Social Media Breakfast 4: Geoff Livingston
| December 17, 2007 | ||
| 8:00 am | to | 10:00 am |
Weather permitting, I’ll be heading to Social Media Breakfast 4 (which is totally sold out, btw) on Monday morning to hear Geoff Livingston weigh out whether people are trying to target audiences, stakeholders, or community members using social media. Geoff posted a really interesting preface to his talk on his blog, outlining the differences between the three types of “targets” (complete with pics as visual stimulators of thought, and dictionary definitions for clarity), and a really interesting bit on the types of relationships each target represents.
Reading the comments so far (I’m guessing there will be more), this statement from Geoff’s response this morning really struck me:
…I’m not seeing it as a battle of semantics, more one of attitude. To me having the attitude that you can use social media to talk to audiences indicates that you think you are in control, that the people you are communicating with cannot make good decisions (Keen), and that it’s your stage to perform on. The audience can only cheer or leave depending on your performance. This approach seems to be one for other media forms.
To me, this is where libraries still teeter, which was evidenced by some of the comments and questions I heard at the Rhode Island CE presentation I did last week (more in on that in another, overdue post), and what I’ve heard at presentations and events before. Librarians still want a serious amount of control, and by this definition, that means we are still treating our patrons as an audience, not as an interactive community or even as decision-influencing stakeholders, going by Livingston’s definitions.
Libraries will need to see social media from the patrons’ perspective, and apply it mostly on the patrons’ terms to really be effective in that arena, and that means allowing access in a way that is inherently uncomfortable behind the green library curtain. And while libraries and librarians are trying, and are making some progress getting feet wet, it won’t be a real, participatory paradigm shift until we all get past that audience mentality and really get into the community and stakeholder mindset of application.
I think it’ll be a really interesting talk. Until my new laptop arrives, I won’t be live blogging anything, so I’m hoping to write up my notes shortly after.
