Measuring effectiveness of social media efforts

I find marketing a bit difficult to grasp but it is becoming increasingly important for libraries and information organizations because there is more competition but less money. Social media seems like such a cost effective way for marketing. Although the service might be free, keeping social media sites upto date and interesting to get readers engaged takes effort. But are the efforts paying off?

I had to read around a bit. It looks like a good place to start for this topic is "How to measure your nonprofit’s social media success" on Socialbrite. This article says that to measure effectiveness of social media efforts for any organization, we have to go back to the organization's mission. Just like we learned in LIBR 204, start with the mission, plan out the strategic objectives and strategic goals for each objective. The article tells readers to ask ourselves: "Have I clearly formulated a set of goals to advance my organization's strategic goals?" (para 4). Only when the goals have been clearly formulated, can we move onto formulating measurements.

For taking measurements, I liked the article titled "Five Simple Ways Nonprofits Can Measure Social Media ROI " because it doesn't just talk about the tools or the numbers. I thought it was one of the articles that actually linked the missions of the organizations with what we can do on social media sites. For example, an obvious goal of marketing is to get donations. So social media tools should be used in our efforts to turn supporters of our organizations into donors. The article recommends a poll to ask donors "what communication tool inspired them most to donate" (para 10). Same thing with volunteers. The article tells readers to ask the audience of social media sites to volunteer for specific events. It tells us not to assume that people will volunteer by having a generic "volunteer" link. It says that we need to ask people to volunteer for specific events with good reasons why they should volunteer. Then, we should ask volunteers what motivated them to volunteer to see if anything on our social media sites inspired them to volunteer. Another method recommended in this article is to track how much traffic on library's Website came from social media sites. Most libraries' Web sites are online resources. Thus, a visit to the library's Web site that was initiated from a social media site is a clear indication of increased usage of library resources resulting from efforts put into social media.

Of course the volunteers and the donated money have to be put into proper use to meet the mission and the objectives of the organizations but I thought these two ways to measure the success of marketing efforts put into social media tools were great compared to just looking at whether the number of followers and subscribers went up. Of course those numbers are also important and it is important to see which or your Tweets are being Retweeted and which blog postings are being recommended as suggested by Beth Kanter in her article titled "Using Metrics To Harvest Insights About Your Social Media Strategy" but if the library is in the online "conversation" but the coversation is not resulting in more support (both monetary and in volunteer hours) and more usage (both virtual and physical) then the social media efforts don't seem to have hit "success level" yet.

Here Comes Everybody and Everything is MIsc.

For one of my courses, we were asked to compare book reviews on two different books: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky and Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger. Although I did not buy these two books, we were introduced to these books in a number of ways. We read book reviews and the course instructor included the main points of the books in her lecture.

I partially agree with the point in Shirky's book, that recently people organize themselves rather than organizations doing the organizing. I can see how it is easier to get together with people with a common interest using new technology but people have been getting together with others that have the same interest. Thus, I can’t agree that this is a new behavior but it is true that thanks to these tools, more people can come together to form larger powers and it is important for archivists to recognize the significance of online tools that are being used to bring people together.

I totally agree with the second point in Shirky's book, that with the current technology, especially Web 2.0 tools, about everyone that has access to these tools can play a part in the traditional roles in information cycle including publishing, creating, distributing, organizing, evaluating, and so on. The amount of information has long exceeded the amount that can be organized and evaluated just by library and information professionals. Thus, it totally makes sense for everyone to be contributing. While it seems obvious that having the “nonprofessionals” or the “lay people” participating in these activities will result in a complete chaos, something like Wikipedia shows that the works of nonprofessionals have not resulted in choas. (Despite some of its errors, it seems to be becoming a fairly reliable resource, and a very large resource too.)

For the book “Everything is Miscellaneous,” it seems like the main point of this book is that information does not need to be classified. It seems like he is saying if we impose a static classification and metadata onto the information, our biases and limitations of views get reflected on them, thus limiting discovery and use of the information in many ways. As this week's lecture discusses how the use of metadata increases the likelihood that a piece of information will get discovered and used, it was refreshing to read about how it can also hinder discovery and usage.

As the amount of information grows exponentially, we've already moved away from centrally trying to classify and to catalog information but I am not sure if it is wise to leave it upto the users. Will there be enough driving force from the information users to create tools to enable them to discover and locate relevant and specific information within a information world that is completely unorganized? How will Google evolve and will Semantic Web technologies provide some sort of solution? These are the questions that come to my mind.

Also, as the amount of information grows, how will information creators make sure that the information that they publish will get found and viewed over all the other competition? Will it be the information creators or the information users that will be the driving force to create some kind of solution to locating relevant or specific information in the chaos? This is another question... Only questions after questions arise as I am discussing these books.

My Voki - for Halloween

Hi!

I've used Voki before and my daughter who was in 2nd grade back then loved it too. She still plays around with it. The first one that she created was a dog. It's really easy to use.

Here's the one that created today. It turns out to be the default one that was on the edit screen but since it's October, I wanted to do a witch. It was tricky to find a voice that matched a witch. Maybe I should've done my own voice :)

Records management futurewatch

Records management future watch is a blog of Steve Bailey, the author of "Managing the crowd: Rethinking records management for the Web 2.0 world."

I chose this book for the book review assignment because I am interested in records management. I haven't finished it but based on what I've read, it seems like he is supporting "save all" theory. He keeps saying that traditional methods of records management will not work with the volume of information we have... I think it is true that the volume of information has long exceeded the level that can be processed by humans... so how are we to distinguish what is a record and what is not... and if we cannot even pick out the records from the vast amount of content that's out there, how does records management begin?

Hopefully, this book will provide some answers but based on the foreword and intro, it sounds like this book won't provide any answers... in which case it will be kind of a disappointment...

Archivist's Serenity Prayer

I was reading a blog and thought I would share it here since I like it a lot. It's called Derangement and Description and it can be viewed on http://derangementanddescription.wordpress.com/. Perhaps many of you have already seen this blog. I especially liked the Archivist' Serenity Prayer!