I mentioned last week that I want to start looking at some of the social networking tools I use and evaluate their usefulness and think about how I use them. An opportunity to do so came up last week with the LOEX of the West Conference we hosted.
I joined Facebook ages ago but never did much with it. I think the main reason was that most of the people I had connected with in Facebook I was also connected to elsewhere. I didn’t have much need to check Facebook for updates on people I Twitter with or whose blogs I regularly read.
A while ago, a co-worker created a Facebook group for the conference, and I joined as did 124 attendees. The group was pretty quiet until a week or so before the conference when people started a few discussions about getting to the conference from the airport, about things to do while here, and one person organized a meet-and-greet for a handful of people who were arriving early. I was able to help out with these plans and got to go out to dinner with them and show a few of them around town.
After the conference, quite a few of the attendees I met “friended” me and now I have a critical mass of people with whom I have no other networking connection other than Facebook (and email and real life). I’m still not sure if I’m inclined to play a lot of the game applications that people invite me to (sorry), but I certainly see the value of Facebook as a social tool. I’m sure I still would have met great people at the conference, but Facebook gave me the opportunity to chat with them prior to the conference and see who we knew in common.
As one of your new Facebook friends, I should assure you I don’t send invitations to applications or add them myself very often. I like FB for keeping track of my librarian friends/contacts and have found myself using it as a communication medium every now and again. Recently, I asked some instruction coordinators I know to share job descriptions with me, and it was easy to get in touch using FB .
It was great meeting you!
Thanks Kaijsa. It was great meeting you as well. Now that I have a reason to really use FB, I can see how useful it can be both personally and professionally. I like your example of sharing job descriptions.
I agree with you Tom. I honestly don’t use Facebook much other than for a few friends from high school and for professional network stuff.
It has helped me deepen my knowledge and relationships with folks I follow on Twitter and other places. Sometimes you do need a list of what they like and want to know a bit more about who they are.
I still follow my general social networking policy of accepting friend requests from folks I don’t know very well or at all, with the intent on seeing if they are cool or not, or if we have things in common.
Recently I went in and added about 7 different groupings with various levels of privacy settings and I enter new “friends” in the most secure level first & then graduate them into more trusted zones if they stay on my list.
Periodically I go through and drop folks with whom I’ve had no real interaction either there or on other networks.
BTW, you are in my “Cool Librarians” group with full access.
I love facebook! What’s cool too is I can use your bookmark button from Add This to send to friends via facebook and I never have to remember their emails, just type their names. I think Facebook and other social networking sites make sharing easier and faster.