Day 2 of SLA social media insights
Day 2 of my first Special Libraries Association (SLA) conference and I'm thinking to myself, "this is
where I belong". Here I am, attending several presentations where
information consultants have similar assumptions regarding using social media
tools to find information as I do. Mining blogs, Twitter and other social media
platforms for insights seem to be the norm in the information consulting
industry. To information consultants, social media presents a very important
and free information source in addition to paid commercial databases.
Zena Applebaum, Director
of Competitive Intelligence at Bennett Jones LLP, was
one such presenter that gave a talk on this subject. Two things fascinated
me from her presentation entitled "Social media-Turning noise into
action":
1. The assumption that social media can be
information sources from which information should be collected
2. That one can develop a social media collection
and acquisition policy (or procedures) to make decisions about what social
media data or information one could collect.
It is these points that I want to briefly review
and talk about here in this blog entry.
First and foremost, Applebaum argues that social media sits between the
spectrum of primary research and secondary research. She further argues that
social media provides access to people essentially talking about themselves and
others without the researcher eliciting those responses. She further suggests
that on social media, there are both individuals and institutions that provide
information. Her questions are not so much whether or not such information can
be trusted or what's the value of such information, but how do we get at that
information. This is in contrast to my discussions with some academics and in
academia (including a few librarians), who are suspicious of social media
information and ask can the data be trusted and how can we know whether or not
the social media information is authentic or meaningful. Further, I've found
that from informal discussions within limited academic circles, that there are
doubts about collecting and storing such information, as social media
information is deemed to be either too trivial, ephemeral or lacking the authority
of traditionally published/secondary sources and primary sources.
The second thing that impressed me about Applebaum's talk was that she laid out
what seemed to be guidelines for getting or acquiring social media data. In her
presentation, she discussed the need for competitive intelligence specialists
to have a framework for monitoring and collecting relevant information from
social media. This begins by determining what she refers to as "key
intelligence topics". According to Applebaum (2014)
Key Intelligence Topic - (KITs)
are those topics identified as being of greatest significance to an
organization’s senior executives, and which provide purpose and direction for
Competitive intelligence operations.
How do we determine these topics? Applebaum suggests that we conduct a
series of interviews of a representative group of users from which we ascertain
the relevant topics to monitor media and social media for. Then we are to
grouped these topics into appropriate categories and get our stakeholders (the
senior organizational executives/users) to allocate a priority to the same.
Hence to begin the process, Applebaum recommends
that we analyse who are our stakeholders (or users) and what decisions do they
make. In addition, we must also ask:
•What knowledge do the users need?
•What intelligence can we provide?
•What intelligence can we provide?
The second step in the process is to define what
she terms the "collection plan" (Using my collection development training, I would
call it the collection development/acquisitions policy/procedures. However, her
term may indicate less formality in the process). This involves determining the producers of the
information that one needs and how to locate them. In Applebaum's presentation, this analysis
of the sources that need to be monitored involves asking:
•Who has the information you need?
•Who is their audience?
•What social media will they use?
•How do you search those platforms?
•Who is their audience?
•What social media will they use?
•How do you search those platforms?
In my own experience as a librarian, the first
two steps are similar to the process that I go about when identifying and
determining which publishers (and vendors of commercial databases) to contact
for what materials are needed for my library. The last point relates to how do
I find those publishers (or vendors) in order to make those purchases (nowadays, we just deal with agents rather
than contacting the publishers directly. Unless we are collecting rare books or
items).
So when I examine this, I conclude that the
skills of collection development are as relevant to social media information as
they are to books and other items collected by libraries. In basic collection
development policy we decide the purpose of our collection, its scope (and or
limitations) and the types of decisions that we will make as to what sources to
acquire or omit from the collection. Further, while we may not write it into
our policy, we may implicitly establish procedures or a process to go about
acquiring items for our collection. All this reinforces the idea to me that
librarians can apply their skill sets (acquired from experience with
traditional media and library sources) to new media and information sources/resources.
The issue is whether or not we deem social media to be sources that we must
collect, store, preserve and provide for our users to access.
References:
Applebaum, Z. (2014). Social media – Turning noise into action. Presented at Special Libraries Association 2014 Conference, June 8-10, Vancouver, BC. Retrieved from http://sla2014.sched.org/event/db8c0c4fe1b010468310ab57b62d9eda#.U5aEzfldUrW.
No comments:
Post a Comment