of an institutional repository with course reserves and a community bulletin board. It allows you to search within your own school, as well as the entire network. The traditional librarian mindset would be to scoff, however wouldn’t it be cool to upload a few items from your IR with links to your own digital repository, citation guides, and plagiarism info?

I often hear campus myths/legends about papers, assignments, and homework solutions being kept in secret drawers in fraternity houses, well now they have a chance to share with everyone. Or what about those “solutions manuals” that patrons always seem to think we have behind the desk somewhere? FaceBook Docs is still rather new, but it will be interesting to see what the collection looks like in the Fall once it is more fully populated.

Oh and I’m still waiting for Ross to build an uber-search (or at least an e-journal finder) for FaceBook… that way students don’t even need to go to our site to find articles. I'm sure the good folks over at UIUC are already incorporating their federated search into the FB Applications environment.

Selling Your Stuff On FaceBook

As a follow-up to the last post on library menus – FaceBook is offering a new (free) service called Marketplace. Based around your community (school, workplace, region, etc) you can run classified ads. These can link to your profile as well as a special listing viewable to your friends. 

It might be cool to use this as a forum to promote some of the “stuff” that we offer in a fun way.

• Check-out a digital camcorder for a week. “Try it before you buy it”
• Free Calculus help on this day and this time. (teaching assistants)
• Need a place to crash? The Library is open 24 hours. (Photo of comfortable couch.)

Products!  Services!  Space!

Summer Semester is pretty slow around these parts so there might not be too much activity, but hey, why not try it yourself? It’s free and will only cost you a few minutes.

Sin, Death, & Resurrection: a Facebook update

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I spoke with Mike Murphy—the VP of Sales at Facebook. He was very sympathetic, but ultimately could not provide a solution to the library profile question.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, my Facebook account was disabled. Apparently I was guilty of spamming users. I disagree with that accusation, but we'll leave that to the linguists to debate.

After a volley of emails, I was able to get my account reinstated. It's a delicate matter because I need to use Facebook as a social utility for the book . I can't post too much information, but here is my advice to you:

Scratch everything I said in the CRL News article . Essentially it is a direct violation to email a student and advertise a service or event. If they join a group, then they are fair game; it's consensual. But for me to look up all incoming freshmen who are computer science majors and introduce myself as their subject librarian, promote Safari Tech Books, or invite them to a workshop, open house, or an event, is grounds for termination.

We cannot use the ‘courses' feature to find students in a particular class (that we know includes a project or research assignment) and send them a message with tips, suggestions, supportive material, examples, or even to offer of assistance; this is prohibited by Facebook.

Direct marketing is grounds for expulsion.

I was actually pretty bummed about this for several days because I've been a champion of Facebook for over two years. But this downtime got me thinking…has my effort paid off? Sure several students ‘friended' me and many responded to my messages—but none of them have used Facebook to contact me since then about the library or assignments. My objective of appearing in their space has ultimately failed. While they don't mind me there, they don't recognize me as a librarian. If I offer help they'll take it, but they won't ask for it. Maybe I didn't ‘spam' them enough? I guess I am starting to question ‘be where the patron is' now.

So back to Facebook--- “profiles are for people, groups are for everything else.” That's their philosophy and we have to adhere to it. I'm probably going to experiment with a group next, but only if I can get others onboard here. Personally, I think groups are lame. Groups are more for symbolic expressions of a person's identity, rather than interactive communication portal. Belonging to a library group is not cool.

I have much more to say but it's a delicate matter. Maybe once Vivendi buys them out they'll stop being so elitist and realize the positive intentions of librarians. Until then...

Facebook Update

I had a good initial phone conversation with Mike Murphy today. He understands the value of library profiles, but his concern is where to draw the line regarding the types of organizational/institutional profiles that can be created.

The next step is talking with the Customer Service Department to discuss possible solutions.

I'll keep you posted. Thanks to everyone for the comments and emails. Please continue to share ideas & experiences.

my pitch to facebook -- any ideas?

Next Thursday (Nov 16) I'm talking with M. Murphy and making my pitch for why libraries and other services units on campus belong in facebook. Hopefully I can convince him of the value we play within their campus experience. He likes to talk about the community building aspect of facebook, so my core argument will focus on the idea that we (and other partners on campus) add to that culture.

I'll probably tell him briefly of my experiments, but I would love to hear from others on why you think they should allow departmental accounts. What is the advantage we gain? What's the advantage to our users? Why should facebook care?

I figured I'd send him my talking points the day before, along with a list of ideas I have for their future development.

A Night with Facebook: Mike Murphy's pitch for social networking

Mike Murphy, Chief Revenue Officer of Facebook, gave a great presentation about social media and the opportunities to engage users.

Here are my notes from his talk:

General Stuff

• Facebook is the 7 th most popular website in the United States .
• 10 million users and over 50% of them sign in daily.
• The value of social networking is that it allows users to do everything they want online, all in one place (how about a federated search?)
• Each person has less than 1% of access to the total facebook user base— it requires confirmation to see beyond your network -- privacy control is spectacular
• People are real on facebook—it's not a fantasy world like other sites. You are the representation of an actual person and your activities are geared toward interacting with real people who you know.
• The next feature coming out will be the ability to load photos directly from your cell phone to your profile.
• Why did YouTube sell for $1.65 billion? The share button. Technology is the easy part— it just requires bandwidth and storage space—the sharing feature allowed for the distribution of millions of videos to millions of users. They creating a community rather than just hosting content. (Which of these are we doing with our databases and online resources?)
• NBC sued YouTube over Saturday Night Live sketches – they should have been excited that people were talking and sharing content and would probably tune into the show again—YouTube helped make them relevant.
• They have had three graduating classes and find that alumni still use their accounts, but less frequently. They are considering how to evolve the product for the post-college user.
• Web/Internet policy (and direction) is being changed by those who grew up with it, rather than by those who built it.

Generational Stuff

• A Proctor & Gamble Executive stated that this is the “let it go” generation. In terms of marketing—let the big brain message go—allow the user to do and think what they want.
• “Studies show” that this is the most generous generation of all time—they care about social causes and the environment . (Hmmmm, you would not know it from MTV's My Sweet 16)
• They are open to sharing opinions—they will respect you, if you respect them
• Social media = active sharing online. FB enables users to share social opportunities.
• The way they talk with friends is a blend of pop culture and serious life matters—lots of focus toward making decisions.
• The old school way people got news was via Walter Cronkite (the one voice that was respected). The next wave was through expert opinions, such as a variety of magazines. With this generation it's through friends-- friends determine what's news, what's important, and what's cool.
• The Great Shift --- if you remember traditional media, you're on the outside—digital media is the thing now—they are net natives—grew up with it, we're all immigrants.
• People are interested in what other people are doing- they want to be aware.
• Why are people transferring time away from real life activities and into social networks? It's generational. Users say it's a short cut—they scout people before attending college or class—it is not a replacement for bars, sports, clubs, etc, but a replacement for the small talk—you already know what people did over the weekend or what's new, because you don't have to ask.

The Controversy

• In September (2006) they received 700,030 unique complaints from users when FB launched a new “feeds” feature. Essentially it collates the updates of all your friends on to one page. The aim was to quickly allow users to see at a glance, what's going on in their social world. They hoped to enable users to spend less time on the site, instead of jumping around between profiles, they could get updated on everything all in one place—but the opposite happened, people started spending more time online.
• Facebook responded in less than a week with stronger privacy controls.
• Even though they got bad press—it could have been worse:
  1. Worse if we made changes, there was no response, yet they were upset.
  2. Even worse if users didn't notice the changes.
  3. And still worse if users didn't care that the changed occurred.
• Because they were so outraged, it shows the impact of the tool.
• FB blew launching the feeds because:
  1. We didn't focus on educating our users about the privacy issues.
  2. We didn't tell the community that it was coming.

Why should marketers care?

• Find ways to share the idea of your product
• If a user is interested in you, they look
• If a user likes it, they will engage
• If they love it, they'll share with friends - that's the home run
• Users create a personal brand
• Find ways to get the user to be defined by your brand
• Friends influence purchases and activities
• You have to give the user a reason to care/share – find a way for them to endorse your product – turn 1 impression into 1000 impressions
• Become part of their experience—learn from it
• Listen without fear—they care, they will respond and will appreciate that you asked
• They don't like to be told what to buy – they want to find out for themselves
• Advertise to the group—not to the individual
• Leverage the benefits of influence (peer pressure?)
• People say they don't hate advertising, they just hate ads that suck—good companies make it work—make it relevant.
• Find a way for users to love your offer, your product, your brand, or your company, and they will endorse it— that's the mutual value of sharing.
• Big is the enemy of cool.
• Interesting example with Chase Credit Cards—they have a sponsored group, which students can join. Within this group they can pool their credit card points—choosing to donate them to a cause or charity or to buy a new big screen TV for the frat house. (An idea I have: what if we could offer $.50 off on a certain coffee product within our café, if they are a member of our facebook group? Push that message and other similar incentives strong in January when they come back from winter break. Grow the membership and once we have them, we can use the FB group to push our agenda (classes, software, events, research help, etc) as well as other frequent discounts, offers, and maybe even a Member's Only event.)
• Users care about what their friends are doing—find ways to make them passionate about what you're doing –offer events and opportunities for participation—get them talking about you.
• Social influence = endorsements = free advertising

Company Stuff

• innovate -> promote -> listen -> innovate -> promote -> listen <repeat>
• Companies say their intranets sucks— asked FB to help them build something more interactive. They declined, but said, they all know each other very well because they all use Facebook—it creates unique interaction between staff.
• No copyright protection abroad, so every country has their versions of FB that look and work the same way. They have great penetration in all the English speaking countries though, so focusing on that.
• FB does not provide research for companies about products, interests, or trends—that's not our business—however they look for ways to provide a conversation between a company and the user. Facebook allows companies to purchase sponsored group memberships.
• The company is run by seventy-five 22 year olds. Starting out, they hired smart people and let them figure out what needed to be done. Once the product was right, then they focused on the business side.
• The youth was thirsty for leadership
• Mike Murphy, was the youngest executive at Yahoo! and is now the oldest at Facebook (he's in his 40's.)
• Two people have hacked the site and they hired both of them.
• They allow engineers and software programmers to build the projects they want, they decide what is cool, what needs to be done, and where it should go next. They frequently have hack-a-thons, in which teams stay up 24 hrs working on a project and the best ones get added to the system.
• Half the time, they develop applications that are not used for the intended purpose—rather than correct user behavior, they build around how people want to use the features (OPAC and database vendors, please read this statement!)

I asked afterwards: Why are you shutting down library and departmental accounts? (And exampled the problem.)

“Hmm, not sure, sounds like a good idea, let us get back with you.” So Stay turned – if they are really as responsive as they claim, they'll see the value of libraries and other campus service entities.

Ninja Tag @ the GT Library (CeLIBration, PART 3)

I was not very involved in this activity, other than helping to unscrew (and than re-screw) about 100 fluorescent lights. This was the brainchild of the stealthy Bonnie Tijerina . Bonnie is very involved with the Electronic Resources and Libraries Conference . Hmmm, Meredith is offering her content for free . ERL offers their content for free . ACRL, get a clue!

One of the things I liked about our CeLIBration crew was that it was very open and nimble. We had a little over $1,000 to spend and tossed around a ton of ideas. One that stuck was idea of playing tag in the library. Bonnie (and Charlene) ran this activitiy and sexed it up with a “Ninja” theme. Very successful!

Here's what Bonnie shared with me, combined with my observations.

Background & Setup

Initially we wanted to create a huge game of tag throughout the library, but we narrowed it down to most of one floor. This helped regarding containment of activities to just two floors of the building. We investigated the price and logistics of laser tag, but that could not be done, so we stuck with a game that was a blend of tag and capture the flag. To change it up a bit, we added a teamwork component. Students would compete in groups, with the winning team receiving movie tickets. 52 students participated in three sessions, however many students were turned away. We easily could have had 100+ willing participants.

To make it more interesting and difficult, we turned off all the lights and installed several black lights and a strobe light. We did this in a space with lots of tables and cubicles so that we could rearrange the environment and create a maze with various obstacles. Knowing that ninjas are cool with kids these days, we decided to call it Ninja Tag, and emphasized the need to be ninja-like to tag out the opposing team.

Students were placed on one of two teams, and wore colored reflective tape to identify their side. The goal was to remove a white tag that was attached to the tape of the opposing team, while running throughout the maze with loud dance music blaring.

Supplies & Costs

• 12 Black Lights (new) $190
• 1 Strobe Light (used) $10
• Movie Tickets for 3 rounds: $150
• Sign-up Sheets
• Cubicles & Tables
• Colored Electrical Tape
• Music! Helps if you have a PA system.

Total: $350

Prep Time and Staffing

1 hour set-up and 1 hour take down with the help of 5-6 people. During tag matches, 3 - 4 people serving as referees, preferably dressed in white so as to be easily identified.

What students said

Students, especially male students, LOVED it! They had many suggestions including:

• Increase the number of players on each team (we tried to limit teams to 8 players)
• Having tag throughout the entire library.
• Having tag throughout the school year.
• Making it a tournament.
• Letting people wear two tags, essentially two lives, to prolong game play.

Some players bonded through teamwork and created names, such as “Team KILL” and “Team Sexy Beasts.”

Students also didn't seem to care about the prizes. They just wanted to play and wanted their friends to be on their team – that was more important than a prize. Bragging rights were very important.

Lessons Learned/Recommendations  

• It helps to actually know what young people are into. We gained invaluable knowledge from someone close to their age.
• The colors we used (pink & red) were a little too similar. Next time we plan to use a wider spectrum to include blue and yellow.
• Students wanted to keep playing. It's an adrenal rush for a few minutes and they wanted more.
• Many students went home and changed into dark clothes (ninja attire) once they discovered the game.
• We're considering running a tag tournament over the semester, or at least hosting another night organized into a tournament style game.
• Having tag on multiple floors would increase the challenge. We could create multiple mazes or black lit zones, however areas of total darkness (shadow zones) are intriguing too.
• Having multiple teams playing simultaneously would also increase the difficulty, as well as allow more people to play.
• Facebook! 16 students listed ‘tag' on their profile. 127 listed ninja. This allowed us to directly market the event. We're also forming a FB group to build anticipation for future events. This will allow us to create a community of interested ‘tag' students. We'll also probably advertise widely on campus, and try to get people signed up early.
• Maybe we could form an actual Campus Club called Ninja Tag, and host monthly events in various locations. Students seemed passionate about the game, so why not let them play? And why not let SGA pay for it?

  Photos

Welcoming Freshmen: CeLIBration @ the GT Library PART 1 (intro/concept)

This is how we kick off the semester in the ATL!

Today is the start of the semester and I forget just how crazy the first week of Fall is! It's such an adrenaline rush on desk though.

On Saturday we held a welcome event for incoming freshmen. We called it CeLIBration and it was a huge success! About 600 students dropped by and it seemed like everyone had a good time.

So, what'd we do exactly? Too much for one blog entry, so this is going to be multipart throughout the week:

• Part 1 – Info & Concept
• Part 2 – Speed Dating
• Part 3 – Ninja Tag
• Part 4 – Games (video and board)
• Part 5 - Music, Movies, Food, Etc
• Part 6 - Justification

So let's get into it. The last two years we've hosted a welcome event with the main draw being a LAN based video game Unreal Tournament . Essentially students would use our Info Commons computers to hunt and shoot each other. We had two big screens which kept score. Cool concept, but attendance was weak. It was a ton of work to configure and re-imagine the PCs. And granted, although Tech has a rep as a nerd school, it just wasn't as big of a draw as we wanted. So this time around we scrapped the LAN idea.

We built upon the idea of community space, which is the big library buzzword these days. We wanted to showcase the library as a space to hangout, socialize, eat, chill. So we gave them free pizza, popcorn, soda, and a variety of things to do. Essentially we strived to create several zones, each with different lighting, music, mood and ambiance. Each zone was designed to entertain 20-30 students at a time. This was very important to me personally, because I wanted to be like a night club with different vibes in different locations.

Another big change we made was timing. The past two years we held our event the first Saturday after school started. There is a lot of competition because you have the Greek stuff in full force, clubs and organizations doing their thing, homework, and of course we're in the heart of midtown so lots of potential distractions. This time around we teamed up with the Freshmen Experience folks and became the primary destination for their Saturday Rats Week Festivities . We had to compete with Day 1 of sorority rush, but there's never a perfect time. Students moved in Thursday and Friday, and we opened our doors to them Saturday from 7 till 11pm . We easily had 100 people waiting at the door at 6:45 and it was jammed with nearly 600 people until close to 10pm .

Marketing played a key role. Again, teaming up with the Freshman Group enabled us to allow them to market the event during orientations, move in days, and other opportunities which we don't traditionally have access to. We also pushed out info to the RAs to encourage their students to attend. And then of course posters and handouts.

But perhaps probably the most interesting strategy was our use of FaceBook. I'll get into this more with the specific events, but we could target students by interest and class, and direct market to them. For example, we invited all single freshmen with an interest in dating to our speed dating event. We also invited students who had an interest in Retro Gaming (old school stuff from the original Nintendo). And additionally placed a $5 per day ad on FaceBook three days leading up to the event. The students who responded were enthusiastic. I have a ton of new FaceBook ideas.

One thing I wanted, but could not pull it together was to get the The Futurists to do a live acoustic set. Two of the guys go to Tech and it would have been nice to give them exposure and chance to sell merch, while giving us a little rock star vibe. I also wish we could have marketed to student clubs, selling the idea of this as a chance to meet freshmen and pitch your organization in a social environment. And finally, would have been cool to create a VIP section, a little something special for people who could advance our agenda, mingled with student athletes and student entertainers (artists, actresses, musicians, etc). I wonder sometimes if I'm in the wrong profession.

I'll leave it at that for now… but come back, or better yet subscribe, and get the full details later. I don't know the exact cost, but I think we budgeted around $2,500. And our Director was very pleased, so hopefully we can do this type of thing several more times throughout the year.