LIBR 246-04/13 Web 2.0 (Fall 2010)

In the spirit of all the lists we’ve been reading this week, I thought I’d do my own: 8 things an organization should do when they find negative things being written about them online…

1. Monitoring. Rather than haphazardly finding out the bad news, the organization should be monitoring its brand so that it can be alerted as soon as bad things are said.

I think that it's most important to stress that, although any working environment is composed of a collection of individuals, these individuals--while working--represent the collective working organization. By this I mean that a boundary must be set in stone/iron/brick regarding protocol and behavior in the workplace and all its representations.

1) Widen the existing (?) confidentiality clause to include the creation of and engagement in social media.

2) Widen the mandated codes of conduct to include the participation in social media.

I commented on an article on one of my favorite library related blogs yesterday - Infonista. The article is certainly timely for all to read, but the positive response to my comment made me really happy as well.

This seemed like a great example of community building via blog comment and fits right in with the week 3 readings.

To be perfectly honest, I had never given a thought to my “online presence” until about a year ago. At that time, one of my friends decided to start up two facebook pages. One page was her personal page, which only listed her first and middle name, and included a personal email that she never used for professional purposes. Her second page was her “professional page”.

After completing searches on Social Mention, Yelp, Google Blog Search and Tweetscan, I was able to get a good idea of what people are saying about 24 Hour Fitness. The reviews are mixed, and most of the complaints have to do with specific facilities, not the company as a whole. Social Mention shows that the sentiments toward this company are mostly neutral (607) with the positive (138) outweighing the negative (30). Most of the results on Google Blog search were related to promotional deals that the company offers.

Roy's "Social Media Disasters" states that a productive and speedy response to a disaster is "to buy and own unsavory keywords so that people searching for those videos and articles will see links to your official response". I am not quite sure what s/he means by "buying" and "owning" keywords, but it strikes me as specious. Owning (i.e. controlling) the means of communication seems counter to the populist and intellectually free foundational concepts that many tout the internet to embody.

MySpace will now allow users to push their content to Facebook and Twitter accounts. This probably is of no surprise to anyone, but still hopefully interesting. See PC World article from this morning: http://www.pcworld.com/article/204537/myspace_hands_over_updates_to_facebook.html?tk=hp_new.

Judging from Yelp reviews, a Google search and Social Mention sentiments, Nordstrom seems to elicit largely positive feedback and comments from consumers. The Yelp search on the Seattle Nordstrom in particular was full of reviews by people marveling at the lovely flagship store and the customer service attention.

What are your thoughts on personal branding as someone who may soon be looking for a professional position in libraries?

This is a timely question for me. Since the Library and Information Sciences chapter of my life is a new career trajectory, I recently embarked on a rebranding campaign using social media. First, I completely revamped my Linked In profile to reflect my status as an Information Services professional, that marks a category change from my previous Marketing and Advertising.