Link Me In, Hook Me Up

Well I haven’t set up a Twitter account yet but I do have a long standing LinkedIn profile so I will web log about that instead.

LinkedIn is a strange beast and while it can be useful it has always appeared in the past to be something that people turn to when their job is under threat. Each time I have resigned, been made redundant or been desperate to leave my job I have updated my profile, made more connections, looked for people I may know, used its functions, etc. Then when placed elsewhere, I let it lie idle until I need it again. From many other people I have talked to this is what they have thought and how they behaved as well so I know it wasn’t just me.

Interestingly, I’ve never actually been successful in using it to get any jobs or job leads though, so I’m not sure why I kept going back to it. I suppose it does feel grown up and like just by using it you’re networking, taking care of your career, etc, and it is a Good Thing to do with low maintenance.

However, since coming to City I have used it rather more often and my pattern of use has changed. Now I do try to keep up with professional developments, watch conversations, link with people and so on. I go in about every three weeks and see if others have joined and try and scan the groups I am involved in to see what’s going on. I have recommended some people (especially the recruiter who got me in for my first temp role at City) and try and keep it current.

I’m starting to build LinkedIn into my general approach to social media and use it as a grown up Facebook. I would recommend that people join it, link up with those they know, search for new connections on a regular basis and keep it current because you never know when it will become useful. When I want to remember the names and positions of people I worked with at different places in the past, LinkedIn is where I go. If I want to see where they have gone, I use it. If I want to lurk and see how other institutions are dealing with the information issues of the day, back I go.

It may not have been a great help when job hunting in the past, but when did Noah build the Ark? Before the rain. Before.

The Sociopath Network

“Too many tweets might make a twat."

D. Cameron

I’m not sure how many of my beloved readership saw ‘The Social Network’ about the creation, rise and battles of The Facebook? A cracking film and when I left I was certainly thinking ‘That was so obvious! Anyone, anyone at all, could have created Facebook! How come that fellow came up with it and I didn’t? He’s stolen my billions of dollars the rat!”

Although I must admit that’s a pretty common reaction from me at times. I came up with the idea for Big Brother and the TV show The Trench years before they were made but my Important Work meant I took them no further than the early stages.

But Facebook? So obvious, so clear. It may be turning into a nightmare of privacy violation , targeted advertising and jury wrecking now but it is still very useful if only to share photographs and invite people to events. I’m not on Twitter, still maintain a MySpace account (for some unknown reason) and even have a presence on Virb though I doubt anyone has heard of it.

At work I encourage the use of social media (Twitter and FB) as we need to be where the students are and we need to be moving out into the ever changing frontiers of the internet. We need to create library presences in new spaces so that if our students run into us there they know that what they will get from us will be as reliable as if they were in  training session on campus.

This raises all kinds of issues of tone, style, responsibility, etc, but on the whole I now think it’s better to crack on and delete later rather than wait until you have a perfect webpage and approach. By then no one cares and the students have moved on.

I’ll set up a Twitter account later this week and see what limited character wisdom occurs.