Thing #24: Feed Your (Library’s) Ego

Introduction

With the proliferation of Web 2.0 services like Twitter, Blogs, Facebook and other services, there are lots of conversations taking place on the web about everything from politics to consumer products. Library service—good or bad—isn't immune. When you find yourself blogging, Twittering, or sending out information via RSS, chances are others are talking about you and what you’re saying. Maybe more importantly, even if your library isn’t distributing information via these platforms, there’s a good chance others are using those platforms to talk about your library. So, regardless of your stance on publishing via Twitter and the like, you should be tracking what’s being said about you.

Luckily, there are plenty of ways that you can find what’s being said about you or your library and in most cases, via RSS, get that information sent to you automatically.

In this Thing I'll be presenting five different services you can use to monitor the web for references to your library or any other topic that interests you: Twitter Search, Google Alerts, Bloglines, Flickr, FairShare. After reading up on these services you'll be asked to experiment with two of them.

Additionally, familiarity with how to subscribe to and read RSS feeds, although not necessary, will greatly enhance your ability to take full advantage of many of these services.

Twitter Search

The first step: head on over to http://search.twitter.com/ and enter the name of your library. (Keep in mind any common abbreviations that may be used. For example, Lincoln City Libraries might want to try searching for “LCL”.) Here’s an example of a search result for “mccook public library”.

If you’re more interested in what’s going on in your town as opposed to specific mentions of your library, try setting up a search for your city(town)/state instead. (This of course applies to the other searches talked about in this lesson.) Here’s an example search for “lincoln ne”.

The results are great but what can you do with them. First, providing you know how to take advantage of RSS, subscribe to the results. (The red arrows point to where you can find links to the results feed.) Once you subscribe, you won’t have to redo the search. Just sit back and receive any newly-found results.

Next…respond. It’s simple to do, assuming you have a Twitter account. If you find someone complaining about your library offer them some assistance. If they’re praising the library, send a thank you. Trust me, in most cases these people believe they’re shouting into the wind. If you send them a response you’ll not only surprise them but you’ll also start a conversation and possibly gain additional support for the library in the process.

Google Alerts

If you’re someone who uses Google services a lot, or prefer getting information via e-mail, you may want to consider setting up some Google alerts. Simply put, Google Alerts are Google searches that are performed automatically and the results are sent to you instead of you have to re-perform the search.

To get started head on over to http://www.google.com/alerts:

If you already have a Google account (you do if you’re using Blogger) go ahead an sign in then return to this page. Then enter your search terms, the type of search you’d like performed (News, Blogs, Web, Comprehensive (everything), Video, or Groups), set how often you’d like to receive results (as it happens, once a day, or once a week), and enter your e-mail address. When finished, click Create Alert.

Now, on the schedule you set, you’ll receive e-mails containing links to results matching your search.

Providing you’re signed in to your Google account, you can now manage your alerts. Here’s a screenshot of the alerts I have set up:

For each one I can edit the search terms, change the search type, change the delivery method from e-mail to RSS, and change its frequency. Click on the screenshot above to zoom in and see in more detail the types of searches I have set up here.

Bloglines Citation Search

If you have a Bloglines account (which you do if you did the first 23 things) you can use it to search for, and subscribe to the results of, links back to your sites. For example, someone might write a blog post in which they mention your library and provide a link to your library.

For example they might write “I found it at my local library.” A Google search for the name of your library won’t find you this one. To find it, do a citation search in Bloglines. This screenshot shows the results for a citation search for “http://www.nlc.state.ne.us”. (The search is entered in the upper right corner of the Bloglines page.)

Trouble is, this search will also find links in which one Commission page links to another. Therefore I need to click on More Options and adding the same URL into the search but making sure to set it to “None of these words” “in the URL”. This way results will not include links from your site to your site.

Now that we have a good set of results, all I need to do is subscribe to those results via RSS:

Now, whenever someone links to my site, I’ll know about it and I can read the whole post, get the context, and respond accordingly.

Flickr Comments

If you’re posting photos on flickr, be sure you’re keeping track of any comments left on your account. Yes, you can log into your flickr account daily and check for new comments but why not use RSS to get the comments sent to you. All you need to do this is log in to your account, click on the “More recent activity link”, scroll to the bottom of the page, and find the link labeled “Feed - Subscribe to recent activity on your photostream”.

Once found, just use that URL to subscribe to the feed. Now you can keep easily keep track of what’s going on with your flickr account.

FairShare

Finally, FairShare is a new service designed to track your content when reposted on other sites. I’m listing this one last since I’m still getting the hang of it myself and it’s not exactly perfect. However, here’s how it works:

First, it’s best to have your content already licensed under Creative Commons. (This is something we’ll be covering in a future lesson.) Next, head on over to http://www.fairshare.cc/fairshare/ and enter the URL to the RSS feed for your content. Let me be perfectly clear: enter the URL of your RSS feed, not the URL of the blog. Click next to continue.

Next, choose the license that your content is using. If you’re not CC-licensing your content, just choose “I don’t license my content”. If you’re using one of the other CC licenses, choose the appropriate one. When done, click “Choose license”.

Next, create your FairShare account.

You’ll finally be presented with links to various versions of the newly created RSS feed for your site.

The first feed is for tracking this particular site. Subscribing to this feed will alert you of any reposted content as it happens.

The second feed contains a weekly summary of all reposted content for every site you’re tracking in your account.

I’ll be subscribing to the first feed as I prefer to track things individually, as the happen, instead of via a weekly summary. Since I’m a Bloglines user, I just click on the “+ Bloglines” icon to add it to my account.

You’ll immediately receive one item from FairShare in your feed welcoming you to your account. It also tells you that you’ll need to wait up to eight hours before any real results start appearing.

Checking back the next day I received more than 175 reports of our content being reprinted elsewhere on the Net. There’s a catch in our case however. In many cases, on our blog we repost content we found elsewhere such as press releases from ALA. In these cases, many other blogs are also reposting that content. In these situations, it’s completely logical that many others would have reprinted the same exact content. So, for this example, pretend the content being flagged was originally written by the Commission.

Here’s a sample reported item in Bloglines:

Clicking on the link under Reused: will take you to the NLC’s blog post. Clicking either of the links (in this case) for kfor1240.com, or “Go to page details” will get you the following:

Here you’ll see more complete information than was presented in the RSS feed including the number of words copied, the percentage of your article copied, whether the reusing site contains ads, and how much of your content they’ve copied in the past 30 days. Most importantly, this screen presents you with a copy of the page that contains the reposting of you work and a “Jump to copied segment” link which will show you exactly what was reused and in what context.

So, as you can see there are several ways in which you can easily track who’s linking to you and who’s reusing your content. Once you’ve found those instances be sure to follow-up as appropriate. In many cases a simple “thanks for the link” on the other person’s blog can generate a lot of good will without too much effort on your part.

Assignment (due by 5/31 for credit):

1. Use at lease two of the presented services to track the content of your blog, your library’s Web site, or your town. If you’re not getting any results, try different terms or topics until you do.
   
2. Respond to at least one of the results you found. Wait a few days to see if they respond back.
   
3. Write a blog post about your findings.
   • Describe the types of results (online newspapers, blogs, other libraries, etc.) and their content (good, bad, indifferent) regarding your site.
     
   • If a conversation did happen with the other author describe that too.
     
   • Discuss how you can see these tools can assist you with marketing your library.