Measuring and optimizing social media - a talk by Johannes Neuer of the NYPL

On the 1st August I went to a talk organised by Staff Development on 'Measuring and optimizing social media'.  The talk was part of 'Bodleian Libraries’ Digital Know-How Day' (#BODdkh1).  It was given by Johannes Neuer (@johannesneuer) of the New York Public Library.  Below are my brief notes on the talk.  The library I work for is thinking of expanding their social media use, the talk gave a lot of very useful links for measuring and evaluating Web 2.0.  I plan to investigate these more in depth at a later date.

I found this talk an interesting counterpoint to my MSc dissertation.  One of my main findings was that libraries do not set goals, or measure social media ‘success’ in a quantifiable way.  It was interesting to hear the practical tools used and how he displayed the data.  It was also interesting to hear, that despite the current comprehensive measurement, evaluation and reporting done by NYPL, social media was started experimentally. 

Regarding setting up Social Media JN emphasised the importance of goals.  They should be 'SMART' goals:

Specifc
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Timely

There should be a focus on outcomes and you should actively think about how you are going to measure success.

I made a note of the tools described.  It looks like the most useful one for a library looking to set up a twitter account would be Hootsuite, as you can collect data about when specified words are mentioned in other peoples tweet (eg SSL etc).  You can also collect @mentions.

Socialflow.com was also mentioned.  This website publishes blogs. It was of use in NYPL as they have 150 bloggers.  The website can look at conversations in Twitter and Facebook and send out, or tweet, the most relevant posts.