Archive for June, 2010

Some things immediately come to mind when one thinks of New Orleans.  Here are some of them:

The French Quarter

Paddle-wheel boat on the Mississippi River (and a beautiful rainbow that appeared after a thunderstorm)

Jackson Square

Streetcar

Streetcar interior

In a “spotlight” session this afternoon, industry guru Mary Ellen Bates continued the theme launched in this morning’s session, speaking on some further aspects of personal branding and social networking sites. Following some of her own advice, she has generously posted her slides on her website (click here), so I will mention only a few of her additional points in this posting.

• You are the best one to talk about yourself.
• People often make excuses for not using Web2.0 systems, but Mary Ellen has found that it helped her work more efficiently when her brand was out in the cloud.
• It is almost unavoidable that your name is out there somewhere, so you should control how the world knows about you.
• This is slow marketing; you should start now to build a corpus of content.
• You must build your brand everywhere you have an online presence.
• If all you do is look at social networks and not participate, you are missing out on much of the benefit.
• The social web is all about sharing social resources, and we information professionals do this very well.   We also know how to answer people’s questions, and we are used to getting feedback from our clients.  Use the social web the same way.
• Make yourself findable by using your name consistently, make sure that your do not hide yourself.
• Add value to all your presences. Remember that it is not your job to tweet about what you had for lunch!
• Make yourself interesting and easy to find. Use words that make you retrievable. Ask yourself how people would search for you.Think about how you want to be seen, not how you look now. Focus on your high-end skills.
• There is a premium on credit and sharing on social networks.
• Keep your Twitter name as short as possible so it does not consume too many of your 140 characters.
• Have a permanent email address so that people can always find you. Don’t worry that it will get harvested by spammers—that’s just part of the game.  Have a good ISP that will filter the spam.
• Be accountable—if you make a mistake, be open and admit it.

There is lots of good advice here!

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blogger

Heather Staines

Heather Staines surveyed mobile internet usage by STM publishers and presented an excellent summary of some of their efforts to date.  Mobile internet usage is growing much more rapidly than desktop usage, and this boom is being driven by smartphones such as the iPhone and the Android.  One report predicts that by the end of next year, the penetration of smart phones in the STM market will increase to near 50%.

Some of the questions when developing a mobile strategy include:

• What are the goals?  Should the mobile application be commercial or only for promotional use?  Should it contain original or repurposed content?
• What platforms should be supported?  Options include the iPhone, Blackberry, Android, or Symbian (now used on “feature” phones).
• What business models should be developed?  Are all books apps, or should there be different apps for each product?  Should apps be free for marketing or should they only be offered as commercial products?
• And what should we do with the iPad?

Springer’s mobile strategy includes creating mobile-optimized versions of all products, focusing first on the iPhone platform, then distributing content through as many channels as customers want.  Discovery and alerting apps will be free, and added value apps will be paid.  Books are the first content to be offered, but there is a large demand for journals or journal articles as well.

Other publishers’ efforts include:

• ACS Mobile
• IEEE Xplore
• IEEE National Electric Safety Code
• AIP iResearch (DL 2500 times in 3 months!)
• Nature.com mobile apps
• EBSCOhost Mobile
• OCLC

OCLC has been particularly active in developing relationships with mobile partners. And libraries are also going mobile and are delivering their information to users on mobile platforms.

It is clear that multi-channel delivery of information is a very complex landscape.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blogger