Week Ten, Thing 22 : Social Networking

My first experience with social networking sites was when I joined Livejournal, about three years ago. Livejournal is sometimes described as a combined blogging and social networking site. When I first joined, it was primarily to read other people's writing and conversations, mostly on the subject of music, but people I "met" at the site encouraged me to set up my own "journal." Although I had heard of blogs, I must not have had a very good understanding of the term at the time, because I recall that I had made several entries in my Livejournal journal before it dawned on me that I had a "blog," and had become a "blogger."

I later also joined MySpace, and then Facebook, but found both of these sites disappointing. I find most MySpace pages extremely unpleasant to look at, with badly clashing bright colors and headache-inducing flash animations galore (an impression just reconfirmed when I visited MySpace in preparation for this posting.) While Facebook is generally not as offensive visually, it seems to me that it's primarily a place to carry on existing, pre-established relationships, rather than to find new ones. I can see how it could be useful for people with a wide circle of friends and associates with whom they want to keep in touch, but it's not oriented towards exploring ideas or interests, or towards finding new connections, in my opinion. So, I was surprised to find out how well suited my first social networking platform (LiveJournal) is to my ideal, especially given that it's much less well-known than either MySpace or Facebook. I suppose it really is a sort of niche social networking and blogging site for people who are geekier than average, more passionate about exploring particular interests and ideas than about using the internet to facilitate existing social connections.

So, to link the personal history into the question of library use of social networking sites, it occurs to me that different sorts of corporate entities, much like different sorts of people, can have different goals, and that different goals may lend themselves to different tools. It won't do for libraries (or for-profit corporations) to simply jump into the most popular social networking sites, thinking that this will make them cool and popular. Instead, they need to understand various social networking sites well enough to decide which platform or platforms are a match that can help them achieve their goals.

One of the most exasperating online experiences is that of being marketed to in places that one frequents for the specific purpose of two-way communication. Self-promotion without any understanding of one's audience is spam. Entities other than individual humans (e.g., libraries, businesses, record companies, which I'll call "corporate entities" for the rest of this entry) do best in the social networking world when they provide useful information. Self-promotion is rarely useful from the "target's" perspective. The best way for a corporate entity to promote itself in a social network, in my opinion, is by providing carefully-considered information sparingly (as opposed to a constant barrage of "noise.") And, a social network is the ideal format for information sharing only under certain circumstances. I'm not sure exactly what circumstances these would be for a corporate entity. I do follow some corporate entities on Twitter, using their "tweets" as news feeds. If they tweet something especially interesting to me, I might re-tweet it, or even mention it on my blog. But, as anti-social a person as I am, I use social networks primarily to interact with other human beings. I suppose librarians can blog in an official capacity, but once a human being is tasked with the job of being an official voice, some of the quirky randomness that pervades recreational social networking must be reigned in. On the other hand, Reference services might find a place in some social networking settings.