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Australia! I am in you in April, running some marketing workshops...

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Phil Bradley always said you could travel the world on a library degree, and that seems to be coming truer and truer. 

In April I'm running some workshops on marketing libraries, in Australia. If this is a side of the information profession you're interested in, I'd love to see you there! The dates and cities are:

  • April 20th: Melbourne
  • April 22nd: Sydney
  • April 24th: Brisbane

The training company who've asked me over to do these has put together a pretty comprehensive brochure detailing what we'll cover. You can see more info as well as booking details over on the PiCS site, and I've embedded the leaflet below.

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Twitter for Researchers: Improvers Tips + Tricks

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I delivered a workshop last week (mentioned in the previous post on hashtags) about Twitter for Researchers - it was aimed at people already on Twitter. There's an HE-centric Introduction to Twitter here, for anyone interested.

This one was at more of an improvers level, and covers setting up lists, saved searches, analytics and so forth. The slides are below.

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A new and unlikely source of free stock photos!

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There's a movie out called Unfinished Business. It stars Vince Vaughn. And as part of the publicity for it, the filmmakers have teamed up with Getty (who run iStock Photo) to make some stock photography freely available for editorial (i.e. non-commercial) use. This is a really nice idea!

It's a good bit of marketing (although as I say in my workshops, the vast majority of marketing doesn't work directly; I'm just as unlikely to go see the film as I was before...) and the photos themselves are great. I can imagine them being quite effective in information literacy sessions...

My favourite one is this:

If you want to get hold of these, you need to do so quickly - it's a limited time promotion. The first 4 pictures are available direct from Getty here; apparently the next 8 will be released in two weekly batches soon, via this page. Or you can look at all of them here on Adweek.

These are great because they capture the utter ludicrousness of most stock photography, and then amp it up further by having people look in the wrong direction. In the original of the one above (which was done in photoshop) the guy is looking at the camera - that at least makes a kind of sense - but in the Vaughn version he looks like he has no idea he's in a photoshoot.

Similarly in this one...

... the fact he's looking away just reminds you how barmy the whole conceit is, with the other actors looking at a (presumably blank) screen and grinning out how damn productive they all are, as the camera just happens upon this real-life office moment.

So can someone weave these into a library related presentation or teaching session? I'm going to try to for my Film & TV students, but I'd love to see examples from others too - leave me a link in a comment.

Twitter Hashtags: The Rules

 

Last week I was creating a slide for a workshop aimed at academic staff and research Postgrads, entitled Twitter for Improvers. On the slide I was attempting to explain what worked with hashtags, and what didn't - for example putting in punctuation causes the hashtag to break.

Then I thought, it would be better to actually do these as tweets (show don't tell!) - I did so just with the idea of print-screening them and deleting them, but lots of people joined in with replies and RTs and I added some ranty opinions on hashtag use as well as the factual and logistical stuff...

So here, in Storify form, is what works and what doesn't: The Laws of Hashtags!

(If you can think of any more leave me a comment.)

Creative Commons header image by GeoBlogs.

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The Student Guide to Social Media is now fully reusable!

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This actually happened at the end of last year but I didn't get around to blogging about it at the time. It's about the Student Guide to Social media - there's background info below and in a previous blogpost written when it first arrived.

Click this image to open the Student Guide to Social Media in a new window

Click this image to open the Student Guide to Social Media in a new window

It was always Creative Commons so anyone can use it, but now we've taken the ND (Non-Derivative) part off, so it's just CC-BY-NC. In other words you can take it and do whatever you want with it, including repurposing it, remixing it, taking only certain bits of it and not others, and generally reusing it in a flexible way.

It was made in Articulate, and the Articulate source file is available via JORUM. So if you want to use it to make something new, please go for it.

Whenever we talk about or use this in York the students are really responsive - it often gets rated as 'the most useful aspect' of infolit sessions. There's a growing awareness among undergraduates that social media can play a professional and academic role in their lives, but they often don't know where to start - so this overview is something they find helpful.

There's a bit more info about the Student Guide to Social Media on JISC's Digitial Student pages, too.