Introduction

Most libraries are beyond the coming-to-grips stage with social media. We have implemented blogs, dived into MySpace, tagged sites in Delicious, jumped over to Facebook, let our MySpace pages die, uploaded video to YouTube, tagged photos in Flickr, started tweeting, messed with Tumblr, and started pages on Google +. Whether we liked it or not, we have managed social media, or, at least, people in our organizations have experimented with social media. We have bravely met the technological challenge of engaging and initiating social media. We get social media. We have solved the technology.

Believe it or not, technology problems tend to be solved with money and time. (Clearly, money and time are not always in surplus.) Unfortunately, most problems are not purely technical. Libraries are human enterprises, and technology problems pale in comparison to human problems as they tend to constantly shift and grow. Technology tends to have a few, defined purposes and functions, but we call on people to work in many areas and deal with a range of functions. Maybe it is more accurate to say that technology problems are solvable, while we hope to make human problems manageable.

It follows then that managing social media is not really about the social media. These tools are not complicated in the same way that learning DOS was in the 1980s. DOS was a whole new world that had its own logic and language. Most of us went from not having a computer at all to having to navigate DOS. But, this is not what we are facing with social media. The world wide web really gained mass prominence in the late 1990s, so we have lived with the web for many years. Social media represent an extension of something familiar. Social media have become a feature that we never knew we wanted, but now that we have it, we can't live without it. Social media represent the microwave oven of the web. We never asked for it, but now that we have it, we will never heat up leftovers on the stove-top again. We get it, and we can't possibly go back.

Managing social media in libraries is absolutely a people problem and absolutely not a technology problem. Managing social media for people is not really different from managing social media for a person. Whether we are talking about one person or 20 people, we must keep track of sites, user names and passwords. Most importantly, they need an awareness of who is using the site and how they are connecting with them. We need to understand how various sites connect users and how information is shared between users. When I post information to a site, who sees it? Does everybody or does one person? Are my posts available to people who are not members of the network? Could someone find it through a Google search?

When I go to Google +, I know that the members of the moms' group to which my wife belongs tend to dominate my feed. They all have migrated away from Facebook and onto Google +. When I post on Google +, I have to be careful not to say things that will get me in trouble with my wife and her friends (although I do sometimes post things just to get them up in arms). On the other hand, my primary concern on Facebook is that my own, real-life mom does not find embarrassing college photos of me posted by my old college roommates. At the same time, I use Twitter, Ning and Delicious for professional activities. In all cases, I try to make myself aware of available privacy settings and who is using the sites in order to connect personally and professionally. Of course, there are many tools that I choose not use at all.

Two questions must be addressed in using social media: how will a particular tool be useful for me and what information will I choose to share? Whether you are an individual signing up for Facebook for the first time or an organization of 100 people using Delicious to curate links, the questions are essentially the same. How is this useful? What will we share? Of course, answering these two questions in an organizational context is a bit more complicated than answering for an individual.

What happens when two staff members see issues differently? How do we address different needs through the same tools? Many social media platforms are based on individual users. They are very public, and they easily co- mingle personal usage and professional usage. When a library user interacts with our library on a social media site, we do not want to appear to be erratic with many librarians posting on every topic under the sun. However, we also want users to experience the richness hidden within the many personalities who work in our libraries. We do not want to appear erratic, but we also do not want to have a bland, corporate voice.

This means that our organizational members need direction when using social media. Conversations need to occur around why we are using these tools and how we are using these tools. We must examine how we are connected to each other, which means that social media do not just help libraries connect with the external world. Social media also help our staff members connect with each other. When managing social media, we must understand how tools can be useful and what we want to share, but we also must recognize that there are internal uses for social media tools and external uses for these tools. A big part of managing social media in an organizational context is recognizing and taking advantage of the internal/external divide.

Filtering vs searching

We link, post, share, like, feed and send. We have feeds, aggregators, email alerts, personalized news sites, text alerts, wall posts and timeline posts. It has become cliched to say that information overload is all around us. We like to show off that over 80 percent of the population in Western Europe and the USA have internet access (World Bank, 2010), that our species has the capacity to store over 295 exabytes of information (Hilbert and López, 2011), or that there are over a billion chat sessions per day on Facebook (Parr, 2009). We are immersed in a flow of information that has escaped from the desktop and now follows us on mobile devices. But this flow has not just taken over our hardware— it has taken over our minds. The constant conversation and connections have implanted themselves in our brains. It's not about numbers of sites or access rates. The information overload manifests as a constant need to keep up.

I am surely an information addict. I can't resist. On my drive to work, there is one long stoplight where I inevitably sit and wait. No matter what time I leave home, I end up waiting through several cycles of the light as traffic moves forward. Sometimes it feels like it takes forever, and while I wait, I just can't resist glancing at my phone to see if any new email messages have arrived since I pulled out of my garage. I know it is dangerous, but how can I not look? My phone calls to me. Try as I may, I can't help but just glancing at my inbox or my Twitter feed. "OK, I won't actually read anything," I tell myself, "but if I can just take a peak to see what new things have popped up … Just to give me a head start when I get to the parking lot." I feel the constant pressure to keep the information tidal wave at bay, the need to read one message and delete it before the next message arrives.

Clearly, my strategy may not be the best to follow, but it does show some of the dangers of the information onslaught. All of us work to find ways to keep up. In The Information, James Gleick (2011) tells us that people use two primary strategies people for handling the information glut: filtering and searching.

Searching identifies specific content based on a specific need. Search has dominated the web from its earliest days. The problem of seeking information in an effective way was certainly the central problem of the web in the 1990s. Of course, Google showed us how to do it, and now search is almost second nature. What would the web be without search, or, more specifically, without Google?

Search has become the language of the web, but with social media, filtering is quickly catching up. Social media include some of our most effective filtering tools. With social media, we filter information for each other. Twitter is my favorite filtering tool. I follow people who post links to sites, articles and videos that match my interests. I review the tweets in my feed and save the links that catch my eye. This type of filtering is happening in Facebook, Google +, and many other sites. Content creators add buttons on sites to make it easier for readers to push pages out into the social media stream. The social media site Digg has built its business model around filtering.

But social media have not just allowed us to socialize articles and web pages but also to connect the virtual world with our physical world. We are filtering restaurants, parks, homes and schools. There is an entire cadre of social media tools such as Foursquare, Facebook Places and many others that use the GPS capabilities in mobile devices to allow users to recommend services, identify special events, or play location-based games.

Search may have dominated the web in the first years of the twenty-first century, but filtering is transforming how the web works and how we interact with our world. In 2011, Google, the dominant force in searching, launched its social media site, Google +; now it is working to socialize search so that filtering and search cross. Of course, significant numbers of people must participate in order for social media to have impact. Search can exist in a single-to-many relationship, which is typically a Google-to-everyone relationship. Social media, on the other hand, require a many-to-many relationship. Twitter would be nowhere near as useful were there only two users. Part of the thrill and bane of Facebook is that all of your old school classmates are on it. In order for it to work, we all have to participate.

In some ways, social media are fulfilling the promise of the web. In the mid-1990s, the web promised to democratize information and publishing. Everyone could "publish" information. We could bypass the gatekeepers. It didn't take us very long to figure out that big companies had cool sites, and most individuals had clunky, unattractive sites (Blood, 2002). Sure, we could make a page on Geocities, and we had email, but we couldn't put out information with polish. That is, until the turn of the century when the first wave of blogging sites hit the web. Blogs were the first social media tool that broke into the popular consciousness, and they were the first significant tool that allowed the average person to publish information with ease. They required no knowledge of HTML, no page management, and no hosting fees. If one wanted to get fancy, one could purchase a domain name, but that wasn't a requirement. Even today, blogs still make up the backbone of much social media use. They were, and are, one of the original filtering tools.

Librarians should not be strangers to searching or filtering. We have been doing both for centuries. Obviously, the card catalog is all about searching. We spent the better part of the twentieth century developing subject headings and debating "aboutness." MARC allowed us to scale our work as never before. Up to around 1998, we were arguably the masters of search. Creating searching tools and instructing users on using those tools was our primary business.

Of course, we do spend some time filtering. Collection development, when done correctly, is essentially a large filtering effort to meet the needs of the local community. Collection development is a matter of economics and user need. Librarians select specific information sources out of the universe of all sources. After an item is selected, it is processed and made searchable—and a great deal of library resources are devoted to preparing items for search. With collection development as our primary filtering service, reference services are focused less on filtering than on searching. Perhaps we perform some filtering by creating some finding aides, making some book displays, and organizing clipping services. But we really spend most of our time thinking about searching.

The web and social media have changed all of this. Now, everyone filters, and every library should filter. Yet it's not enough just to collect and organize—we are also growing increasingly social. Libraries have a role to play as participants in socializing information. We can highlight information sources that are part of our own collections or sources that are on the web. We can bring users together—virtually or in person—to add comments or reviews. We can make cultural events in the library extend beyond our walls and live on after the event has ended. We can find ways to reach out into our communities and participate.

Attention is expensive, while storage is cheap

When I was working on my master's degree, I worked for a short time at one of Northwestern University's small branch libraries in downtown Chicago. As I was a graduate student, I tended to get stuck with the Saturday morning shift, which was slow and allowed me to catch up on classwork. Each Saturday, a small, frail-looking older gentleman would creep into the library. He'd remove his battered fedora and pick up the morning's New York Times. Then, carefully, he would examine each page of the newspaper. Looking them up and down, he would carefully turn each page, licking his thumb once in a while to ensure that pages didn't stick together.

At that time, I had more readings than I could manage. I would pile books and copies of articles into my backpack so that I could read during slow times at the reference desk. Many times, I would be pulling up articles online and bookmarking websites to visit later. When I watched the older man come in and read the New York Times, I felt that I was sneaking a glimpse of bygone days. He had one source before him. He read methodically. When he was done, he neatly folded up the paper in a very respectful, but also physical way. He returned it to its proper place and then strolled out of the library. I knew that I did not read like this. Not only did I not have the time to read like this, but I also didn't have the attention span. I just couldn't sit and look at every section of a newspaper. It was so linear. My mind couldn't operate like this.

There was a time when people had time to read. Late eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels were long and flowing. Letters were formal and wordy. The creation and distribution of information were slow and expensive so information sources arrived sporadically, one at a time. Getting information was a geographic exercise. Times have changed. Now, the moment of birth initiates a digital information flow that never stops. Content flows easily and relatively cheaply. Thomas Jefferson was well known as a major book purchaser. It was not an exaggeration to say that he physically owned a significant portion of the information of his day (Jefferson, Gilreath and Wilson, 1989). Today, no one can come anywhere near this claim. We are bombarded with information with ever-shifting attention.

In the late sixteenth and through the seventeenth century, England felt the shocks of an information revolution brought on by the availability of print. During the reign of Henry VIII, around 80 publications a year were printed and distributed. By the start of the English Civil War a century later, the publication mark hit 2000 a year. This annual figure would double during the war. Leading up to the war, print allowed British readers to be connected to the rest of Europe as never before. They followed the conflicts between and within France and Spain over Protestantism, a topic that directly impacted local English politics. During the war, print reflected and exacerbated political division. This was one of those times in history where we could see communities form because of an information technology. Individuals did not need to be geographically together, but created movements from a distance through sharing ideas. Pseudo-newspapers had been in existence prior to the war, but it was the use of print through the war that established printed news as a key mechanism in society.

Before the Civil War, the government of Charles I did not have an official newspaper but was instead represented by advocates in print. This meant that their voices were mixed up in the tumult. After the Restoration, however, the government of Charles II could not ignore print in this way and had an official newspaper that spoke loudly above any debate. From this point forward, newspapers became a primary means of discourse. Their use spread quickly as they were carried around the world.

Print, as a new information technology, wedged its way into the existing information ecosystem. When print first arrived, people read out loud and in groups because only a fraction of the population could read. An oral news network already existed and print injected itself into it. Although it initially enhanced oral culture, print eventually stopped being a tool to help one person share news with another; instead, it became a tool for people to receive their own news. Print shifted culture as it extended knowledge to the masses as never before. By today's standards, literacy rates remained low for centuries to come, but the impact of print was widespread and truly revolutionary. It grew during a time of political controversy and allowed for the articulation of new ideas by new voices (Hughes 1998;, Sharpe, 2000).

If we really want to stretch back to before the printing press, it is arguable that the oldest social networking tool was the letter. As literacy and writing spread, the use and impact of letters to connect social hubs across time and space grew. From St. Paul to Mary Shelley, epistolary writing was a standard literary form. Scholars from Stanford's "Mapping the Republic of Letters" project (https://republicoflettersstanford.edu/) are exploring the social networks between leading thinkers across Europe and mapping the hubs of knowledge that connected England to the continent. Every century has its own information revolution and all of them can be measured in terms of the information volume, speed of delivery, and social connections they fostered.

The ease and immediacy of information sharing in the early twenty-first century highlight the impact of our own information technology revolutions. Examples include the post-election protests in Iran in 2009, dubbed the "Twitter Revolution," and the "Arab Spring" of 2011, the organization of which relied heavily on Facebook and YouTube. Information has been removed from physical boundaries and sent around the world digitally.

In the past, when information had to be embodied in a physical format, we could stumble upon information sources. The day's newspaper was delivered to the door. The weekly magazine lay on the coffee table. The new novel waited patiently on the nightstand next to the bed. Although these formats have not vanished, they are now interrupted by the buzzes and beeps of new messages and new comments. The link found in a tweet leads to a blog post which leads to a Wikipedia entry. Sources are skimmed and left behind for the next discovery. No longer do we read them in their entirety and allow time for contemplation.

Over the centuries we have gone from information scarcity to an information surplus beyond our wildest dreams. Everyone has become a writer, a publisher, a photographer, videographer, and, of course, a critic. Attention is today's currency. It is a commodity in limited supply, expended nugget by nugget. We are a society that has engaged in a battle for eyeballs. Business models revolve around attracting those eyeballs. Whether selling information to users or giving away information while selling advertising, the bottom line is engaging users in content.

The driving force behind much of this is cheap information storage. Users can easily access sites via the web, and sites can store and organize data at relatively little cost. Sites run different software and offer different services but their central point is the same, which is to allow users to create and deposit data at no cost to the user. Wired magazine's Chris Anderson (2009) tells us that "free" is the new norm. Sites give away their services knowing that a vast majority of their visitors will give them nothing but may visit a few ads on their site. These sites also hope that a minority of visitors will be willing to pay for expanded services, and those payments will be enough to support the entire site. The model is to give away 90 percent—or more—of the service with the hope that 10 percent will be enough to make a profit. In order to seek out that 10 percent, the battle for attention is being waged.

The media and faculty at business schools are making a big deal about the willingness of sites to give away information and services for free as if this is a new invention. They fail to mention that libraries have been doing this for centuries. We have been making information and a range of services available to our communities. Most libraries have done this as publicly-supported entities. We have had educational missions seeking to be community learning centers. This is our advantage. The web in general, but social media in particular, offers an opportunity to extend our services. We must remain true to our missions and strive to be efficient with public resources as we serve our communities. We also must recognize that serving the public good is our competitive advantage. There are many information services the market will not make freely available, and we must be prepared to fill in the gaps.

Naturally, as we join the battle for attention, we must also remember that attention is expensive for our libraries too. Even during the best of times, budgets are limited. It is not possible to meet all user demand, and it is impossible for libraries to participate in every social media site. Our organizations have limited attention. Managers and organizational leaders must help to direct this attention.

Time to step back and refocus

Our staff time is our most valuable resource. Needs grow, but staffing does not keep pace. Each day, new social networking tools hit the scene. Either we decide not to try them out because we simply cannot handle another username and password, or we jump in and add the new site to our list of 30 other sites that we must update each day. A blog post, Facebook update, Google + update and tweet follow any change of services by our libraries. This may also mean that following any committee meeting, three or four staff members may choose to share information on behalf of your library. On top of this, when staff members go home, they may be posting work-related information to their personal social media networks. We are not so much connected via a gossamer web of finely tuned communication channels as by a knotted ball of yarn.

We have now hit a point in the history of social networking where we can step back and refocus. Social networking is no longer brand new. Our staff members have had experience using these tools. Some new tools come and go, but many tools, such as Blogger, Wordpress, YouTube, Delicious and others, have been around for years. Managers can direct the attention of organizational members and clearly connect social media tools to organizational goals. They may not recognize exactly how this connection is to be made, but they can initiate a process where staff members can work together to discover how these connections should work.

Our organization members have some big picture needs that must be addressed. First, there is a need for clear messages communicated via social media. This may not mean a single voice or a "corporate" voice. However, messages should support brand identity and the organization's marketing push. Second, participants can benefit from clear workflows where everyone involved understands their role and how they can participate. Third, defined workflows should push for a degree of efficiency in how and what tools are used. Fourth, the organization as a whole needs protection from the potential mistakes of members, and members need protection in their own use of social media tools.

Finally, Web 2.0 also presents an opportunity for us to capture and share the knowledge that members of our organization create as they do their jobs. It's not just an opportunity to do new things, but also an opportunity to become better at the things that we have always done. It could be as simple as a blog post following a complicated reference interview, or a series of tweets to build awareness as cultural events are organized. In the end, we can become better at connecting patrons to information and to our services.