#CPD23 – Thing 6: Online networks

The “thing 6″ task is to blog about your experiences with online (or social) networks and communities.

I’ll start with LinkedIn, which being honest, I don’t use very often, as I find the site rather dull. I am a member of 15 groups, but I’ve not actively commented on any discussions. This is possibly because when I initially investigated groups (a few years ago admittedly!), the discussions seemed to be mostly started and sustained by consultants touting for business or egomaniacs! However, today I took another look and it seems like things have changed for the better, so I could be persuaded to contribute or instigate discussions on a relevant LinkedIn group, if I was seeking objective advice. However, whether it would be my first port of call, I’m not sure.  I have used the LinkedIn events feature to create invites for two events that I helped to organise last year. However, my experience has been that most people don’t seem to use this feature on the site, so I wasn’t convinced that it was the best means of advertising events to other professionals. I have given and received recommendations, I’ve also been contacted about job offers – so I can see the value of LinkedIn and I do plan to login and get more benefit from using the site.

To date I’ve been an active Facebook user, mostly for personal use, but also for professional reasons, such as keeping in touch with fellow CILIP Career Development Group (CDG) members. I have found the Facebook events feature to be useful for advertising CDG events and wearing a non-library hat; for music events that I’ve arranged and promoted. I find Facebook much more informal and friendly; I like being able to view people’s photo galleries, especially to keep in touch with people I know, who live far away from me. Seeing people’s wedding, children, house decoration, cookery, gardening etc. photos does feel rather voyeuristic, but it also helps form a sense of connectedness; i.e. you can be present in their lives virtually and interact via leaving “likes” and comments.

I have found Facebook to be useful, but it seems like LinkedIn has greatly improved, since my initial investigations, so I’m going to try to get more benefit from it. However, I do find LinkedIn rather “sterile” and with reference to the Reid Hoffman quote: “Facebook is the backyard BBQ; LinkedIn is the office” – I completely agree, but I prefer being at the BBQ! (and that is not just because there is food there!!!)

Regarding new networks like Google+, I think the jury is still out. I have joined the site and have started to play with its features, but I’m still uncertain of what effect it will have on my professional networking. However, I have been following Phil Bradley’s posts about Google+ and found the graph about new user rates on this post to offer much food for thought.

#CPD23 Thing 5 – Reflective Practice

Hmm reflective practise, I have a guilty confession to make, I’m rather fond of self-improvement books. My favourite author of this genre is Richard Templar, but I quite like several others also published by Pearson. Furthermore I’ve been positively influenced by advice from the Fly Lady and Susan Jeffers. I appreciate that some of this can come across in a patronising/cheesy manner, but in general I’ve found great help from these books.

Reflecting on the 5 weeks that I’ve been taking part in CPD23; I’ve certainly felt more engaged and motivated. I’ve blogged each week, read other people’s’ blogs, left a few comments and I’ve used twitter much more than I had done prior to starting the programme. I’ve discovered the benefits of using Google Reader to follow RSS feeds and I’ve thought about how Pushnote may or may not be useful to me. So all in all I’m feeling glad that I joined the CPD23 party and I’m keen to stick it out until the end.

However, I’ve been also been reflecting on my life more broadly and deeply. Several years ago I felt that I was not well-balanced; I had moved from Scotland to Yorkshire and it took me a while to settle into a new location and a new job. I also had a long drive to work (56 miles each way!) and for 2 years I worked on a demanding project, that I allowed to become all-consuming. In short, I spent too many hours either on the motorway, or in the office and this had a negative effect on my home life, personal relationships and ability to form new friendships. After feeling pretty miserable for some time, I realised that the only person who could change things was myself. I also had the epiphany that increased number of hours in the office did not naturally equate to higher productivity. That looking after myself; getting enough sleep, eating well, being hydrated, relaxing and seeing friends were all very important and that having a better work-life balance would help me be more focussed at work and less stressed!

A few years ago, I read a great book “How to be Brilliant” by Michael Heppell. Michael advocates a technique called the Wheel of Life, which is a simple, but effective way of quickly assessing several facets of your life and spotting where there may be issues that need addressing, it also highlights imbalances. There are some really useful resources to accompany the book on Michael’s website; including a blank wheel of life that you can print out and use. This book really helped me regain a healthier sense of perspective and I’m going to start filling in wheel of life sheets once more.

In the last 12 months I’ve gone through several major life changes, one long-term relationship ended and a new relationship has blossomed – so much so that I’m getting married in less than 3 weeks time! I’ve radically changed jobs (level transfer within the same organisation), relocated from Yorkshire to London and I’m about to move house this autumn (still in London). I’ve wanted and instigated these changes; the new relationship and job have enthused me. However, I acknowledge that these are all stressful events and that I will need some grounding time soon, to catch my breath, take stock and do more life planning.

I like to think that I welcome change, but the pace of technology does overwhelm me at times. For my professional life I’m concerned that I need to develop ways of keeping informed and up-to-date, but without these taking over in a bad way (I remember reading this story and being horrified!) I wish to embed “technology watch”, “horizon scanning” and “online networking” into my routines, so they harmoniously fit in with my lifestyle.

The availability of smart phones is fantastic and I’m learning to be connected, while I’m out and about. I’m enjoying living in London again, after an absence of 10 years. Yes, it is busy, noisy, dirty and expensive, but it is vibrant and has huge amounts of culture on offer. I’m relishing and revelling in all the amazing talks, exhibitions, films, plays and not forgetting the concerts that I can attend and check in via foursquare

I appreciate that this post is rather long, waffly and not purely focussed on professional reflective practise. However, as with the branding exercise in CPD23 thing 3, I’m increasingly finding it hard to separate the professional and the personal aspects of my life, as I’ve experienced how closely the 2 are connected and affect each other.

I’m constantly learning more about myself, what types of work I enjoy (and what I don’t!) .  I’m also very aware that I have a tendency to say “yes” to too many requests and then end up in impossible situations. So with this review in mind, I plan to operate with a little more self-preservation and self-awareness. To be selective and give opportunities more consideration before diving straight in …

#CPD23 Thing 4: Current awareness – Twitter, RSS and Pushnote – part 3 Pushnote

I’ve signed up to Pushnote and downloaded the browser add-on for Firefox. One of the challenges I’ve faced is finding other Pushnote contacts to follow and interact with. Reading the FAQ it says that “soon you’ll also be able to find your Facebook and Twitter friends who use Pushnote.” However, at the moment you can only find people by searching Google contacts or via typing in email addresses. Currently only one of my Google contacts is a Pushnote user and they aren’t a Library Professional following CPD23.

From initial explorations I’m unsure how Pushnote will enhance my online experience. I think it will need to build up a critical mass of users for it to do what it is meant to do.

#CPD23 Thing 4: Current awareness – Twitter, RSS and Pushnote – part 2 RSS

RSS has been something that I’ve been vaguely aware of, but not paid any special attention to! However, in the spirit of CPD23 I’m investigating how it could be useful to CPD and my life in general. I understood that it offered a means of feeding information from many different sources into one feed, but I had always been too busy or distracted with other things to work out how to set up an RSS reader, which is ironic really, as having a “one-stop-shop” should help me save time!

For this part of thing 4 I’ve started using Google Reader and I’ve subscribed to the single feed of CPD23 blogs created by Shannon Robalino. So far, so good. The proof of the pudding will be whether I frequently remember to go to Google Reader and read the feed. Along with blogging and tweeting, I’m going to see if I can develop using an RSS reader as a new habit. I’m wary of subscribing to too many content sources to start with, as I may feel completely overwhelmed, so I plan to be cautious at first.

Thing 4: Current awareness – Twitter, RSS and Pushnote – part 1 Twitter

This week’s #cpd23 exercise is to blog about your experiences with these tools. I’ve decided to break this task down into 3 blog posts with the first one being about Twitter.

Being honest, I’m not sure I get Twitter. I’ve met many avid Twitter fans through my workplace and also through CILIP’s Career Development Group, people such as @MattShaw, @digicurator, @glambuslib and not forgetting @theREALwikiman. These good folk do a worthy job of selling the professional benefits of using Twitter, I’m just not sure I’ve personally adapted my thinking and approach to get the best out of it yet!

My challenges with Twitter:

1) It is too fast, there are so many interesting people to follow that I can’t keep up with reading all the tweets.

2) It can be a distraction from productivity, this could be a good or bad thing depending on circumstances! Personally I need to learn how to incorporate it into my life, so it is used as refreshing/inspirational breaks from concentrated periods of work, rather than it being like a buzzy fly in the corner of my vision all day!

3) I often have no idea what all the hashtags mean! However, today I discovered http://tagdef.com/, so this may solve that problem!

4) I forget to add hashtags to my tweets and I personally find that using other tools such as WordPress and Foursquare to also post to Twitter makes this problem even worse.

5) There is a lot of “noise” & I want to be able to find the “nuggets of gold” tweets containing new information or inspirational thoughts amongst the mass of mundane guff. I realise that I add to this problem, as my Foursquare account is linked to my Twitter account and populates my feed with all my check-ins!

Going forward:

I do have TweetDeck installed, but I’m not sure I use it to its full advantage, so I’m going to pay more attention to its features and try to use it more effectively.

I really wish I was starting afresh; if I was a Twitter newbie I would heed Ned’s advice! However, I am where I am! I intend to try to implement strategies for managing my use of Twitter, so I find it more useful and less confusing/irritating/time wasting. This may mean setting up more focussed lists of who I want to follow, or following lists that others have already created. It may also mean using my android phone more; though I’m not entirely sure I want to be reading Twitter in bed, when I could be reading a book … or heaven forbid even sleeping!

As a final note, I’ve been thinking about Twitter netiquette and I like much of what is written in this blog post,

Thing 3: Consider your personal brand

I’ve found thinking about “Thing 3: Consider your personal brand” to be interesting, rather indulgent and if left to my own devices I would probably waffle incoherently on this topic, so I’ve decided to stick to the sections specified by Jo Alcock, to give this post some structure

Name used – Many new people I meet, ask me if I’ve changed my name by deed poll, as they think that Stella Wisdom was not the name I was given at birth! Or they want to know if my parents were hippies, which is not true either. When I was a child, the only other Stellas I had met were all old ladies, but the rise in fame of Stella McCartney over the last few years has meant that “Stella” is now seen to be a fashionable and modern name. I realise that this won’t last forever, but even so I like both my first and second names, so these days I tend to use something close to my real name, such as “miss_wisdom” or “stella.wisdom” as usernames online. However, this hasn’t always been my approach! When I first went to university in the autumn of 1996, the Internet was very exciting and new, as I explored using irc and newsgroups etc. I quickly realised that I needed to use online nicknames, so being somewhat of a goth I flirted with using “Lucretia”, but young and naive I was, this still seemed rather naff, even then! So my next choice was “Avaritia” inspired by a song of the same name by the band Manuskript, who have been going since the early 1990s and are veterans of the UK goth scene I used this name for quite sometime, it was also my DJing alias, my name on netgoth and LiveJournal etc. I’m sure there are still some folk from those days who only know me as Avaritia! However, despite me being a self-confessed glutton, hedonist and spendthrift, over time I realised that are some very negative connotations associated with avarice and I questioned whether I wanted to be associated with a deadly sin It also started to seem rather immature and not really appropriate for more professional purposes. Back in 1996 I had no concept of how the Internet would evolve and how sites like LinkedIn would appear, so it has been interesting to witness the evolution of web 2.0 and my attempts to develop a more mature online presence …

Photograph – This is rather a tricky one; I have no problem with wanting the people who I network with online to recognise me when I meet them face to face. However, I really fail at being photogenic and I can’t think of many photos of me that I find acceptable, let alone like! I don’t have self-image problems, I just acknowledge that my beauty and personality are best seen in the flesh! So I tend to use a painting of a vintage librarian as my online profile picture instead.

Professional/personal identity – Again, another tricky issue. Earlier in my career I attempted to keep my personal and professional lives mostly separate. However, in recent years I’ve become much more relaxed, especially as I’ve met some truly wonderful librarians, who are definitely much more kooky and bohemian than myself! So I figured that my dodgy music and dress tastes, plus other eccentricities were not necessarily something to hide away, but that I could share and be proud of them. I’ve witnessed many newer professionals take a “profersonal” approach and this has influenced me to blend various aspects of both my personal and professional identity into one sense of true self.

Visual brand – This is an area I definitely need to consider more, plan and consistently implement. To be perfectly honest, I have not strategically planned my visual brand and whatever online presence I’ve created has been done ad-hoc. However, I do remember when I had a chocolate phase on Livejournal about 8 years ago, where I changed the background of my online journal to melted chocolate, which received lots of positive feedback and even when I met fellow LiveJournal bloggers in person I seemed to be associated with chocolate eating! (which is not a bad thing in my opinion)

As for this week’s activity “a vanity check. Search for your name in Google and check out the first page or so of results”. This made me well aware of historic/out-of-date information that can linger around and of which it is not always easy to edit or delete! When searching for “stella wisdom” using quotation marks to find hits for my whole name, the first 4 links are about me:

1) My twitter profile
2) A profile page from when I was a research student at Edinburgh College of Art, this dates from 2003, incorrectly names me as one of my former colleages Simon Bell! It also includes a photo *shudder*, cites a redundant email address and is about research interests that I’m nolonger pursuing.
3) My LinkedIn profile
4) My biography on the Online Information conference website, as I am on the 2011 Executive Conference Committee

I think I’m quite fortunate that both my first and second names are quite unusual. I’m also relieved that these links are not embarrassing and I would be ok about an employer viewing them.

However, the 10th search result was this! Fortunately not my grave, but I did feel an inexplicable fondness for the soul resting there!

For the second part of the activity I need to ask someone else (such as one of the other programme participants) what they think my blog says about my personal brand, any volunteers please get in touch and I’m willing to return the favour

Ok enough self-indulgent reflection for one evening! I will ponder this issue some more and attempt to create a professional, but fun visual brand for myself (that doesn’t involve either goth or chocolate!)

Oops I’m behind already

Well it is the 3rd day into the 2nd week of cpd23 Things and already I’m behind, as I haven’t yet blogged about Thing 2 from the first week of the plan: “Explore other blogs and get to know some of the other cpd23-ers”. Anyway, better late than never, I’ve been reading:

The extremely popular Phil Bradley’s weblog. Phil is on-the-ball about new technology developments and I like his down-to-earth, no-nonsense writing style. I found today’s post on Google Plus or Google+ to be very informative; this afternoon my line manager mentioned that I should read about Google Plus, so Phil’s blog post was timely and hit the spot.

In a similar vein, I like Stephen’s Lighthouse by Stephen Abram. I saw Stephen speak at Online Information in 2009 and found what he says to be very inspirational, thought-provoking and entertaining. Furthermore, today’s post Seth Godin on Building a Reputation is very relevent to Thing 3 “Consider your personal brand”, which I will post about shortly

I’ve also been dipping into blogs by people I’ve met in real life, such as Rachel’s Big Adventure. Rachel’s recent post Why we need to be talking about the LIS new professionals “clique” really struck a chord with me. Despite having been involved in the CILIP Career Development Group for the last few years and having helped organise the 2010 New Professionals Conference at Sheffield, I don’t really feel like I’m included in all the LIS New Professionals activity and debate. This is mostly my own fault, as I feel that I should be more active on twitter etc. However, I need to develop new habits to include regular blogging and twittering into my daily routine. I’m hoping that my new smartphone will assist in making this easier, but I think I need to consciously make more of an effort to be pro-active with these things.

I’m also going to continue to check out more blogs written by those taking part in CPD23, so if anyone has any suggestions of blogs I should be reading, please comment