I want to give a shout-out to an awesome website an academic reference librarian showed me: Docuticker.com.
Docuticker - Blog of Documents!
Basically, the blog is run by librarians who troll the universe for documents they see as important and from reliable sources (i.e. scientific research, government reports, Think Tank results, statistics summaries, etc.) and post them in a blog, occasionally with limited commentary. The focus is on the documents.
You can search Docuticker’s archives by the date of the post or by category (there’s a nonprofit category!), and can even put it in your RSS feed, though be warned – it’s high volume posting!
That’s pretty much it. Resources selected by information professionals, brilliantly simple for the user. Do check it out!
And once you have checked it out… do you think that comments would add or detract from what Docuticker does? How could it be more interactive and still maintain its apparent goal of being a pure resource?
I was reading the May 2008 issue of American Libraries and the Internet Librarian column by Joseph Janes jumped out at me with the potential to be immediately useful to me at work (which is not in a library).
I help run a program at a literacy nonprofit, and a lot of people contact me and my colleagues all the time with a large volume of questions. Now don’t get me wrong – I’m one of those people who actually gets a kick out of answering questions. It’s just that as I mentioned in my last post, when we’re bombarded with questions, especially redundant ones, it’s extremely difficult to do the rest of of our jobs done.
This article, “Spring Awakening,” describes how the Cornell University Library ended up making 90-second YouTube clips for their incoming first-years about basic research concepts.
As Janes points out, this isn’t earth-shattering, but as he also points out, it doesn’t need to be earth-shattering in order to be dead useful; it just needs to 1) address the need and 2) actually happen.
It brings to mind a huge site I used a few times in college called Atomic Learning. Schools can subscribe to it to give their students access to tons of tiny (“atomic”) learning modules. My college subscribed to it, but I don’t have access to it now that I’m out of school, and I think the focus was watching, not creating your own. The brilliance of using YouTube instead is that it’s free, allows participation on both sides, is easy to embed, and simple to access.
How powerful would it be to have even a couple of 90-second videos addressing super-common questions! I’m so excited to bring this to the team and see what we can make of it. I’m thinking that even if we can’t do video, a cute (and very brief) Slideshare really should be doable. Or hey, even a Voki if we’re feeling cartoony.
Have you done something like this? How has it gone? Can you use this kind of resource in your organization? What can help bring this from the “idea” stage to the “actually happening” stage?
At work we’ve noticed some… communication escalation. By this I mean:
One person will call 3-5 of the staff running our program and leave them all the same voicemail, which does not mention that she was calling several of us.
One person will both email me a question and leave me a voicemail about it within five minutes.
Someone who leaves a voicemail at 8AM (I don’t get in until 9) expresses frustration that she couldn’t get through to anybody when she calls again at noon and I “finally” answer.
It’s a typical case of people not seeing the big picture. They’re thinking about their isolated concern, not about what they’re doing to the office and our ability to address everyone’s concerns. Let me tell you, it’s frustrating to listen to a two-minute voicemail, look up some answers, call the person back, talk for ten minutes, then bring other questions to another colleague, only to find that that colleague had just talked to the person in question an hour ago about the same thing. Yes, that has happened. It’s a pity I couldn’t have used that time to call back 5 other people who also needed answers.
I honestly don’t blame people for getting worked up and feeling that they need to bombard us in order to receive an answer. I do want to offer them some guidelines for not slowing down everything for everyone else though.
I’m not the only one in the office who’s noticed that this problem has been increasingly insistent, and we’re discussing some policies that might help us reign it in within our department. Measure’s we’re considering:
Sending out an automatic reply to every email stating our reply policy (i.e. staff set aside x amount of time to reply to emails per day. Non-urgent emails will be answered, but not immediately.)
Leaving a new voicemail greeting everyday outlining our meeting schedule for the day and when callers can expect a reply.
Indicating on our voicemails and emails that staff check both regularly, so a message in one of those systems will be sufficient.
Has anyone else noticed this happening? What do you think causes it? How have you addressed it, or how do you wish you could address it? Can social media help?
I had a great conversation with a coworker recently about how to deal with constant interruptions. You know what I mean: those days when the moment you hang up the phone it rings again, and all the while your red-exclamation-point emails are piling up, and people are lined up at your door looking worried… it can seem like a conspiracy.
On those days, I take the top thing on my to-do list, write it in large letters on a post-it note, and stick it right in the middle of my desk. That way when (if) there’s a moment between distractions, I don’t waste a moment trying to remember what the heck I was trying to do. It’s right there.
Post-It Reminder: Simple, Obvious, Effective
It’s also extremely satisfying to crumple up and chuck the post-it into the recycling when I finally finish with it!
The Wall Street Journal’s Business Technology blog posted “Why Most Online Communities Fail.” (Thanks to Doug H for sharing it on Twitter!) It’s short and sweet, and explains it’s based on a study of around 100 businesses with online communities. Three big, common errors: 1) They spend too much on “oooh, shiny!” technology, 2) They don’t appropriately staff the projects, and 3) Their goals and metrics don’t align so they’re pretty much doomed to appear to fail. The article points out that these are pretty obviously mistakes. Any thoughts on why these illogical errors were so easy to make for so many businesses?
It’s so good to read a concise yet pithy post about what not to do! Sometimes I think that social media talk is just a tad more Pollyanna than is warranted, though I obviously partake and enjoy doing so. The We Are Media Project has been talking about how to be Social Media “Evangelists.” I think that sharing awareness of common pitfalls is a huge part of being a responsible social media evangelist. It shows that it’s not a brand-new, completely untested idea. It shows that you’re informed and honest. And it provides a more complete map to guide our organizations.
The fate we’re all trying to avoid is that of Michael Scott, who unthinkingly follows his car’s GPS straight into a lake and then insists that technology tried to kill him. We can be intelligent about new-to-us technology, and understanding where pitfalls (or lakes) are can keep ridiculous plunges on The Office and out of ours.
a branch of successful marketing creates consumer habits, i.e. using Febreze.
some people think this is wrong, creepy, etc.
a nonprofit partnered with one such marketing company to promote the habitual use of soap in parts of West Africa, which saves a lot of little kids from dying.
we don’t have to go through life playing out the same old tired, automatic habits.
we can choose how to react, and therein lies our freedom.
it suggests working toward synergy and also doing what you love.
It was fascinating to read them on the same day because they’re so close to contradicting each other. I think, though, that they both point to the idea that habits are powerful and can to some extent be controlled.
My takeaway is a whole bunch of questions to ask myself that I’ll also share with you:
Are you aware of your habits? Habits of mind, relation to your environment, treatment of others, technology usage, verbal tendencies, etc.?
Is your organization aware of its habits, its automatic actions?
How are said habits serving you? Your organization? What would you change if you could?
How can we make positive change in personal or organizational habits?
How can we move beyond writing more policies and procedures to actually change our everyday experience? Is this a logical place for Social Media to step in?
A common response to all the social media options out there is feeling overwhelmed. I think people start feeling like they “should” be using all of these new tools, and the rate at which the perceived to-do list lengthens is a little alarming.
So far I haven’t been overwhelmed at the huge variety of options out there. Don’t get me wrong – I do indeed get stressed when I see the tasks before me growing exponentially. It’s just that I don’t see social media options as a to-do list at all.
I see the options more as a bowl of fruit:
There are lots of different, enticing choices that I can mix, match, taste, or avoid as I see fit.
It’s right there, just hanging out and waiting for me to partake.
It’s yummy and healthy. Why not try some?
Do you see social media as a bowl of fruit? Do the options stress you out? How can we reduce social media’s overwhelming-factor?
I was talking to my mom about Facebook the other day. She said she’s not on it because it would be creepy and tacky if she were. It’s not for middle-aged women, it’s for young people.
She said that when she was younger, she would see middle-aged women wearing mini-skirts as though by wearing the clothes of young people they could be young again. They thought it was working. She said it was kind of horrifying to see, and that she swore that when she hit middle-age she wouldn’t do ridiculous, age-inappropriate things as some sort of weird effort to hang on to her youth.
I very much respect that my mother doesn’t wear mini-skirts, and I really appreciate being around someone who was stoked to turn 50 and who fully embraces and celebrates her age.
But mom, Facebook is not like a mini-skirt. It is not just for kids. Yes, it’s possible to use it distastefully, i.e. friending 13-year-olds you don’t know, or posting pictures of you and dad totally wasted. But you can use it to connect with old friends from previous jobs and schools, to support causes you believe in, and to keep with your daughters’ profiles! It can really be useful for anybody.
I think that’s one of the beauties of social media in general – you can use it to act your age.
If it’s not like a mini-skirt, what would you liken it to? How does the message of welcome get to people who think this is not for them?
When I finished the article, I didn’t know quite what to focus on first. Here’s what came to mind, in no particular order:
Shoddy statistics made for a misleading title and overall weak article.
It’s sad to me that women with money and power are anomalies to be reported on, though of course I’m glad to see successful women featured.
I’d like to know what the author’s basis was for generalizing male motivation for private jets (ego, status) and women’s (buying time, avoiding problems). He doesn’t say
Reading this while commercial flights are getting worse for the rest of us who don’t have $130,000 (or $375,000+) for a plane was a little hard to swallow, though of course I’m very happy that women are better represented in the “haves” category.
Oh yeah, what about all those people who can’t afford a coach-class commercial flight to whine about?
And that leads me to my nonprofit-related thoughts and questions:
What would I do with $130,000? What would my organization? Who could we serve, and how?
Where does nonprofit reporting live in our major newspapers? Where should it? Business? Education? Health? Our strength, that we address all of those categories, can be a weakness because we’re hard to feature as one entity.
At work we’re looking to make a social network function for quite a large and geographically distant internal network, which in an ideal world would have 5 or 6 related but distinct subgroups.
Our overall goal is to use a system to efficiently get information around these groups. Email is not cutting it. We would like to free ourselves from its grip.
We were initially very excited about Drupal, but I’m told that we would have had to rely on a programmer to make it happen for us, and he has evidently fallen off the face of the earth. I hope he’s ok, wherever he is.
In lieu of outside help, I’ve been looking around at other options. I heard Ning.com mentioned a few times, and as far as I can tell it’s just Moodle. Regardless of which nonsense-word social network service we use, I’m excited about several features:
Initial setup was intuitive
I can post events, announcements, links, and other information
Groups
A blog, forum, etc.
My concerns about Ning.com in particular are:
I have an alarming quantity of information to post, including a forms library. Is there a good way to do this using Ning.com? Or is this where Moodle really shines?
I’m having trouble editing the layout of my page, as opposed to the main network page.
Will it be intuitive enough for enough of our network to make it worth trying?
I also have a more general concern about Web 2.0-ing my program. Within our program, there are a lot of details, complications, and restrictions, not all of which are intuitive. It’s the nature of our funding streams, and is even a little extreme in a nonprofit context. We definitely want our network to collaborate with each other, talk, share stories, etc. We also need the rules, regulations, and expectations, and their relatively strict natures to be abundantly clear. How do other networks walk that line? What are some tips for success?
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