 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Christa Burns, at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online event where we cover various commissioned activities and any Nebraska library topics that might be of interest to librarians in the state. We do these every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, free about one hour sessions, depending on how long we go. We have a mixture of presentation, interviews, book reviews, anything we can come up with that might be, as I said, of interest to any librarians in the state. This morning I have Michael Sowers joining me on Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Library Commission, and together we are going to do a session on libraries, Nebraska libraries, that are using Twitter. Hello. We have four libraries, four places. We saw libraries, actually, now that I think about it, that we have that we're going to interview about that. Sorry, we're having other technical issues here for just a moment. So we have three libraries, and hopefully a state agency, who I just got a note passed to me, is working on trying to get connected. Trying to get connected. Connected, yes. Yeah. Okay, I'm doing this. Okay. So I will admit right off the top that I'm big in Twitter. Christa's big in Twitter. We've done a couple other sessions already on this. And this session was her idea, and she just kind of comes to my office. She's like, how about we talk to librarians that are doing Twitter? I was like, great, because what we've done is we've kind of done a what is Twitter, although we're going to do a little refresher real quick at the beginning here, and kind of advance things. But a couple of things have come across my desk recently that made us go, maybe we need to talk about this a little more. I take photos all over the place. I look at a lot of photos about what libraries are doing, what other things are doing. And a year or so ago I did a Wi-Fi project, because I had this great photo of a local Wendy's offering free Wi-Fi, and I thought if the Wendy's could be offering free Wi-Fi. Wendy's in all places. You know, why aren't the libraries offering free Wi-Fi? And we found a couple of those pictures recently here. Try pulling up with us. This is, I believe, in Topeka, actually. I believe where this one is from. But you can now follow the Hivee Meet departments on Twitter and Facebook. Specifically the Meet department. Yeah, not even the grocery store, but just the Meet department. So ask yourself this. If your local grocery store's Meet department has enough to say that they have a Twitter account, you think maybe the library would have enough to say to have a Twitter account. The other one is we just went to a new restaurant. Sam and Louie's opened up downtown here in Lincoln, and they also are on MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. And they even sent text messages. I've already gotten a Koopa via text message. Unfortunately, the Koopa showed up after lunch. I was seeing that. Next time, I'll get my free appetite. But it's good. You should know they're using it and not just putting it out there and then not following up. That's the thing too. You've got to follow up if you're going to start joining and doing these social networking type things. So definitely good response from them. So just basically for anyone who's new to this or just wants a little refresher on what we're talking about, we're not going to jump right into Twitter as if everyone knows what's going on. Twitter is what they call a micro blogging service. There's lots of different ones. There have been lots of different ones. Tumblr is still out there. Quick, short messages. A lot of people blog. They send big blog posts and do articles and things. However, maybe you've got something just short and quick you want to get out there. There's something new happening at the library, a new event, or look at this cool article I found, blah, blah, blah, all sorts of things. So it's very short, very fast. You can do it mobile on your phone, from your phone, from your iPod, whatever, or just off your computer. It answers the question they have when you first log in and says, what's happening? It used to be what are you doing now? What are you doing now? They changed it to make it more broad. Just what's happening? Just anything you want to share. You're limited to 140 characters in it. That is based on the 160 character limit for a standard text message. And they took out some of those as far as what you can write to put in someone's screen name or extra things when you want to send messages. If you do want to share URLs, something really cool you can do. If you have a website for your story time or a website, some page on your library website for signing up for a class or something, you can put a link to that web page into your tweet that you send out, your message you send out on Twitter. And it will automatically shrink it down into a shortened URL. So if you have a really long one, that's okay. It will automatically do that. So it's very good for sharing that kind of information and things. You can follow people and be followed by people. And this is the important part. You want to be out there as a library, as an institution, and have your users, your patrons, who are going to be interested in you, following what you're saying. Just like they would watch your web page or they would follow you on a Facebook or a MySpace same thing with Twitter. You want to get people to follow you so you do your advertising just like we saw Hivee and Sam and Louie is doing. You would advertise this on your web page in your library letting people know so that your users will follow you. And then you can follow them. You can follow either your patrons if you want to. I don't know if you want to hear everything your patrons are saying. But maybe following, just to get information, following other library-type organizations or things that you do. If your local newspaper has a Twitter, you might be one of you following that to keep up with what they're announcing that you can then resend, retweet out through your account. Things like that. Or following the Library Commission or following NLA, you know, whatever's out there just to keep track on what's going on in your area or field. It is very similar to doing interesting messaging if you've ever done that to chat. But it's not the kind of thing where you're live and you know someone's online so there's no status message. They don't know if you're away from your desk or not. So it's more, you can do conversations and people do it back and forth. But you never know when someone might answer. They might not be sitting at their desk at that moment and that's okay. They might answer you in three hours and that's how it works. As a library, you may be doing a lot of just announcing of things. But when someone responds to you, you need to be paying attention to it and answer them. You may get people saying, hey, I have a late book. What do I do? And then you would reply to them via Twitter. Tell them, come into the library. Here's our page about paying fines, whatever. You know, be there for them as you're using it as well. I've been known to randomly apologize on behalf of other libraries. Two people on Twitter are like, this library sucks. I'll be like, on behalf of all librarians, I'm sorry. Is there anything I can do to help you? Yeah, sure. Anyways, so what we wanted to do for kind of the rest of the session, and if you have questions, you know, feel free to raise a hand or type them into the Q&A as we're going along, as we've got some folks here that are libraries or we get Sarah on the line of our state agency using Twitter. And so we've got kind of four very different situations to kind of cover the different areas here. And the first person we'd like to talk to is Steve Fosselman of the Grand Island Public Library. We'll actually bring up his live session there. This is their Twitter page. And we'll also bring up our video down here in the bottom right. Steve, can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you, Michael. Okay, great. Okay, sorry, another technical issue. So Steve, you're the director of the library. That's correct? Yeah, that's correct. Okay, and can you just tell us a little bit about Grand Island, the population you serve, a little bit about your library real quick? Well, our library is in a town of about 47,000 population right now. We're trying in the immediate area to get up to 50,000 in the 2010 census. And that'll be big changes for us. We've already had big changes at our library. We've doubled in size in the year 2007. And we've been slowly adapting technologies such as blogging for our staff and social networking. This is our first foray into that, the Twitter page. We picked you as one of the folks we wanted to talk to because maybe as people can see on the screen here, this is not exactly your typical library Twitter accounts. We have a picture of a bird there. Can you maybe give us a little explanation of what's going on? Toward the end of 2009, one of our staff members had to give up her pet bird. And we adopted the bird. It got in the newspaper in early January. We've had public just flocking in since then, unintended. Flocking in to see our bird in the children's section. Snow is the name of the bird. And so long after the snow of winter is over, we'll have snow in our library. And we thought, why not start social networking with someone other than myself? And so my alter ego is a bird. That is awesome. That's great. Was this your idea? The staff come up with this one? I understand you're the one doing the actual tweeting, obviously. Did you volunteer? Did you get roped in? How'd that work? Yeah, I'm the one that came up with the idea. And what we do here at the library is we have some followers right now, some staff members, and we're seeing how people follow us. We're seeing how to enter information in. And so we're slowly adapting this, and we haven't rolled it out to the public through a news release yet, but at least it's on our website. And so it's a little slow going, but that way our staff can become comfortable with it. And then I can teach people on the staff how to enter the remarks and how to respond. And at the same time, we can do developing some ideas of, well, is this going to be it? How do we get more followers? Should we have a Facebook page? We don't know the answers. We're just trying to do it step by step. Great. Well, as you were talking there, I just followed you. One more. You're up to 10 now. And I see you're following, this snow is following five other Twitter accounts. Can you give us an idea of who you're following as part of this? Well, we were following a few staff members. We're following a few media outlets. And we're following right now the Hastings Public Library. And then after today, when we learn more that we should be following, then we'll be following them as well. I think we started following the Nebraska Library Commission this morning, but it isn't showing up yet. Well, it's good. We're getting more followers too. Have you got, Krista, do you have any? I mean, I've got some questions too. And again, in the audience, if you've got questions, feel free to drop them into the Q&A session. If you have a microphone, we can unmute you and have you ask on the microphone. Just do a hand raise and we'll notice that. So when did you start this account? How long has it been running? It was sometime in February. I can't remember exactly when. And so it's been several weeks. We have 11 tweets on. And so that's an indication of how lazy I get sometimes. That's totally normal? Absolutely. You just do it when you think of things and when you get it, it's kind of getting the habit of. So you guys are brand new to this then. So you're total newbies on the scale of using Twitter. Yeah. Go ahead. And you're right. Several times, I've remembered after the fact that I could have used Twitter and I didn't. Sure. It's the kind of thing you get to just get it into the habit. But you can also, after an event has happened, report about it saying, you know, we held this and here's like the pictures from it, or here's the news story that was written about this event. And that helps just promote the library as well. So you can do it as an after something happened as well as like a follow up. So being new to this, do you have any sort of expectations or where you'd like to see this go that you're hoping to get to or you're really just kind of dipping your toe in no water at this point and seeing what happens? Well, the first thing we have to recognize is that we don't have very many followers right now. Learn some really good common sense and fun steps to get followers. It won't be that hard. It's just finding a little bit of time and energy to think it through and actually get people interested in following us. Content shouldn't be a problem. But then there's techniques that I'm just so new at. For instance, you see on the page that I have an entire URL typed out and then I see everybody else has URLs that are shortened and I still don't understand how that works. Well, it should automatically, if you just paste cut and paste in a URL into when you're typing in your tweet what you're saying, it should automatically make it into one of the short URLs for you. Well, and I think that'll happen if you've gotten over the 140 characters in the URL. There you go. I'm too literal. I'm too literal. That one there including the URL written out didn't go over 140, it didn't need to shorten it for you. So that's what happens. I'm going to go over on purpose then. There you go. I'll counter with the fact that a lot of people don't like the short URLs because you don't really know what you're clicking on. So some people appreciate the fact that they can actually see the fact that it's a link to PBS in advance instead of another service. But yeah, if it doesn't fit, definitely then it's going to shorten that up. And there are other tools we've talked about in other sessions too that can do those sorts of things. So it sounds like you're having a good time with it and it's a great experiment and I got to say it's one of the more creative uses, especially in the library world. I don't remember how I stumbled over it. Christa found the article about you getting snow. It was before that that we knew about the tweet. We just find these things. We find these things. Somebody linked somewhere and I went, okay, the library bird is tweeting. So is there anything you'd like to say for the benefit of the attendees or the recording that maybe we didn't ask about? And we'll also, while you're doing that, check the questions. We'll just keep, we'll follow anybody that we can and we appreciate anybody that references us and we reference them as well. That's fun. Great, Steve. Thanks a lot. We're going to go ahead and put you back on mute there. Well, we might have a hand up here. Give me a sec. And for those that commented on the feedback, we're working on that here. We should be able to fix that. Karen, you have a question? Karen, we've got you unmuted. You can go ahead and ask your question. We didn't have a question. Oh, no. Okay. Sorry. Missed that. All right. And it looks like we have a question from the commission staff. Hi, Steve. Thank you. Doing great. Thank you, Mary Jo. Hey, you know, I'm always interested in library merchandising. And so I'm kind of wondering about signage in the library. Do you have any kind of signage that, like we saw that they're using in Hi-V and pizza shops? Yeah. Just tell me about it. I don't have anything like that yet. Okay. Well, we just... Any Twitter signage you mean? Yes. Yeah. Twitter signage. Oh, next time I go into Hi-V, I'm going to take a look. I'm looking too closely at the merchandise. I think maybe Michael and Chris can show us those. All right, Mary Jo, for some reason we're kind of losing your audio right there again, but it sounds like your question did come through and Steve answered that. Steve, I want to thank you again. Due to time, we're going to move on to our next interviewee. So thanks a lot. Thank you very much. Very, very interesting. Okay. So let's see here. Oh, that's a lot. There we go. We're still working all this technology out, aren't we here? Okay. So the next one, I'm going to go ahead and Dan, I'm going to need to unmute you. Krista, why don't you take this one over because you found South Sioux City there. Well, yeah. Did you find it? There we go. Dan's unmuted. I'm from South Sioux City. We've got you unmuted in your account up here. I've been following you. South Sioux City Public Library has been tweeting for a while now. I know you guys have a lot of everything that you see on there. I see it come through on your webpage and on Facebook. I believe Facebook, yeah. So South Sioux City is a library that's been doing it for a lot longer and has maybe a bit more experience with how it's being done. Dan, can you tell us a little bit about how you guys got started with it originally? Why back whenever you started? What got you into it? Well, we started about two years ago when we were doing the Library 2.0 classes. There were several of us get it as individuals and got comfortable with it. And we finally decided, well, instead of just tweeting about the library on a personal account, we'll just set up a library page and tweet about what's going on at the library. Wow, two years. That's a long time to be on Twitter and still be going strong. As you can see, you guys just did some things yesterday. And I can see on yours it says via Facebook. So you're using the Facebook-Twitter connection as well to feed things through. I see. Right. What we do is we have more of an actual community on Facebook. So we put everything on Facebook and it transfers over to the Twitter. And we mainly go on Twitter to do app replies and DMs that don't come over on Facebook. That's a great connection to make. Definitely, as you said, if you've already got a community somewhere but you want another outlet to be sending things out because different people will use different social networking tools. Some will use one and some will use another. There may be people that are all about the Twitter and can care less about Facebook. And there's some people that just do everything. So you do have to be aware of that and jumping in anywhere that you can, which is great that you guys are doing it. So what kind of response have you had from the Twitter side of it? Are you seeing that it has had any effect on what's going on at the library? People coming to the library saying they've seen it or used it or anything like that? Well, the biggest thing for us is the local newspapers and TV stations are plugged into Twitter. And so that's where we get most of our effect is they follow us and we follow them. And we reciprocate. They will pick up more news stories this way than by just sending press releases. We keep doing the traditional but we throw out, you know, we put it on Twitter and maybe one of the junior reporters or something is really trying to find something to write about. We'll pick it up and do a story or come and take pictures for things. So our big thing with Twitter is using it with the local media. That's definitely a good tip. Yeah, if you know your, like I know that Grand Island is also following one of their locals and I saw some posts on theirs also about congratulating the independent on the anniversary of something, the newspaper. But definitely if you know your local news either TV, radio, newspaper are on there as well, yeah, get connected with them and definitely that's a better way. You said you've got even better response from this? Absolutely. Get the library news out there. Get your events on their radar using Twitter. That's an awesome way that actually makes that connection. I see also that you're retweeting some things there from that one that I see on the screen right now, the USA Gov about diabetes or high blood pressure. So you're using it also to pass on other information that you found from places, not just your own. Right, next we use it as kind of a news aggregator, almost like a blog reader for some accounts where we'll follow USA Gov, we follow the different library sites which helps us to keep up on our blog reading and share things that would then be interesting to the general public. Great. So are you the, who actually does the tweeting at your library? Is it you? Is it director? Do you have a staff, a group of people doing it? How do you have that organized? Actually, in the way it's set up, we have four people that can tweet. Like you say, everything we put on Facebook gets automatically tweeted. But I do mostly actual work with the Twitter account. So it sounds like you've got it pretty well organized. And you can see here from the, there are two most recent ones as well, what we were talking about the shortening URLs, that this is what it did here, the tweet, the text of what you typed in plus the URL was more than 140 characters and so it used what Bitly is a service that automatically shortens and that's what Twitter uses now and that's what it did there with those URLs for links. Looks like both of those I guess are links to your library's webpage. Go ahead and click on one of them. And what that will then do is let the person, oh you're linking it to your Facebook. Which we're not logged into. But it's there. So they're linking back to that. With that example of that shortening URL that we were talking about on your account too. And a question I always find interesting, because I'm always trying to decide myself, just in my own account, who to follow back. I'm noticing that you have 512 followers. You're actually following 573 accounts, which is usually the opposite. Usually you have more people following than the other way around. Do you just follow everybody back? Do you make some sort of decision? How does that work for you? Well, I follow back. Most people, if they're really out of balance, have like 300 followers or follow 300 people and only have 3 followers, I'm probably not going to follow them back. I'm not really sure what they're doing. Most businesses, libraries, or library-based groups that have something that we can learn from, we will follow them and follow them back. Sounds like a good way of organizing it, definitely. And it's definitely good if someone, as Grandin was saying, you don't have very many followers yet. But definitely follow your people back if they're like people that you can tell they're in your community or something like that. Let them know that you see it, that you're reacting to them following you and that you're interested in what they're doing as well. It's a reciprocal type thing. We appreciate that. That lets other people know that you're looking at your account. These guys are an active account, they're not just a robot. And so you will have more people that will follow you back. I wasn't sure if you were aware that we, I didn't know about the library's account for a while, but just recently there was an article, and I'll send it out, I'll include it in the recording of this session, our links, a website put together the top Twitter's library. Top 100 Twittering libraries. And your library was on there as number 78. Did you know that? That's kind of a surprise. I saw that Friday afternoon and I thought, wow, that's a surprise because we saw these big huge libraries and here we're in that top 100. Yes, it was. I just did, I saw it because it came through on some reader somewhere, I don't know, something else. And I said, I want to study Nebraska. And there was. And there was. And you guys felt like, oh my gosh, that's totally awesome. So something you do is caught people's eyes. You can see you've got a lot of people following you. I will briefly go into one other thing that I see on your page as well. Over on the right-hand side it says 23 listed. There's a feature within Twitter where you can organize the people you follow into groups because you may follow, as in your case, 500-something people. And it can be very unwieldly to keep track of that. You can put them into categories. And this means that there are 23 lists out there that have put your library on their list as someone they want to be paying attention to and following. Yeah, look, it just updated. There we go. And now Michael has just added you to his list under Nebraska. I have Nebraska libraries and I was there on that listed one. So people are paying attention to you, putting you onto their lists of somehow they want to categorize you and keep track of yours. So that's a pretty good sign, too, that people are paying attention to you. You can see here, just six minutes ago via Facebook, your page just got updated while we were sitting here. So somebody is out there obviously updating you for your Facebook. That's not you, which is good. You've got a stack of people. This is Twitter live and in-person as it happens. So Dan, is there anything else you'd like to say or recommend for the benefit of the group about how Twitter is working for your library or what libraries should be doing with it? I think just stay out there, keep trying it. When we first started to have almost nobody following us, it does seem like at times it's just not working. But the Midwest is kind of the great plain as far as this. Like in the 1800s when you didn't have anybody living here, we don't have very many people on Twitter now, but just stay with it. People will come your way. An analogy, definitely. Absolutely. Great. Well, thank you very much, Dan. And hopefully you'll get more people. And you're going to... Does anybody else have any questions for Dan about what South Sioux City has been doing? I think everybody's going to be staying on. So if you've got questions at the end, we can always bring those back. Thanks a lot, Dan. We're going to go ahead and mute your mic. And then, so we've had two public libraries. Sure. Go ahead, Krista. We're going to switch over here. Unmute Scott. Yeah, so we've had our two public libraries. One just started. One has been doing it for two years. And now also university libraries are out there doing it, obviously. And we have Scott Childers from UNL libraries here right in Lincoln to talk about what they've been doing with it. Hi, Scott. We've got you unmuted. Hello. Hello. Scott, Scott, I will say, is our current NLA president. Yes. So we must acknowledge this. He volunteered, I think. He was elected, too. He volunteered. Anyways. So UNL, obviously, is a large university doing a lot of things promoting what the library is doing. So can you give us a little idea about how UNL got started with it, what your theory, ideas, whatever were getting into using Twitter? Yeah. We actually, last summer, we were seeing other libraries getting involved in Twitter, and especially the UNL law library, which isn't listed here, but they're a really good example of being active in Twitter. We were looking at what they were doing. And also, it was about the time where even Oprah was tweeting, was making all the news. So we decided to try it. This was back in July. And we decided, I just sent out an email to all of our staff and said, who's interested? And we got about 19 folks who were interested in doing this. So what you're seeing is a collaboration of almost 20 people in one account. We met before the summer semester, started talking about what do we want to do? How are we going to handle this? Are we going to follow everyone who follows us? Are we going to be, like you see now, we're only following specific accounts? Are we going to try to be very active, very much community, or we're going to use it as a broadcast type of thing? And so this is what we started out with, started out at the beginning of the semester. We've averaged about two or three tweets a day. We didn't want to do too much more. Otherwise, it just becomes spam. And we're just flooding people. So we tried to pace ourselves. The first few weeks, of course, we were all interested. We were all trying to put our stuff out there. And now we've kind of mellowed out. One thing that we decided, I don't know if you could see it on any of the posts now. If you refresh, there's a new post too. And I'll show an example of this, assuming we don't get to fail well. At the end of most of our posts, we're initialing them as who did it? For a couple of reasons. One, to prove that there's more than one person doing this. And two, if we do get a reply or someone asks questions about one of these things, we know who put the initial information out. So we could ask them to follow up with that patron or that Twitter user. It's something I saw in some corporate Twitter software. And we just think, oh, we'll try it. We'll see if it helps or anything. Yeah. I'll take a guess here that that might have been Hootsuite was the thing with the initials. We use that here. We haven't actually turned on the initializing. Yeah, pretty much because I post 99% of the material. So we figured having my initials on everything would not make it necessarily look as good. But if you do have that whole group of people, I like the fact that you're doing that. Especially if I know who those people are. I'm guessing SC is you. Yeah. That's great. Go ahead. Another thing, let me just throw out about those 19 people. They're throughout the library. We've got catalogers. We've got reference people. We've got circulation people. We've got branch people. So they all have something to say. And it's coming straight from them under the UNL library account, but the initials and that point of view. So it's more than just one person. It's the staff. It's the faculty. In some cases, I think we've even had a student or two suggest items. So that's kind of where we're coming from as far as what we're doing with people. That is an awesome great philosophy and way of doing it, Scott, of getting the entire organization involved. Not just, oh, one person's going to do it. Fine. It's the Twitter or whatever it's that person's thing. That getting everybody involved. Like you said, everyone does have something to say and something to share and something that's useful that your community might want to know about. And definitely the more you get all of them involved and into it, the more they'll appreciate it and understand it and wants to be more involved. And it'd be this, you know, cyclical thing, but that's a great attitude. And the way that you organized it, I thought was awesome as well getting them all involved, asking who wanted to do it, getting the volunteers and set up with this whole initialing of owning your post, owning what you're putting out there, owning your job, your department, whatever. That is a great process of going through and getting something like this set up. Do you have a feeling as to who your followers are? We see here you have 157. I know I'm one of them. Obviously it says so right here. Chris is another one. But are you noticing it's, are you getting a good proportion of students that you can tell? It's interesting because when we first put it out, the first followers were library staff here at UNL. And then it started to bring out two other librarians throughout the state. And then we started, we actually, when we put links on our front page, and we're adding it to almost every promotional material we put out. You know, our Twitter address. So now we're starting to get a little bit more. I'd say we're getting more students now than before. It's starting to come out. Yeah, as you scroll down, this is our front page. We've got our Facebook link, our Twitter link, and then another link to what we, it's our university labs page where the weird things we're trying out. That's kind of our new media type of places there. So we're starting to get more students. To tell you the truth, our Facebook has grown a lot more than Twitter. Maybe it's because we don't follow people back. You know, like Dan was, he's following almost everyone. We're following almost no one. Maybe that's part of why we're not getting a lot of followers. We'll see. We've had our tweets retweeted. They've turned into articles at student newspaper. They see something in our Twitter feed. So they follow up and create a more full story for the student newspaper. So we'll see. We've only done this, like I said, starting in the last fall semester. And we're actually meeting together as a group and saying, okay, what do we change? What do we do different? Do we keep going? That type of thing. Yeah, the whole followers issue. That does depend on your philosophy, how you want to do it. You mentioned earlier that you had to decide what are we going to do. Are we going to follow a lot of people? Are we not going to? And I see you're picking, you know, other Nebraska, you know, UNL organizations to track and obviously keeping track of what they're doing. But that is a decision to make, you know, how you're going to run your Twitter account. What is it going to be? You can still get people, even if you don't follow them, they can still reply to you and you can see, you know, if someone has started a conversation, like you said, figuring out who needs to answer them. So there can still be back and forth, even if you're not following every single person that follows you. Yeah, it depends. We have had that, yeah. My question, because you're kind of the large organization here. You are all 19 people who are originally interested still participating. And as a follow-up to that, how are you managing it? Are you using a third-party service, or are you just all logging into Twitter.com and with the same login and posting as needed? Unfortunately, we've had some people leave the university, so they're no longer Twittering for us. But the ones we're still around are still in the group. You know, since it's kind of this free-form volunteer thing, some are a lot more active now than when they first started, and so that's another thing we'll be meaning to say, okay, you're still interested in doing this. Right now, we have one account we're sharing the login and password. It's not the best security-wise, but it allows people to be flexible in what software they use to tweet. Myself, I use brisly.com for my tweeting. Other people like FoodSuite, other people like other software, depending if they're a Mac or PC or a Linux person. So we decided we'd just have one account and a password and let the person doing the tweeting decide what software or what web interface they want to use. Nice. Yeah, and luckily Twitter will allow three people with the same account to be logged in from six different machines. So you can get away with that. That helps too. Yeah, definitely. And that does add the flexibility with the mobile if anybody's tweeting from a mobile device. Well, thank you very much, Scott. That was a lot of good, useful information for people thinking about getting involved in Twitter. I'm going to try and move on to Sarah at the Department of Tourism. Let's see. We're going to find Sarah in our list here. There she is. Let's see the questions. See if she got it. OK. And Sarah is there. Hello. Yes. We can hear you. Awesome. Good. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Yes, we can. Great. We're getting a little worried here. So, OK. Yeah, I was too. I figured it out. So, Sarah and I have that once or twice before. We've had some meetings here with some other state level folks about how the commission was using Twitter. Found out Nebraska Tourism was using it, and Sarah is the person in charge of that. So, you know, speaking to librarians, but we definitely noticed a theme, I think just about everybody so far has mentioned that the media, this seems to be very popular in a way to reach out to the media. So, we did want to pull in somebody who's now even larger than UNL. Now we're talking state level. So, could you just give us a little background on how the Nebraska Tourism got started on Twitter? Sure. Well, we have a Facebook page, and that's kind of what we started with. And then a lot of travel and tourism organizations, other states who do what I do, which is PR for the Division of Tourism, we're starting Twitter pages. And so, we just decided to start one and see what happened. So, we started tweeting about, you know, deals or events that were happening in Nebraska, or just things that we thought the general traveler would find interesting. And what happened was, we got a few sort of general people following, but it kind of blew up right away with media people, travel writers, other state organizations, cities who were tweeting. So, the bulk of that nearly 800 followers, that's who they are. And then it kind of grew into just other Omaha, Nebraska, Lincoln, other cities-based businesses who wanted to know what was going on with us. And a lot of them are tourism-related businesses. So, that's how it kind of grew. And now, I've kind of grown and passed just tweeting about events, live tweeting, things like you can see. There is some hashtag there, Nebraska AG ECO. That's from our AG ECO Tourism Conference. Because what's happened is we've got a lot of our industry partners following us. So, if we couldn't maybe attend the event, they could at least follow my live tweets as I attended all the different sessions. Great. So, the question we keep asking, so I'll throw it in here as I'm thinking of it, you've got almost 800 followers. You're following 213 back. How are you deciding who you're following and who you're not? Because you're obviously making some sort of distinction by those numbers. Yeah, I honestly try to follow people that I think would be interesting to the people who follow me. So, if you look down at my little following kind of pictures there, you can see that Omaha Zoo, different communities in Nebraska for you, using Twitter, some outdoor organizations, camping, arts organizations. And part of that is self-serving because that allows me a really great list of things I can retweet if I'm feeling non-creative. I try to keep that list pretty pertinent to things I can retweet because otherwise, my list of tweets gets so long if I'm away from my desk for four hours that it takes me a really long time to read through it. And I've also noticed, and I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but I'm starting to see more of people following us that are clearly advertisers. People who are mining my tweets, finding words, and then following me. And when I click on them, I see that they're following, you know, 3,000 people and they only have two followers. So, I'm noticing that as a trend that's happening, which I'm not terribly thrilled about, I don't really know how that's going to pan out. I'm not sure. Have you guys seen anything like that or has anyone else done the call to me? I've had personal problems with that, actually, with people using my name to advertise their products recently, which got into an interesting discussion with them. But, yes. Yeah, it depends on what you want to do about it and what they do with the information they get from following you. And it's going to be on a case-by-case basis. I think Dan was also talking about seeing some people that he doesn't follow because their number of followers and following is so off, he says, not even going to bother reciprocating that kind of thing. And it's kind of a personal decision to make as an organization or as a person, depending on what you're tweeting, if you want to even allow that. If you're concerned or just don't like the idea of that this obvious business, obvious advertiser or spam or whatever is following you, you can block them from being able to. And they won't be on your following list. I mean, you can show here where we won't do it to you guys. But you can do that. And then, at least, you know that they don't have the ability to borrow your stuff, whatever. But it depends on what they're doing if you want to do that. Some of it is just harmless, like you said, but relatively speaking. They're just seeing what you're doing because they want to use that in some way to figure out where they could advertise. They're just seeing that you're at this conference and that maybe they should have been there. I mean, that might be their reasoning. It depends on what they do with their account. And then you can decide on your own what you want to do. You can block people, which just means they can't follow you because you said nope. Or if you think they are doing something wrong, like spamming, if you notice their account doesn't look on the up and up kind of thing, you can block and report them for spam to Twitter. And then Twitter will go and investigate that account. Up to you if you want to go that far or not if you think it's necessary. You can not just do the block and that's fine. But it's up to you to decide if it's something harmful or not to yours. Or if just it's a philosophical issue, you don't like the fact that they're using Twitter in that way. Yeah. They're really speaking. They haven't retweeted many of my tweets. I think they're just trying to grow the number of people that are following them. That's what it seems to be. You seem to get a lot of like, why would you even be vaguely interested in kind of assuming that I will follow them back to grow their numbers. I tend to take kind of a laissez-faire attitude if you want to follow me. Hey, so be it. It doesn't mean I'm going to follow you back. And that's my own personal account. Now, the library commissions account, maybe I think, you know, do I want to actually block somebody considering I'm a government agency? Maybe not. That's to be a slippery slope. Exactly. Now, I don't necessarily follow everybody back, but to flat out block somebody. Now, I will report people for spam on mercifully, because you can just kind of tell. Except that one organization I was having a problem with, if I blocked them, then I couldn't keep track of them anymore. So I didn't report them. I didn't block them. We're still kind of in negotiations with, using your name was accidental. And I'm like, no, it wasn't. I just wanted to go back to what you had said earlier about how you chose your followers, how you chose who you were following being things that you thought other people might be interested in as well. And that is a good way of doing it, too, is thinking about your organization or a library out there who's trying to get information to your patrons and users and have them have good information. And this is a good way of showing them what we think are important and useful enough to follow. And then they might say, hey, maybe I should, too. Maybe I should see what news organization, what library organization, in your case, what tourism or outdoor organization is out there tweeting. So that's definitely a good philosophy on how you decide who you could follow. That's another way of doing it. I want to say to my followers, here's good ones that I like. Take a look at them. It's been really interesting and kind of what I'm doing with it. We've seen a real kind of explosion with it in the other parts of central western Nebraska pretty much of people wanting to know what it's about, wanting to get on there, wanting to, you know, us to follow them and us to read their tweets. And so we're really excited about that, that more people are getting involved and, you know, just kind of broadens our horizons since we are a state organization. It's a really easy way to know what's going on everywhere. It wants a good response and results from doing it. Yeah. Here's my question. Have you gotten, you know, like say, I'm going to come visit Nebraska. I might call up Nebraska Tourism. Do you know of anybody actually contacting you through Twitter because they were thinking of coming to Nebraska? Yeah, I actually have gotten some tweets about, you know, when I tweet about events, which is something I do usually all summer, people will kind of send me messages after that and say, hey, where do I find out more information about, you know, this tweet that you posted about the arts festival in some community or whenever I tweet about CheckFest, I get tons of replies. People just want to know about it. So kind of, you know, getting the word out about those little cool things that happen in small towns, people are really interested in that. And so, you know, we kind of have a dual purpose with our Twitter. We serve the media and give story ideas to writers, but we also have to think about the traveler, too. So you have to kind of balance both of those audiences. That's great. Yeah, wonderful. We're kind of running short on time, just a little bit here. Thank you very much, Sarah, for that setup. Lots of another point of view, definitely on how to do it. And this just shows that there's all sorts of different ways to run a Twitter account, to decide how to get started, to organize it, whatever. There's no one right way. You're going to need to think about it and decide what you want to do. We want to see if you have any questions. I believe there was, Janet here at the commission said something that she had a question. Okay, a sec here. Steve has a question. Let's turn on your mic. Go ahead, Steve. Do you have a question? Do you have a microphone? Okay, Steve. Can you hear me? Yes, we can. I guess the question I would propose, because maybe I have a Facebook and a Twitter account personally. But why would I I'm not sure why I would choose one over the other if I had made a recommendation to the library. Which one to use? Oh, wow. Facebook is much more robust. Uh-huh. Well, oh boy. Let me throw out what I've got. I mean, I would say rule number one is, and Scott, I see you have your hand raised, so we'll get to you in a sec, is if you can figure out where your users are, so I don't want to speak for Scott, but just knowing having one stepdaughter in college and one going in the fall, they're not on Twitter as much as they are on Facebook. I mean, they practically live in Facebook. So if you kind of have an idea where your audience is. But then the other way to look at it is you can cross-reference these things as is being done. So if I I tend to hang out more on Twitter than in Facebook. So things I post on Twitter also get automatically sent over to my Facebook account. South City is doing it the other direction. They tend to post things on Facebook and has it automatically posted over onto Twitter. And that way you're just, you've got another presence in one more location that you can take advantage of. Especially if it's not, once you set that cross-referencing up, you don't have to take any additional work. I mean, my blog posts go out to my Twitter account. I add new bookmarks so once a day those go out to my Twitter account. So you can automate a lot of this. You don't necessarily have to choose one over the other. No. It's just something also to decide from the library's point of view, what do you want to do? What are you trying to do? You can create an audience like Celso City did and Grand Isles attempting to do it at the moment. If you find something that you want, you've decided here's something we can do. We can get organized, we can do this. Let's try it and create our audience the same way as you build your library and they come hopefully. So it might be just an experiment sometimes and then see if it is the place where your people were. I can see can you hear me? What I was thinking of was like middle school kids and developing a program with them so trying to talk about what's coming up so they could connect with it. So it's kind of an advertising tool and what we'll be doing in the future next week or something like that if we get some programs going so that they're automatically informed of what's going to happen next week or the following week or for the month or whatever it might be. Could you see that as a tool? Absolutely. Although if they because you're talking now a specific audience you might want to see if you can figure out if they're already although technically they're not old enough to be on Facebook. According to the rules they're not old enough to be on Facebook. So yeah, if you do have a specific audience but as much as Facebook is a little more robust as you said Twitter is dead simple so maybe dead simple might be what you're looking for especially if you're going for a younger audience. And for a lot of the kids using cell phones and things like that it is I think you can depending on the capability of your phone follow Facebook on the phone it's simpler and easier to follow Twitter get Twitter posts and messages I know also stepdaughter has the same thing she goes back and forth yeah I'm doing my Facebook stuff on my phone but oh god I need to get on the computer it's just not working as well as it could because of just how Facebook works so for that kind of thing too if you know the kids are big into their text messages and their phone use instead of a computer Twitter might be the better way to get them involved Scott you had something to respond about this? Yeah Michael pretty much said this before for our target audience the Facebook the Facebook, the Google, the Twitter Facebook is more of where we're going to see more of a community and we're using it that way where Twitter is more of a broadcast news brief type that's how we're using it so we're using both technologies but for two different goals and so I think that might be something where you might want to look at is using one or the other why not use both but have different goals for each one of them or try to reach a different community that's kind of where I just want to add to that Exactly, it's like you don't pick and choose and say we're only going to advertise the newspaper and not on radio and not on TV you got to use whatever is available and just like Scott said in possibly just different ways Does that help Steve? I just had one other question You mentioned the fact that young kids can't get on or can't have a Facebook account but can they have a Twitter account? The simple answer all that is yes Facebook in theory their rules are you've got to be at least 13 I think or 14 but I know kids who aren't 14 that are on Facebook but if they catch you they will theoretically kick you off there's a completely open platform anybody can sign up there is no official age requirement that I'm aware of with Twitter Okay, that's good to know for better or for worse take that as you will Alright I'm muted myself here Any other questions or comments? from the group Check our questions window here If you have a microphone you can raise your hand if you don't go ahead and go to the questions section and type in your question We started a little late so we'll go for a couple more minutes Any questions, comments Anything anybody wants to make Or does anybody have any questions for our speakers? In the meantime while we're looking for that one thing I mentioned and I do believe I covered it in the last session we did kind of an advanced Twitter It's called HootSuite This is a web-based service we had just started to implement it here at the commission when we talked about it last It's kind of those for those situations where you have multiple people contributing it can automate the kind of signing of a tweet that Scott was talking about it can track some statistics for click-throughs, things like that statistics, it's something to look into it is completely free I'd say if you're going to have more than two or three people contributing your account you might want to consider looking at something like that and it does look like some commission staff have a question, let me find you on our list and unmute you go ahead Hi, it's Mary Jo again Can you hear me now? I just wanted to make sure that we revisit that issue of the in the library signage that helps to drive people to your Twitter and Facebook accounts and maybe if you guys could go back and show those slides again of what Heidi is doing and what the pizza shop is doing I think it would be good for library people to think about this and I'd love to have you come back to me and send me photographs of your in the library signage that shows people that you are on Facebook and Twitter so that was what I was trying to say, I hope you heard me send me your photographs OK, so, yeah, Mary Jo has put out the request if you're using Twitter in your library please send her some examples and we'll share them in effect we might even make Mary Jo do a whole session and share them herself I'm now muted her so she can't defend herself I can't say no but that sounds like a future session actually it's just marketing your social web how are you marketing it how to market it great example write that down and so we do have one last slide let me get to that we'll kind of wrap this up here there's the same one that we talked about we do have a list here a list here of all the four speakers and their Twitter accounts that we had today this is in the PowerPoint slide this will be loaded up available for you to download don't try and scribble us down, you don't have to we're going to put this up on our slide share account it will be available for you also we will link to all of these from the commission's delicious account so you will have quick links to them as well but definitely get out there and search and see if there are other libraries these are just four that we picked there are tons more you can go to the next screen which we have on here as well we have those lists that I talked about where I've got a list of Nebraska related things like tourism and things Nebraska libraries Lincoln Nebraska, lots of organizations and places Lincoln, you'll also find friends of mine in there but look and see who else is out there that are using Twitter and take a look at them, follow them see what everybody else is doing out there to get an idea of how you can do it both Lincoln and Omaha have Twitter accounts yes of course we've only got time for so many right and we just picked some as we said some people at different stages Grand Island just starting out new South Susie even doing it for years University and the state agency Nebraska tourism so there's a lot of resources and information out there I think if we don't have any other urgent questions we should probably wrap this up we're a little over but that's okay we started a little late too thank you very much for attending thank you to all of our speakers lots of good information I thought very different points of views which is great to see and how everybody's doing this differently so we'll wrap it up for today we hope you'll join us next week when Encompass Live will be about doing surveys focus groups and observation how to find out stuff from people in your community use for your library like what social network are they using that could be I don't know we'll find out so thank you very much and we will wrap it up now alright thanks a lot bye bye