Sunday 31 January 2016

Making It All Work Together - The End

It is a shame to finish on such a negative post as this one, but it is very difficult to find anything positive to say about these products. Hopefully you will look at the apps I enjoyed and concentrate on those which where the majority. If my lack of engagement with them fails the course then that is how it should be as I simply cannot think of a way of setting up any of them in the way required without also setting up fake accounts for all the relevant social media too which I don't have time for and I am definitely not sharing my details with any of them.

I do not link social media accounts, I have diigo, twitter, Access-It, pinterest and I also belong to a Yahoo group for work and that is it. I do not wish to link them as it would be like mixing cheese and cement - not necessary and not productive. If I want students to pick up links then I put them on the student portal so they know exactly where to go and look. In addition where I live the internet is not like it is in most of the UK, I have a limited allowance per month and so am much more careful about how I use the internet for downloading or streaming at home.

I do not have or want Flipboard it seems to be another way of not working but seeing the same content on yet another app - a mix of fb, tumblr and twitter. I use FB for personal stuff - and if you run a business or have a real need to contact colleagues or clients then a totally separate account should be used as I have done in the past. I spend considerable time and effort trying to educated our students about the importance of keeping their personal details confidential and it seems contradictory if I then have a FB account that shares details of my life with that of work contacts some of whom can be total strangers.

Pinterest is useful to keep visual records of websites or items connected with home or work, again it is advisable to keep the two separate as the details are likely to need to be quite different - that is what I have found. I am also planning for the future when I leave this job I want to be able to leave all these things in place for my successor. I am about to sign up for another year and may decide to do one more year after that, but it is surprising how quickly the time flies.

I think this adequately describes Hootsuite, from their own website:

Save time finding content to post

Finding content to share on social media takes time. Hootsuite's publishing features automatically discovers, schedules, and posts content for you, freeing up more time to engage with customers.
So as a user you are allowing a computer to generate text to put on your social media site? Really? If I am going to post content on a website as a Librarian, then I am going to write it and check that it is suitable. 

Buffer, in the words of its owners: 
Social media management for marketers and agencies
I fit neither of these categories and never will, I have done lots of jobs during my working life but I will never be in marketing or work for an agency. Sometimes you just know these things.

I feel like I am on the wrong planet with this assignment as there is nothing whatever that attracts me or suggests I should in any way buy into this. It is a bit like the Emperor's new clothes, one day everyone will wake up and realise that the time spent using this myriad of social networking apps could far more profitably be spent working and producing real products or information.

I do not have a problem keeping up with my social media as I use so few, I also do not feel as if I am missing out or that my students are. We want them to use their time efficiently and not spend half the day tracking across half a dozen social medial apps to read the same thing written in more or less the same words. The Yahoo group I belong to is fantastically important and supportive as well as being the source of a huge amount of information which is contributed to by all its users -  this is probably the one I spend the most time on, but that is reasonable as it is the one I get the real benefit for work from.

2 comments:

  1. Interesting post, it sounds like you dont need social media managment tools, you have it very compartmentalised. I agree that it's important to be mindful of your personal data when signing up to these accounts. That in itslef is also making social media work for you. It's important that you remain in control of how and what part of you gets shared online.

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  2. Congrats on finishing also by the way! Thanks for sticking with it.

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