The Outro; Social Networking - Week 12.

Well I'm in overdrive now, and I love it! I've certainly got a heck of a lot out of this amazingly put together course. Just how you put it all together for us makes my mind spin. There are now resources on the net net that I have never used before, a few i have never even heard of before, that i know have the confidence of utilising from hereon in, not only at work, but for my 'other life' as well, so thanks heaps for this opportunity.

Chorus- This article from the museum is quite thought-provoking. While written using some organisational jargon the framework from Forrester is helpful in working out ways that libraries can use social networks to both promote themselves (marketing) and support their clientèle using such social media applications as blogs, communities, Facebook and MySpace (social networking sites), embedded widgits and Wikis to name the obvious.
This reminds me of how I first became a user of 'Myspace', long before I weakened from my higher than thou stance that MySpace was just a site for showoff musicians that needed attention. It was when I was shopping around online for a place in Australia that sold and soldered together BYOC (Build Your Own Clone) guitar effects pedal kits, and I found a link to their Myspace page, but I had to join myspace in order to view it correctly or order from it or the like, so I did! So even though it was not a community organisation like a library, this commercial company made me always think of this type of social networking site as a very effective way of gaining new customers. I did buy the pedal and it can be seen in my "big huge labs" photo at the top, it's the spray-painted purple one.
I have since had lots of experience with Myspace and I do have my own page: http://www.myspace.com/fxstocker
Reverb- Like the American Library Assoc. Myspace page, I have had discussions in staff meetings and casually over the past year about our local council library creating its own MySpace page, and then like our Council's website, it could be advertised as a place to go to find out all about our services and events. Having 'friends' link themselves to our page would be an obvious and effective way of social networking.