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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Online Information in London

Info pros from across Europe and parts of the rest of the globe are in London this week for the annual Online Information meeting.

This conference always offers a great program for the info pro, and this year is no exception. One session on Wednesday morning looks especially interesting.

Moderator: Mary Ellen Bates, Owner, Bates Information Services Inc, USA

A toolkit for searching the social web
Phil Bradley, Independent Internet Consultant, UK

Finding the key (words) to the hidden treasure
Inbar Yasur, Information Professional, Hipusit, Israel

Competitive Intelligence and the evolving internet
Victor Camlek, Vice President - Market Intelligence, Thomson Reuters, USA

What? You say you can't be in London at the moment. Well, not to worry. There are a couple of pretty good options for following the action from right where you sit.

Marydee Ojala, Barbara Brynko, and Dick Kaser are blogging the conference for Information Today on the InfoToday Blog.

You can follow the Twitter stream using #online09, or check out the Twapper Keeper created by Mary Ellen Bates to collect all of the #online09 Tweets in one space.

I'm going to be watching the blog and the Twitter stream to see what might be said about that Wednesday mornign session.

Delivering Value to Your Clients or Organizaton

Information professionals deliver value to their organization or risk becoming expendable.

I recently delivered a webinar program to members of the Association of Independent Information Professionals on how to deliver value added analysis. You can download the slide deck titled Adding Value to Your Research: Value Added Analysis to get the gist of the presentation.

Cyberspace is abuzz right now as specialized librarians debate the merits of renaming their professional organization. The current name is SLA: Special Libraries Association. The suggested name is Association of Strategic Knowledge Professionals.

The proposed name actually represents a mind shift from information management to something broader. Some info pros appear to object to this change. From my angle it represents an appropriate evolution in our profession. To demonstrate the value in what we do, we have to wrap value into the services and solutions we offer.

Value added analysis serves as one proven strategy for an evolving profession.

Develop Your Professional Skills - Focus on Management

As independent info pros we are on our own when it comes to professional development. Manager Tools can help meet the need for management and leadership training. Manager Tools offers podcasts on valuable topics including timely meetings, presentation attire, attention management, how to remember names, how to leave a voicemail, and lots more. Podcasts are categorized as Manager Tools and Career Tools. Take a look.

Learn something new today.