ah, the easy Thing! As a digital native (I'm a bit too old to fall into the usual definition of this term but as my dad works in IT, I grew up around computers), I'm already on all three of these sites.
The 'Thing' asked us to get started on these sites (too late), learn more about what we can do on them, and consider their usefulness.
Facebook: I use facebook only for connecting with people who are my friends in the real world - and so I only have about 30 friends on there. I might sometimes cross-post amusing links between there and twitter, but generally I keep the two separate. People on twitter don't want to hear about my cat, people on facebook don't want to hear about my job.
Twitter: I've been on twitter pretty much since I started at Westminster, having come from working at a bank where web access was very much locked down. In that time (18 months) I've gained (and kept) 600 followers, which I'm pretty pleased with. The vast majority of these are other archivists, from the UK, Germany and North America. It took me a while to find my voice on twitter but now I use it very much as I would to talk to a colleague in the office - sharing interesting enquiries, tasks I'm doing, amusing items from the archive and professional news. So that it doesn't sound like an archivist robot is tweeting, I do mention things from my personal life, like gigs or theatre performances I'm going to, but try to keep it to a roughly 80/20 professional/personal mix. Twitter has been very useful for keeping me plugged into the professional world and for networking. I attended a conference recently in canada and already knew about half a dozen people there from twitter, and met up with another archivist who lived there but wasn't at the conference. I've had lots of help with german translations I'm doing for the archive, and in return have helped a german archive with translating their webpages into english.
LinkedIn: I'm on LinkedIn, and have been for some time, but haven't really done much with it other than join, and add people I know. I can see that for people with other jobs, such as a consultant or freelancer, it could be a very useful tool but I struggle to apply it in my own line of work. Ultimately I see it as having my CV online but not much more.
So I would say that I think social media is very useful in both a personal and professional capacities, but for me it works best when you keep the two separate, and have a very clear idea of what you're using them for.
No comments:
Post a Comment