CILIP article: demonstrating your value

Way back in August 2012, I wrote a letter to CILIP Update in response to what I felt was a very one-sided article they’d published about outsourcing in corporate libraries. They published my letter, and invited me to write my own piece in response.

I’m republishing my article here now, as enough time has passed that I’m not robbing CILIP of any magazine subscriptions! Since writing this I’ve also started an occasional column for CILIP Update, on the topic of demonstrating your value as a librarian/information professional. I will also be republishing these columns here, once CILIP’s one-month embargo period has passed for each.

Librarians: worth our weight in gold!

Librarians in all sectors know that demonstrating the value you provide is vital. This is especially true for librarians in the corporate sector. As part of a larger firm, our role and value isn’t always obvious to those holding the purse strings. Some may not see the point of hiring librarians at all when, obviously, everything the staff might need to research will be available on the internet!

The prevalence of this view has become sadly apparent since the credit crunch, as many corporations have downsized, outsourced, or even axed their library staff altogether. Those of us that are left have had to find creative techniques for demonstrating our value. Techniques like…

Have a strong brand

The first battle in demonstrating value is making sure people know you’re there. Have consistent messages, logos and document templates that you use for everything the library sends to anyone in the firm. If someone has used a piece of research that’s helped them win some new business, or contributed to a big case, they should know exactly who to credit for it. Information is one of those things that too many people assume “just happens”. Make sure your customers don’t make this assumption.

Make yourself indispensible

When most of your marketing is word of mouth, the best kind of advertising is to be really, really good at your job. You should know everything that is important to the firm, so you will know what’s likely to be of interest to your customers before they’ve asked you for it. This will likely mean getting out of your comfort zone: you’ll need to find a way into conversations with the key decision-makers in your firm. If you’ve never done this before, some might wonder why a librarian is interested – isn’t your role just to wait for people to ask you things and then send it to them? – but persevere! It can help if you find someone high up who is impressed by your work and is willing to act as a champion for your service.

Embedding within teams

Librarians are easy to axe if we’re seen as a function that sits on the periphery. We’re much harder to get rid of if the work we do is entangled with all the business of the firm. At Addleshaw Goddard we have eight team members each assigned to key market areas and legal practice groups, which allows us to provide in-depth research and insight tailored to the strategic priorities of each area. If you’re a solo librarian then obviously this will be harder, but it’s still worth seeing if anything you do overlaps with any other department. If it can, why not spend time with them to see how you could add value to their team?

Embedding also involves leaving the library! If you still have a hard copy collection then you may need someone to sit with it (see the excellent Dumpling in a Hanky blog for a recent post discussing this), but you certainly don’t need all the librarians there all the time. Try hot-desking to see more of the business and make your presence known.

Outsource and automate routine work

To demonstrate your value, first you need to make sure that all your work is valuable. Routine administrative jobs are the obvious candidate for outsourcing, so make sure they’re not the bulk of your job! See what you can “outsource” yourself: would a subscription agent take over the journal processing and circulation? Could anyone else in the firm do looseleaf filing?

Automating routine work frees up time for more skilled and valuable tasks.  At AG, we were spending significant amounts of time sending out daily current awareness alerts. To reduce the manual work involved, we now use a combination of subscription sources and external services to have these alerts sent directly to requesters, without manual intervention from the team beyond initial setups. We are also looking at software to allow us to use custom RSS feeds to deliver more detailed, bespoke current awareness within the firm and to send to external clients.

Delivering Differently

A core strand of Addleshaw Goddard’s strategy is “delivering differently”. In the legal market this means offering something beyond the typical law firm fare to make ourselves stand out, but it is also something that everyone in the firm is expected to embody. In Research Services, we have taken this to mean ensuring that everything we do contributes to the firm’s strategy and growth, by challenging old ways of working and revising outdated practices, and demonstrating the value that we bring to the firm with every piece of work we send out.

Looking back and looking ahead

Inspired by Suzanne Wheatley’s post on Information Today, I thought I’d use my traditional* end-of-year post to not just set goals for 2013, but to look back on some of my achievements in 2012. This has been an incredibly difficult year for a number of reasons, some public and some not, so it seems like a good idea to remind myself of some of the good things this year, before I start looking ahead to next year.

So, here are some of the things I’m proudest of having achieved in 2012:

1. Speaking at two professional events

This year I spoke at a seminar for SLA Europe, and a panel session at the Ark Group law libraries conference. Sadly for personal reasons I was unable to attend the BIALL conference in June, where I was also supposed to be speaking, but I was glad to have these two other opportunities in the year to speak. Public speaking still absolutely terrifies me, but I’m glad to report that it’s getting easier each time I do it – I’ve even started to enjoy it! I don’t think I’ll ever get to the stage where I’m completely unfazed by public speaking, but then I always think that a bit of nervousness is a good thing: it shows you care.

2. Writing for CILIP Update

In the autumn I wrote a letter to CILIP Update in response to a piece they published about outsourcing, and was invited to write my own article as a response. I’m happy to say it was quite well received, and I will be writing a semi-regular column for CILIP in 2013, on the topic of proving your value in the workplace. I’m delighted at the opportunity, and looking forward to doing more professional writing!

3. Learning to swim

Ok, I sort of already could swim – at least, I could keep myself afloat and doggy-paddle – but I never really learnt to do it properly. Like many people I’m sure, I was inspired by watching the Olympics this summer: I’m not really a big sports fan, but having watched some of the swimming and seeing how beautiful it looked, I was suddenly really sad that I’d given up swimming lessons as soon as my parents let me! So I signed up to an adult swimming class at my local leisure centre, and discovered that I really enjoyed it! I’m now getting quite good at backstroke, and am almost there with my front crawl

Well, that all looks quite good written down like that! So, now I’m all abuzz with positivity having reviewed my achievements, what are my goals** for 2013? Well, how about…

1. Decide what to do about Chartership

Last year I put “complete CILIP chartership” as a goal. That didn’t happen, largely for personal reasons. I’m still not sure it will happen this year, because I’m far from sure that chartering is something I still want to do. That’s a complicated post for another time, so I’ll just leave it at this: this year, I will either complete my chartership in a burst of activity, or I will decide to let it go.

2. Pick up more CPD activities

This year, I have mostly stepped back from all my CPD stuff (committee memberships, LIKE North, blogging…), for personal reasons. I needed that time away from it all, but I am starting to miss it – and starting to feel like I could take more on again. I don’t want to immediately load my plate with too much and burn out again, so I will be starting slowly, but I do plan to be more active in the profession this year.

3. Keep learning

I’m starting a new job next week, which is in a totally new field and sector for me. It’s going to involve quite a steep learning curve – and I am incredibly excited about that prospect. I love learning new things, and I’m looking forward to having a solid reason to develop new skills. I don’t plan to leave it all at just work, either – learning for me should encompass all aspects of my life.

There: 3 achievements, and 3 goals. That feels like a nice round number to leave it at!

So, onwards to 2013. Last year, I said something about how I was sure 2012 was going to be better than 2011, because it bloody well had to be. Given how 2012 actually turned out, I’m not going to say the same this year – would rather feel like tempting fate! Besides which, if this year has taught me anything, it’s that it is pointless worrying about the events in your life. Life will always throw things at you that you’re not ready for, so why worry about what you can’t control? Far better to focus on what you can control: your own attitude. At Christmas, I described my new philosophy to my sisters as “relentless positivity”. Whatever happens this year, good or bad, I will meet it with optimism.

Happy New Year, everyone.

* This is the fourth time I’ve done it – I think that counts as a tradition!

** Yes, that’s “goals”, not “resolutions”. Resolutions don’t work for me: you’re bound to miss some, and then feel awful for failing. With a goal, it doesn’t matter if you don’t meet it, or if the goal itself changes over the year – it’s about trying.

Influencing through networking

At the Ark Group conference, the last presentation of the day was from freelance trainer Nick Davies,  on “Influencing through Networking”. Nick is a very engaging speaker, and very funny, so it was a great way to round off the day! I doubt I’ll have captured any of his humour in my notes, but I thought he gave lots of very useful advice, so wanted to blog about it.

The first thing Nick stressed was that influencing and persuading is an ongoing process, not a one-off event. If you want to persuade someone to do something, you need to have built a relationship with them long in advance of actually asking them to do anything.

The second point is that persuasion works emotionally, not logically. Too many people make the mistake of thinking they can convince someone with a list of facts that backs up their point, but people don’t make decisions that way. Most people make decisions on an emotional level, then look for facts to back that up. Nick used the example of the Compare the Market / Compare the Meerkat adverts: these have absolutely nothing to do with the product, in fact they don’t tell you anything about the benefits of the product at all. They are designed purely to provoke an emotional response. And it worked: comparethemarket.com went from about 50,000 hits per month to 2 million hits per month following the launch of this ad campaign*.

Nick’s third tip for influencing people was not to go in too heavy. If you bombard people with information, and try to give them the hard sell, then at best they’ll back off; at worst they’ll become hostile.

Nick then told us the acronym SPICE, which stands for the things you need for your message to be persuasive:

• Simplicity 
  
• Perceived self-interest (what you need to appeal to)
• Incongruity (i.e. don’t do the expected)
• Confidence
• Enthusiasm

He then went on to how you get yourself in a position where you can influence someone. There are two important qualities you need in order to have influence: credibility and trust.

Credibility is down to experience, and also down to how you present yourself. He gave the example of physiotherapists, who were trying to figure out why their patients weren’t sticking to their exercise programmes. After finding that they were more likely to do so if a doctor had told them to, they realised the problem was one of credibility: rightly or wrongly, physiotherapists were not considered as credible as doctors. The solution to this was to display the physiotherapists’ certificates of qualification in their offices: this was the only change they made, but the rates of patients sticking with their exercises shot up. The takeaway from this is that you have to demonstrate your credibility, whether that be through highlighting your qualifications or in other ways – no one will assume, or do this for you!

Regarding trust, this is something that takes time to build. Nick drew a diagram showing the stages of a relationship that most people go through, which went a bit like this:

Acknowledgement – Understanding – Acceptance – Respect – Trust – Bond

This is a lengthy process, and most work relationships tend to get stuck around the “Acceptance” stage. This is partly due to the depersonalised nature of modern workplaces: you don’t learn to respect and trust someone you only speak to via email, and don’t know anything about other than their work.

This led on to a bit of talk about networking. Nick considers it vital (and I agree) to get to know people on a personal level, if you ever want to work successfully with them. He mentioned the importance of small talk – a lot of people say they hate this, but it formed the first step of every relationship you’ve ever had. Small talk is a form of what Nick called “self-disclosure” – letting the other person know little details about yourself, that can form the basis for getting to know each other and building a relationship.

Finally, Nick talked about body language and making a first impression. He said that like it or not, everyone judges on appearances – that is literally all you have to go on when you meet someone for the first time. There are apparently 12 stages of body language that people go through, but the first three are the important ones when you meet someone (apparently as you get further down the list, they get “a bit mucky”**). The first three are:

1. Eye to body – we make an instant judgement based on appearance, clothing, etc. Make sure you are dressed appropriately

2. Eye to eye – make sure you’re paying attention, and smile

3. Hand to hand – handshakes must be firm and dry!

 

That about wrapped it up – at least, that’s where my notes end! I really enjoyed this presentation, it was a good, lively way to round off the day. A lot of what Nick said was common sense really, or at least should be, but I know I can certainly use the reminder from time to time! He handed out a booklet of networking tips at the end, which is actually quite useful – you can download it from his website as a PDF, along with his other course booklets.

 

* Obligatory librarian note: Nick didn’t give a source for this, and I couldn’t find any data myself to back it up, so I can’t verify the accuracy of this figure!

** I googled. They do indeed.

Ark Group Conference: Managing Your Law Firm Library

On 29 November, I spoke on a panel at the Ark Group’s Managing Your Law Firm Library conference. As a speaker, I got to attend the whole conference – which turned out a bit odd, as I’d accepted a new job just a day before the conference, which meant I’d be leaving the law library sector! It was still very useful though, and I took away a lot that I think would be transferable to most types of information services.

I didn’t take exhaustive notes on every presentation, but here are some of the topics I thought were most useful:

Sarah Brittan, Baker & McKenzie – Running the library more like a business

Sarah’s started us off with a talk about Baker & McKenzie’s restructure of their Library and Information Centre (LIC). This came about following a strategic review of the LIC, for which they employed outside consultants – which I found interesting in itself! I know of a few law firms (including my current employer) who’ve undergone processes like this, but I don’t know how common it is to use external consultants.

The consultants were tasked with finding out:

• How should the department be structured
• What IT improvements were needed
• What the business wanted from the LIC

There was some positive feedback from this, but the point was really to focus on the negative feedback – they needed to know what they were doing wrong! Negative feedback included that the LIC was too general, low-level, process-driven, and not providing enough value-added services.

Key messages were that the LIC needed to be:

• closer to the business
• more customer-service focused
• proactive rather than reactive
• more effectively engaged with other departments
• more strategic and client-centred
• more influential over knowledge management (KM) technology

Following this review, the whole department was restructured. Key points:

• Now have 3 information specialists, each allocated to specific departments/practice areas
• They sit in the departments some of the time, but are mostly based together
• Decided against sitting them with their supported departments permanently, as they still needed to work together as a team
• Info specialists are embedded within teams, there at the point of need, and can provide tailored assistance. They are first point of call for sector queries
• Info specialists have got more involved with work “higher up the food chain” – e.g. producing client alerts, assisting with pitches
• LIC also now has a KM technology specialist – far more say in global IT issues!

I found this presentation really interesting, not because it told me anything new, but because the process sounded so similar to what we’ve gone through at Addleshaw Goddard. Baker & McKenzie are about a year into this process, and AG did this about 2 years ago, so it was interesting to hear from another firm that was doing the same thing. I found it quite reassuring that all of the concerns and problems mentioned, as well as the benefits and successes, sounded pretty much the same as ours!

 

Chrissy Street, Clifford Chance – Demonstrating value through the use of business cases

Chrissy’s presentation was about how Clifford Chance had started using wikis to build business cases for new product (e.g. databases etc) subscriptions and renewals. They had been producing business cases for all subs/renewals over a certain cost for some time, and had always just used Word docs for this. The problem came when trying to gather feedback from users – this was all done via email, which could be very messy and inefficient. Using Word docs for business cases was also problematic when more than one person needed to work on it, leading to multiple versions all over the place.

The firm started using a wiki to build business cases in 2009. The idea was to make the process more efficient and standardised, as well as reducing email traffic. These benefits were emphasised when introducing the concept to the firm – it was very important to get user buy-in, so the team talked to key stakeholders in the process at the early planning stages.

As part of the presentation, we were shown a worked example of a wiki business case – I was impressed, it all looked really clear and straightforward. The process goes something like:

• Library team inputs data to the wiki about the resource, what it’s for, cost (including details of negotiations), benefits, any alternatives
• A link is sent to fee earners asking for input – they are asked for comments on usefulness of specific features/improvements, comments on the resource generally, the consequences of not renewing, and whether or not they consider the resource “business critical”
• All comments are public – this can encourage a bit of discussion/debate!
• Information from the wiki is exported to a final version business case, in a Word doc, for partner approval

Chrissy’s top tips for anyone considering a similar project were:

• Open communication is vital to get people used to the idea. “Wiki” can be a bit of a scary word!
• Stay flexible – some people just won’t adopt a new approach
• Be persistent: e.g. if someone insists on still emailing you comments, and them to the wiki yourself and then send them the link
• Invest time in getting the structure/format right before you start trying to get people to use it!

 

Other presentations

Obviously there was a lot more discussed on the day, but those were the two presentations I got the most out of. They were all good though – one of the comments I put in my feedback was that this was the first conference I’d been to where nothing felt irrelevant.

Here’s a few comments on the rest of the day’s presentations:

Fiona Fogden – Managing a library budget

This was hugely useful for anyone who has budget responsibility – which, by the end of the presentation, I was increasingly thankful that I do not! This was full of really practical tips though, which I will be hanging onto in preparation for any future role that involves budgeting.

Loyita Worley – Overseeing a law firm merger / Victoria North – Managing global teams

A double-header here! Both were really interesting, although I think I’d have liked to hear more from Loyita about the practicalities of overseeing a merger – she talked more about the current merger market and the drivers for law firm mergers, rather than what to expect if it happens to you.

Panel: Staying in the know

This was the panel I spoke on (alongside James Mullan and Loyita Worley), so I didn’t take any notes! There was lots of interesting discussion throughout the room, about managing information overload and making use of new technologies. I was a little surprised at how few people in the room used social media – but then perhaps I shouldn’t have been, given how cautious law firms are!

Dunstan Speight, Berwin Leighton Paisner – Clarifying copyright

Very useful account of how BLP has introduced a new copyright management tool on their intranet. If you’re interested, and are a BIALL member, there was a piece on this same project in the BIALL journal Legal Information Management earlier this year.

Nick Davies – Influencing through networking

This was a great presentation, full of genuinely useful tips, so I’m actually going to write a separate post on it – coming soon!

New job!!!

I have an announcement to make: I am leaving the law library sector and starting a brand new job! As of January, I will be the Research and Information Officer for Brake, the road safety charity.

I am hugely excited about this new role. It’ll be a big change for me: no more corporate law! This new role will be much more directly supporting the team I work within, rather than producing discrete pieces of research that are then taken away to become… I know not what. As I’ll be working within a very small team, I’ll also have a lot more direct responsibility: I’m going from being one of 11 librarians in a firm with more than 1500 staff worldwide, to being the sole researcher in a team of less than 30 people.

A more important change than all the above though, from my point of view at least, is the nature of the organisation I’ll be working for. For some time now, I’ve felt like I needed to be doing something more worthwhile with my life. Not that I don’t enjoy working for a law firm, but I don’t feel like what I’m doing is actively making the world a better place. It’s not necessarily making it a worse place either – I’m not naive enough to think that lawyers = evil (I don’t work for Wolfram & Hart!), and I know our firm does a lot of good, but that somehow doesn’t feel like enough.

Brake is an amazing charity. They campaign for road safety, and support those bereaved or injured in road crashes. Regular readers will know that the latter is something close to my heart. They are a small charity, with a big impact, and I can’t wait to be a part of that.

The other big change, of course, is that I’m not entirely sure I can call myself a librarian any more! This is of course an information role, but it’s a part-research, part-communications role – not a lot of it is a typical librarian job, even accounting for the broader “special librarian” definition I’ve been working on so far. At least, that is going by the job description – I’ll have to decide whether I still feel like a librarian once I’ve been in post for a while! Stay tuned for another post on that in the new year…

Open Rights Group

As an information professional, I am both interested in and hugely concerned about digital rights and information rights. That is why for the past few years, I’ve been a member of campaign organisation Open Rights Group (ORG). ORG is a non-profit, campaigning on everything from “e-voting to copyright, open data and privacy”.

We live in the information society. Even if you don’t think about these issues much (although, assuming that most readers of this blog are librarians/information professionals, I rather hope that you do) they do affect us all.

ORG is currently holding a member recruitment drive, to raise money to hire a Legal Officer. So, as I feel slightly guilty for not really doing any active campaigning, I thought I’d do my bit by promoting it here! If you’re interested in joining, you can do so here for around £5 per month (full disclosure: that link gives me the credit for recruiting a new member, and ORG is offering small incentives for that. If you’d rather do it without linking to me, use this link instead).

SLA Europe talk: Engaging with social media for fun and career success

Last week, I did a talk for SLA Europe on “Engaging with social media for fun and career success”, alongside co-panellists Meghan Jones and Neil Infield. It went pretty well, I think – and was filmed, so will be available to the wider world fairly soon! Eep…

In the meantime, here is, more or less, what I said…

I’ve used social media for a long time in a personal capacity, but probably only started using it for professional stuff within the last five years. I thought I’d talk a bit through my personal history of social media, just to outline how my use of it has changed over the years.

I am just about old enough to remember the beginnings of social media. As a teenager in the late-90s and early-noughties, I was active on a few of the early sites – all of which I’m pretty sure have now vanished from the web (anyone remember Bolt?). I used them all for fairly trivial purposes, of course, but thinking back I’m not sure my use of them was really so different from the way I use services like Twitter now. Then, as now, it was a chance to widen my social circle outside of the people I saw every day. Now, it’s to network with other professional contacts besides my colleagues, back then it was to make friends with people other than my schoolmates.

I kept up my use of social media through my teens and early twenties, moving from Bolt to MySpace, from Facebook to Twitter. I’d deleted my MySpace account by the mid-noughties, but I do still have a Facebook profile – although there’s not much on it and I rarely log in. My current network is mostly on Twitter, so that’s where I’m the most active – I mainly use Facebook for keeping up with old friends and family members that I don’t see much in person. I don’t find Facebook at all useful for professional networking.

The site that really got me in to professional networking was Twitter. I joined at the start of 2009, while I was in library school – so I wasn’t quite an early adopter, probably more like early majority. I joined primarily because, at the time, every other blog post from Phil Bradley was extolling the virtues of Twitter and how great it was for librarians to network! I quickly found that to be true. At the time, I was just finding my feet in the world of librarianship, and I really valued being able to reach out to a wider network than just the people I worked with, to get a greater idea of what the sector as a whole was all about, and to actually make a few friends in the process. I imagine it might be different now for someone just joining Twitter – there are far, far more librarians on there now, so you’re immediately joining a much bigger crowd – but at the time it felt like a really nice, close-knit, friendly community. The reason I find Twitter so much better for professional networking than Facebook is that there isn’t that barrier of needing to know someone before friending/following them, as there is on Facebook. Twitter is much more like a post-conference networking event in that respect: it’s perfectly acceptable to approach a complete stranger, glass of wine in hand, introduce yourself and ask them a question.

A few months after I joined Twitter I started blogging, and that’s still my other main form of social networking. I started my blog a month before I went to the SLA conference in Washington DC in 2009, on an Early Career Conference Award – that was how I first got involved with SLA Europe – and have continued it to this day. The timing was actually quite fortuitous, although I didn’t plan it like that: attending the conference gave me months worth of blogging material, which stopped my blog from fizzling out early due to lack of momentum. That’s what I credit with keeping it going for this long really, and that’s the advice I’d give to any new bloggers: try to find something, at least in the early days, to hang your blog around and give you some guaranteed content.

In terms of what I use now, my main social networks are my blog and Twitter. I’d like to talk through each of these in terms of how I use them and what I get out of them.

I cannot overstate how useful I’ve found Twitter for my professional development. Twitter allows me to find other information professionals around the world with similar interests and ideas – and, indeed, wildly different interests and ideas! I’ve talked to librarians in countries I may never visit, in sectors I have no experience of, in organisations that I didn’t even know hired information professionals. There is no comparable real-life network: even SLA, through which I’ve met dozens of professional contacts, cannot compete with Twitter in terms of sheer numbers and the ease of networking. Twitter is also invaluable for conferences and other events: I can follow from a distance if I’m not able to attend, or I can tweet from events that I’m at, and make notes at the same time as sharing key insights with my followers.

I’ve also started using Twitter recently specifically for work. I’ve always used Twitter really for my own professional development, but it’s never had that much relevance to my day job, so it’s quite nice that now it has! My firm now has a social media strategy, and is actively trying to encourage the lawyers to tweet, particularly the partners, as a way to raise their profile among journalists and the commercial world as a whole. There is a key partner in each of the firm’s market areas who is trying to get their profile raised within the industry media. As I’ve been using Twitter for some time and know it quite well, I’m part of a media panel at work that monitors twitter in various key sectors (mine is property), suggests people for the partners to follow, picks out breaking news for them to comment on, and suggests and helps compose tweets. As you’d expect, some of the partners are not especially social media-savvy, so the idea is that we help them navigate what is, for them, an entirely new form of communication, and hopefully help them get it right without making any embarrassing mistakes along the way.

The legal tweeting project is going really well, and has already had some benefits in terms of media attention. However, it has highlighted for me one of the ways that I see so many newcomers doing Twitter wrong. Among the property industry experts I’ve started following for this project, there’s a very obvious split between those who’ve been there for a while and are comfortable with using Twitter as a networking platform, and those who are new to it, and haven’t got the hang of it yet. The way you can tell who doesn’t get it yet is they’re the ones that only tweet about professional stuff. They’re quite dull to follow, as you really might as well just be following an RSS feed of press releases. The ones who know what they’re doing mix in some personal stuff as well: they’ll tweet about a big property deal, and then mention something about the football team they support, or their plans for the weekend.

I honestly think Twitter works best if you take a “profersonal” approach, blending personal and professional. I share quite a lot of personal stuff on my Twitter account, some might say too much, but I also tweet about law librarianship and other things that interest me. I’m quite comfortable with that balance. Other people manage the balance differently, and I know lots of people who have separate personal and professional accounts, but that’s never really worked for me. I’m not really interested in following people who only tweet about what they had for lunch, but I also don’t like following people who only tweet about their work. Personally, I think a good mix of interesting work-related content, along with enough personal content that they look like a real person, is what makes someone worth following.

My other most-used social/professional network is WordPress, where my blog is hosted. I know not everyone considers blogging as a form of social networking, but I do. Blogging, if you’re doing it right, shouldn’t be a one-way broadcast – although, sadly, that is the way a lot of people use it. To get the most out of blogging, you should consider it as much a conversation as Twitter is.

One of the things I love most about blogging is that it allows you to build a mutually beneficial learning network. If it’s working well, the process goes: I blog; other people read and reply, either in the comments or on Twitter; people add things that I hadn’t thought of; other people with more to add jump in – and everyone involved benefits. If I’m really lucky, sometimes someone else goes off and writes their own blog post expanding on their perspective, and the whole thing starts again.

Blogging also works really well for me in terms of building a profile. I’ve gained so many opportunities from blogging that wouldn’t have come my way otherwise. I’ve received numerous invitations both to speak and to write articles on the back of blog posts I’ve written, and I’ve got involved in projects I wouldn’t have got off the ground without my blog: the Library Routes project, the Echo Chamber talks with Ned Potter, and the Yorkshire-based networking group LIKE North are all good examples of this.

So, that’s my social media history. To wrap up, these are my top three tips for engaging with social media for fun and career success:

• Be open! Try out new things, see what works for you. It’s not about learning one tool – Twitter won’t be around forever, so you need to be prepared to explore new networks as and when they arise and see what works for you
• Be interested! Social networking is as much about what you can learn from other people as what you can broadcast yourself. Reply to people on Twitter, leave comments on blogs, and join in discussions on LinkedIn – make it a conversation.
• Be yourself! Having a professional persona is fine, but don’t be afraid to inject a bit of personality in it. People will be more likely to engage with your insightful tweets about knowledge management if they also know you’re a keen amateur taxidermist who loves 80s music!