New Year, New You

In the midst of planning for this year's upcoming library conferences, I stumbled across my notes from last June's SLA annual conference in Phoenix.

Heard of Hootsuite, TweetDeck, TinEye, or Graph Search? At her SLA educational session on June 18, 2017, Mary Ellen Bates illuminated these and other tools to help information professionals become more intelligent searchers and users when diving into today's social media landscape. From market research, to validating an individual's identity, to discovering new ideas and job leads, there is no shortage of insight available through social media platforms and related web-based applications. Here's how you can help make 2018 a year of professional success for yourself through social media usage.

Whether you embrace social media, shy away, reluctantly observe, or have fully purged social media from your life altogether, Bates advocates for playing in the sandbox: social media "lets you see the world from another point of view…an unfiltered perspective" that you can best understand through direct participation, rather than observation from a distance. "Our job as information professionals," Bates adds, "is to break through the filter," venturing down rabbit holes and embracing the diversity of social media clusters despite our hesitations. Doing so allows us to "challenge that confirmation bias with all of our users," softening our assessments of what we find so that we can focus on understanding what's popular; this, in turn, informs our searches within the social media ecosystem.

Along these lines, here are a few highlights from Mary Ellen's (2017) toolbox of tips and hacks to help you become a more savvy searcher and social media user along your information professional journey:

• think about alternative names for keywords or search terms

• practice searching by and/or/not, date range, or near location

• dig beneath the surface--look all the way to the fourth page of search results

• make some time to participate in social media--don't just lurk--this will inform your searching know-how

• don't immediately disbelieve what you don't agree with, even though you need not believe everything you read

Ours is a role of guardianship--in an age of spin and astounding relativity, in spaces where terms like 'alternative facts' continue to surface, library and information professionals remain steadfast guardians of truth. This makes expert searching all the more important, both for understanding the communities we serve and for preserving facts in a post-reality era.

Still reluctant to take the social media plunge? At a minimum, consider the following for putting forward the best version of yourself in the year ahead:

• Once every six months | update your privacy settings for accounts you do hold--these can automatically reset to default parameters as platform privacy options evolve, so it's important to monitor and periodically update your settings. Did you know people may be able to find you by your phone number? Or that folks whose profiles you view on LinkedIn may be able to tell you were not-so-secretly browsing their pages? You can adjust these settings by diving into privacy options.

• Once or twice a month | spend 10 minutes browsing social media platforms for topics or people of personal interest to your professional development.

• Once a week | if you're on LinkedIn, check your account for profile views, messages, and other activity; respond to requests as appropriate, and consider if there are updates you can or should make to your publicly available information. Taking the time to do so can help you prevent missing out on an important development within your network, such as a message regarding a potential job lead.

New year, new you. And there's more to explore--check out additional resources and extras, including slides from Mary Ellen's 2017 presentation, at https://reluctant-entrepreneur.com/extras.

See you out there.

References

Bates, Mary Ellen. (18 June 2017). Harvesting Insights from Social Media: A Super-Searcher's Secrets. Special Library Association 2017 Annual Conference.