Based from personal interactions speaking with librarians about using Wikipedia that really showed effectiveness of using such collaborative tool. Many of the children public librarians in County of Los Angeles created wiki account all to share tips and advice about projects and programs. This is a great way to help librarians find resources among local colleagues. There are numerous benefits to this collaboration such as they all deal with the same budget, resources and similar demographics. On top of that having ideas and discussions become archived is an excellent reference tool for future new employees to help them start their programs and understand resources they have.
Overall Wiki is a great tool used for public librarians but in-house collaboration tool not for the public. If the public feedback is needed then this is where we can utilize other social media tools for feedback. Wiki is not really known for back and forth but more collaboration to work on content.
In Steven Bell's article, “Students tweet the darndest things about your library - and who you need to listen" really hits the importance of library utilizing this social media tools when he noted the following statistics:
Twitter communication, the customer experience and communications consulting firm Maritz Research (2011), found that only 29 percent of organizations responded to a consumer’s twitter complaint, while 50 percent of the consumers expected a response to their complaint. Among those who did receive a response to their tweet 86 percent said they liked or loved hearing from the company, while 86 percent of those who did not receive a response said they would have liked or loved getting one.Showing how engagement and addressing customer’s questions or complaints are crucial because these angry twitterers are only going spread among others. We see many times how one slip of the tongue in Twitter can devastate a brand's identity and cause major PR nightmares. Not many libraries feel comfortable using this tool due to lack of training or no management requirements to utilize. The best approach is just to monitor what the community is mentioning about the library at the very least.
Steven Bell really shows his argument the importance of knowing what people are mentioning about the organization. Though an interesting observation in his article is most libraries that utilized Twitter are mostly private. I really thought the reverse would be the case since public libraries need to keep connected to their customers to help them with fundraisers, budget issues or anything since privately held libraries tend to have bigger budgets.
2 comments:
Scanning Twitter for comments is a great idea. We can think of it as another form of follow up. We want to know if our patrons are finding what they need. Sometimes they aren't inclined to say it face to face, so sometime we need to dig a little deeper.
Also acts like a Self Help for customers looking for answers when seeing what others are asking.
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