What defines the culture of the info pro?
Sharing? Sure. Info pros happily offer high levels of service to clients and customers needing guidance in finding and using information.
Learning? Definitely. Info pros generally learn something new every day while going about the business.
Embracing change? Not so much. Info pros have a reputation for liking things just the way they are, thank you very much.
How does our culture work for or against us? The culture of sharing makes us good at delivering valuable information, providing useful training to our constituencies, and mentoring new info pros. At the same time, the propensity to "give it away" makes it hard to monitor return on investment or charge sustainable rates for our services.
The willingness to learn helps us improve our skills and fosters the curiosity we need to help our clients and customers. Could learning ever work against us? I can't see how, but maybe you can.
The tendency to resist change has proven useful to info pros over time, as we carefully and systemically develop the cataloging and classification systems that make information findable. By the same token, we may have missed opportunities to better connect with users by holding on to the "we've always done it this way" approach.
What else defines the culture of the info pro?
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Professional Development - Face to Face
What do you do for professional development? How do you stay current in the industry and keep your creative juices flowing?
Consider the options - podcasts, blog postings, online videos, and electronic newsletters represent some easy, at your desk options. What about face to face, you ask? Good question. How often do you get out of your office and rub elbows with colleagues from outside your organization?
Effective and essential professional development cannot happen without the occasional live, real time, face to face interaction. We're coming into the conference season for info pros. The Association of Independent Information Professionals met last month. The Medical Library Association meets later this month. Specialized librarians in SLA will meet next month, and the American Library Association meets in July, just to name a few.
AIIP drew over 100 attendees while ALA will draw over 25,000. What's the attraction?
First and foremost, humans are gregarious. We like to gather with people who understand who we are and what we do. It is refreshing to interact with colleagues who "get it", to share experiences, and even to commiserate.
Second, we learn from each other. We pick up ideas, solutions, strategies, and alternatives to take home to our own work environment. These learnings satisfy a professional need to know and make us even more valuable to our organizations.
Most importantly, however, is the "cross fertilization" that happens in a face to face environment. Here we encounter ideas, issues, and concerns that we may not have sought out. Unlike the RSS feeds and newsletter subscriptions that we opt in to, conferences foster serendipity and the friction of dialog that often sparks new ways of thinking. One does not have to cross the country to attend a large gathering like ALA. While I strongly recommend one such excursion every year or so, most communities have a local info pros group of some kind. Join. Attend. Participate. Cross fertilize. Learn. You and the profession will be better for it.
Professional development thrives in a face to face environment. In fact, without conference gatherings, withering on the vine is inevitable. Don't you agree?
Consider the options - podcasts, blog postings, online videos, and electronic newsletters represent some easy, at your desk options. What about face to face, you ask? Good question. How often do you get out of your office and rub elbows with colleagues from outside your organization?
Effective and essential professional development cannot happen without the occasional live, real time, face to face interaction. We're coming into the conference season for info pros. The Association of Independent Information Professionals met last month. The Medical Library Association meets later this month. Specialized librarians in SLA will meet next month, and the American Library Association meets in July, just to name a few.
AIIP drew over 100 attendees while ALA will draw over 25,000. What's the attraction?
First and foremost, humans are gregarious. We like to gather with people who understand who we are and what we do. It is refreshing to interact with colleagues who "get it", to share experiences, and even to commiserate.
Second, we learn from each other. We pick up ideas, solutions, strategies, and alternatives to take home to our own work environment. These learnings satisfy a professional need to know and make us even more valuable to our organizations.
Most importantly, however, is the "cross fertilization" that happens in a face to face environment. Here we encounter ideas, issues, and concerns that we may not have sought out. Unlike the RSS feeds and newsletter subscriptions that we opt in to, conferences foster serendipity and the friction of dialog that often sparks new ways of thinking. One does not have to cross the country to attend a large gathering like ALA. While I strongly recommend one such excursion every year or so, most communities have a local info pros group of some kind. Join. Attend. Participate. Cross fertilize. Learn. You and the profession will be better for it.
Professional development thrives in a face to face environment. In fact, without conference gatherings, withering on the vine is inevitable. Don't you agree?
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Attention Info Entrepreneurs - The Tribe is Gathering
If you provide information services as a contractor, freelancer, or business owner, it's time to pack your bags and head to the 24th Annual Conference of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
This year the gathering takes place in Cleveland Ohio, April 29 - May 2. The conference offers professional development, networking, and social opportunities especially tailored for the independent information professional.
This year the gathering takes place in Cleveland Ohio, April 29 - May 2. The conference offers professional development, networking, and social opportunities especially tailored for the independent information professional. One of the many program highlights is the Roger K. Summit Award Lecture. This year's award recipient is Peter Shankman, Founder of Help a Reportert Out, HARO. HARO serves journalists on deadline, offering more than 100,000 sources around the world to be quoted by media.
Invest in your business. Invest in yourself.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Social Media Searching for Competitive Intelligence
Real-time sources contain useful information about your competitors' organization and products. These sources also contain information about your organization and products. Trust me on this. It's not just about who just had a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch.
Consider developing new services and products for your clients for competitive intelligence, brand management, and reputation monitoring.
Here are some tools.
Addictomatic is a federated search engine that pulls results from live sites such as Google Blogs, Wordpress, Technorati, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and much more.
OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg, and other social sharing services.
CrowdEye
searches Twitter and compiles a bar chart of tweet volume over the last three days with a word cloud of keywords.
Backtype is the only free tool I know that searches blog comments.
There are also fee based products such as Radian6 and Attaain that offer powerful features to research, analyze, engage, and tract activity on real-time sites. Consider starting out with some of the free offerings mentioned here and dazzle your clients with the information you can deliver.
Consider developing new services and products for your clients for competitive intelligence, brand management, and reputation monitoring.
Here are some tools.
Addictomatic is a federated search engine that pulls results from live sites such as Google Blogs, Wordpress, Technorati, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and much more.
OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg, and other social sharing services.
CrowdEye
searches Twitter and compiles a bar chart of tweet volume over the last three days with a word cloud of keywords.Backtype is the only free tool I know that searches blog comments.
There are also fee based products such as Radian6 and Attaain that offer powerful features to research, analyze, engage, and tract activity on real-time sites. Consider starting out with some of the free offerings mentioned here and dazzle your clients with the information you can deliver.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
The Value of Twitter
I don't have time for Twitter. Who cares what anyone is having for lunch, and how can anything important be reduced to 140 characters?
Even if you haven't had this thought yourself, you've likely heard it expressed by someone else. What's the deal with Twitter? Who has time for it, and why should I care?
While Twitter can surely be a place to post random answers to the question "What's happening?" (Note: When did the question change from"What are you doing?") Twitter can also be much more than that. Using Twitter it's possible to push meaningful information out to a large and/or targeted audience and to bring information in to your sphere of influence.
Savy companies have begun using Twitter to communicate important messages to customers and clients. According to USA Today Wells Fargo and Bank of America alert customers to changes in bank fees, product features, and customer service information. Individuals who follow the Tweets coming from these banks will have information deliberately and strategically pushed to them by company employees. It may be an advantage for the customer, but it is surely an advantage for the banks to be able to deliver such targeted information.
BusinessWeek points out how entrepreneurs are gathering information through Twitter that they can use to grow their businesses. By strategically searching the Twitter archives for people interested in a given product or service, it's possible to find new customers. In the BusinessWeek article, Wistia.com CEO Chris Savage found a buyer for his video sharing service by searching the phrase "video sharing."
Companies also monitor their brand and reputation on Twitter, keeping abreast of what people are saying. This kind of awareness makes it possible to do damage control or deliver alternative messaging if necessary. A quick search on a pharmaceutical of interest to me revealed a Tweet inquiring whether anyone had ever had an trouble with the drug. "I would really like to know if I should be concerned," he said. If I were the manufacturer of that drug, I would surely want to be a part of that conversation.
To search Twitter, simply go to the home page and enter your term or phrase in the search box. Use quotations to force phrase searching. You can also access the advanced search form through Search Twitter in order to search on words, phrases, people, places, dates, attitudes, and Tweets containing links.
The best overview I have seen on how to use Twitter strategically comes from this slide (posted by loichay on November 3, 2009 to a blog called KJB de signets graphiques.)
It addresses six business strategies (customer relations, crisis management, etc.) with suggestions on what topics to follow, how to create content addressing the business strategy, and how to engage others. For instance, the drug question posed above falls within the business strategy of Crisis Management. In this case the loichay slide points out that you can Follow your brand, products and relevant issues; Create directions to additional resources, updated information, and explanations; and Engage in answering questions, responding to comments, raising issues, and providing information.
With a few possible exceptions, we probably don't need to know who ate what for lunch, but we surely want to know what people are saying on topics of interest to us. We likely want to deliver a point of view or information related to a topic of interest to us. Twitter is a viable option for accomplishing both objectives.
Even if you haven't had this thought yourself, you've likely heard it expressed by someone else. What's the deal with Twitter? Who has time for it, and why should I care?While Twitter can surely be a place to post random answers to the question "What's happening?" (Note: When did the question change from"What are you doing?") Twitter can also be much more than that. Using Twitter it's possible to push meaningful information out to a large and/or targeted audience and to bring information in to your sphere of influence.
Savy companies have begun using Twitter to communicate important messages to customers and clients. According to USA Today Wells Fargo and Bank of America alert customers to changes in bank fees, product features, and customer service information. Individuals who follow the Tweets coming from these banks will have information deliberately and strategically pushed to them by company employees. It may be an advantage for the customer, but it is surely an advantage for the banks to be able to deliver such targeted information.
BusinessWeek points out how entrepreneurs are gathering information through Twitter that they can use to grow their businesses. By strategically searching the Twitter archives for people interested in a given product or service, it's possible to find new customers. In the BusinessWeek article, Wistia.com CEO Chris Savage found a buyer for his video sharing service by searching the phrase "video sharing."
Companies also monitor their brand and reputation on Twitter, keeping abreast of what people are saying. This kind of awareness makes it possible to do damage control or deliver alternative messaging if necessary. A quick search on a pharmaceutical of interest to me revealed a Tweet inquiring whether anyone had ever had an trouble with the drug. "I would really like to know if I should be concerned," he said. If I were the manufacturer of that drug, I would surely want to be a part of that conversation.
To search Twitter, simply go to the home page and enter your term or phrase in the search box. Use quotations to force phrase searching. You can also access the advanced search form through Search Twitter in order to search on words, phrases, people, places, dates, attitudes, and Tweets containing links.
The best overview I have seen on how to use Twitter strategically comes from this slide (posted by loichay on November 3, 2009 to a blog called KJB de signets graphiques.)
It addresses six business strategies (customer relations, crisis management, etc.) with suggestions on what topics to follow, how to create content addressing the business strategy, and how to engage others. For instance, the drug question posed above falls within the business strategy of Crisis Management. In this case the loichay slide points out that you can Follow your brand, products and relevant issues; Create directions to additional resources, updated information, and explanations; and Engage in answering questions, responding to comments, raising issues, and providing information.
With a few possible exceptions, we probably don't need to know who ate what for lunch, but we surely want to know what people are saying on topics of interest to us. We likely want to deliver a point of view or information related to a topic of interest to us. Twitter is a viable option for accomplishing both objectives.
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