"Only the strongest professions have the strongest associations" - 2012 SLA Hall of Fame inductee Susan Fifer Canby

Chicago in July is hot, even with the lake breeze you can't escape the concrete jungle heat. So the key to my personal success in attending the annual SLA (Special Library Asociation) conference was:

• #1 was keep hydrated 
• #2 pick the right sessions to go to (hard when so many are going on at the same time!) 
• #3 when taking a break from sessions and sitting down with other attendees, choose a shady cool spot (learned that the hard way!)

This year, I attended SLA 2012 (Special Library Association) #SLAChicago conference as an attendee, not as a vendor staff person as I have for many many years. Although in the past I was always able to get to some sessions that I really wanted to go to- often negotiating booth time slots with my coworkers!- This year, my focus was on attending as many sessions I could that interested me and to meet as many information professionals  as i could that had similar interests. 


Here are some high level themes i came back with:


- Throughout 2011 I kept an eye on the SLA Future Ready Project, a project that Cindy Romaine, SLA President 2011 had lead with the goal of finding and sharing information about how information professionals where or had to get 'Future Ready'- many of the sessions and conversations I was in where focused on what and where the profession of 'Special Librarians' was going. Many conversations on value (perceived and measurable), extension of roles (where else in the organization to embed oneself) and identity (what is a special librarian, what is the role of information in the enterprise, etc.). The general consensus i heard was that as a profession, information professionals feel that they are or are on the way to being 'Future Ready'.


- I attended a session on Collaborative Insights that highlighted some new information professional roles to embrace that i thought were great role descriptions for the skils and experiences that come with being an information professional in an enterprise including:

• Cross-Pollinators
• Connectors at Critical Intersections 
• Innovation Facilitators

- In more then one session and conversation, the topic of 'delivering information to users where they are' came up. Mobile and etablet delivery of content and what Mary Ellen Bates in one panel, made the association that it is not only about giving users the ability to 'Search' but being able to proactively 'alert' within context of what they are doing, regardless of what device they are in.


- The Rise of Internal Enterprise App stores and the opportunity for Information Resource Centers/Corporate Libraries to become front and center to that new enterprise ecosystem. Being first in line to delivering valuable enterprise applications within these new platforms would raise awareness of the services provided and direct value to the enterprise.


- Types of collaboration skills to develop as an Information Professional includes 'Horizontal Collaboration' within organization - IT, HR, and very importantly Rainmaking with C level executives.


- In regards to Collaboration, I really liked this reminder from Mary Talley  : "Collaboration Requires Intimacy"


- The shift to Self Service and Self Curation and the changes in how end-users use and consume information was another topic heard in the sessions in discussions with attendees- unlike the 'clients' of the past the skills AND the tools available to end-users enable self access (and success with it). Information Professionals MUST understand and become champions of these tools 


- Very Popular sessions - Like 60 Apps in 60 minutes conducted by Scott Brown of the Social Information Group and Joe Murphy highlighted the need for Information Professionals to have a good grasp of tools that are out there so that they can make recommendations, compete effectively and become part of the App culture that the corporate enterprise is embracing.


- Guy Kawasaki- gave the keynote, focused on Enchantment (that is the name of his newest book). Although I wish Guy has focused a bit more on addressing the actual audience of information professionals (something he talks about being a requirement to enchant!)- his core message can be applied to pretty much any profession that is responsible for providing services and products: Enchant people and build something DICEE - Deep, Intelligent, Complete, Empowering & Elegant


- Last but not least on my list, Lee Ann Benkert (pictured above)- @LRBenkert spontaneously organized an 'un-conference' session during lunch, asking people to join in the social media lounge and self-organize into small groups to talk about topics that were top of mind to them. It was a new thing for many of the attendees and it was great to see their excitement. I have been to many unconference events, and honestly the group session i was in was just ok (about identity as a special librarian- what should the title really be, etc.)- but the classy part was that Lee Ann managed to include the expo vendors who might have complained that this was taking people away from the expo floor booths during the time when attendees had free time to visit- by coordinating a 'flash-mob' visit to the vendor that best included themselves in the process of the unconference organization- well done!


There were many other sessions which you can view here, many have slide-decks as well (click through the session title) and there is also an Eventifier conference overview that has aggregated images, tweets, slides etc.


Thank you SLA for another excellent conference and thank you to all my old and new friends that i got to spend time with- see you next year in San Diego! 

Next week SLA (Special Library Association) is hosting their annual conference in Chicago and i look forward to meeting up with many of my old friends and clients in the library world!


If you know me, you know i have been advocating this for years: The role of the information professional is a very important one that should be leveraged in enterprise social projects projects- in today's Social Portals, ESNs (Enterprise Social Networks), Collaboration chat platforms, SCRM,. etc. The core skills that Info Pros have can lead to greater adoption and ultimately  greator ROI.

In my new role at FirstRain as Director of Business Development i have a chance to spread the word that Info Pros- should and NEED to be brought into these projects- so if you going to SLA and feel the same (or perhaps you disagree)- i would love to talk to you!

Oh Yeah- here is what i look like now a days (hair is a bit longer but dimpled smile is the same :-)



If you are interested in touching base with me here is my email dbarbosa@firstrain.com or via twitter @danielabarbosa.

See you in Chicago!

Amanda Katz a commentator for NPR Books, recently published an article that caught my attention through my twitter stream. Titled Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books, it tells of her personal story in discovering a book with a personal family story that was found in a box of books her grandmother left behind. That story in itself is interesting and a reminder that those books that our parents and grandparents and even ourselves have on the shelf- are more then the book itself but can include a collective memory of their past readers.

Last night, the TV was on- only the dog was watching, but as i walked by i noticed this:


On Dateline NBC, the ubiquitous peacock on the left side of the screen and #DATELINE the Twitter hashtag on the other. I have seen #hashtags on many a commercial, news show etc. and often even within TV shows, the Tweet this with #hashtag bla bla bla - but haven't really seen it being used as part of the brand name of a show so blatanly (ok i admit i don't watch much real-time TV, so correct me if i am wrong!).

It reminded me of a blog post I read a while ago about Facebook, where the author made what i thought at the time was a very astute point about the following URL- www.facebook.com/nike . Why would Nike who has one of the most recognized brands in the world be willing to supersede their branding with facebook's? Had facebook ubiquitously become the brand identifier for big brands? I couldn't find that post or the author as i wrote this, but i think it went on to talk about how Facebook was going to be the defacto platform.

Now, most of us when we think about hashtags think about Twitter- no doubt #hashtag adoption started becoming mainstream with Twitter. The # symbol, called a hashtag, is typically used to mark a keyword or topic in a Tweet. Any user can categorize or create hashtags or follow and search topics using Twitter or various services built on top of Twitter. I remember seeing #hashtags start in August 2007 and becoming excited about the power they could have in information delivery and consumption.

But hashtags are used in many other applications, take for example Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs) like Yammer or Salesforce's Chatter- that encourage the use of the #hashtags for classification, to find other people talking about specific topics, to display the 'categorized' content within one view etc.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, then you know i have been talking about 'tagging' for a while and even wrote a very popular ebook on the subject. Hashtags are just an extension of tagging, but the conversations that occur around them make them way more valuable then traditional tags- that were mostly consumed by search engines.

So this morning, i was reading this TechCrunch article on Twitter's new Brand pages, that launched with #NASCAR. Since #hashtags were on my brain with the #DATELINE revelation i had last night- i thought it was very timely since i have had a #hashtag post coming anyway.

From the Twitter Blog, you can learn a bit more about how these Brand pages are created. In describing how the Pocono 400 race was covered through #NASCAR it states "Throughout the weekend – but especially during the race – a combination of algorithms and curation will surface the most interesting Tweets to bring you closer to all of the action happening around the track, from the garage to the victory lane." -

It will be interesting to learn more about how Twitter is creating these Brand pages, what control will the brands themselves will have (are they the curators or is Twitter??), how will the algorithms work? Are they automatically removing tweets that would be brand offensive?, how valuable it will be to consumers, how long before people start to 'game' the system and how will Twitter combat that- and ultimately how else  will #HASHTAGS create new consumption and interaction models for content inside and outside of Twitter?

This post was orginally published on FirstRain's Market Mine Blog.

John Stepper a blogger whose job is to "change how people work" using collaboration platforms, communities of practice, and public social media channels at Deutsche Bank, recently blogged how your best use of social media may not require a single post. The focus of his post (and most of his blogging on the subject) is on regulated firms, including both financial service firms like Deutsche Bank and other industries that deal with similar requirements such as pharmaceuticals, energy etc. Over the years, I have spent a lot of time talking to people about the use of social media in a B2B environment, regulated or not. There is, of course, the very well established and vendor-serviced market of social media monitoring and measurement from a PR/Communications/Brand perspective. But increasingly, companies are seeing the value of social media within other functions in their enterprise, and as Stepper points out in his post, value from Social Media can come without the need to actually create and post content by every employee. I think it goes beyond embracing the 90-9-1 rule that "1% of people create content, 9% edit or modify that content, and 90% view the content without contributing.” This is now a given and as Stepper says, it should be embraced not fought against. Many organizations just can't afford to have everyone—especially revenue producing functions—creating social media content and listening and learning using either consumer-oriented or professional PR tools. I, however, do encourage every single enterprise employee to use social media to build themselves a brand and engage with their customers and markets—just leave the 'heavy 'lifting' to others.

When Penny came back to the office after her TEDx talk and told me that she had been "surrounded by teenage girls thrilled to have their interest in software and technology endorsed and confirmed" by her talk it actually gave me goose bumps.

Mission accomplished. See for yourself:

Note: This post was originally published on the FirstRain Market Mine Blog on Friday, May 18th 2012, the day Facebook went IPO.

Today's Facebook's IPO although a more consumer focused interest story then what most of our customers are interested in, brought a huge amount of tweets on the subject as expected. (I would even venture to say that it was more then a 'consumer interest story' but rather a 'human interest story'). None the less, being that FirstRain is a Silicon Valley based company, the buzz is also being felt strongly outside the digital world for those of us that live here and have friends and acquaintances that are being directly impacted by facebook's IPO. Exciting times.



Yesterday, prior to Facebook's IPO we ran some stats using our FirstTweets™ technology and then redid the same exercise at the close of the market today. FirstTweets™ uses our patented FirstRain technology to uncover and deliver only high-quality, business-relevant tweets to sales and marketing professionals across the enterprise. Our analysis shows that less than 0.1% of daily tweets contain quality, business-related content, yet this still represents more than 200,000 tweets per day of business-focused intelligence.

The picture painted by the stats that we captured, aren't surprising but are interesting and illustrative on why our customers are seeing value in our FirstTweets- as YY Lee our COO tweeted this morning allowing them to "cut through the frenzied roar to net out the actual business discussion...".

On the day before Facebook's IPO:


At the close of Market on the day of Facebooks IPO:

The Octopus is Microsoft Co-Founder Paul Allen's Super Yacht, it doesn't even rank in the top ten of super yachts - but it is pretty darn nice (ok it is # 11). like super nice. If i got an invite, i would go on a ride and i would ask Paul to play Al Green's 'Take Me to the River' (Paul is a huge music fan so i would probably let him go through his own collection as well).

Last night, Doc Searls posted a reaction to Dave Winer who posted a reaction (and plea) to Jason Pontin's post 'Why Publishers Don't Like Apps' that i had read earlier in the day. Pontin the Editor in Chief and Publisher at The Technology Review tells a tale of woe of how the Technology Review decided to move away from creating their own News Apps.

Their main points?

KISS it Publishers. ((Keep it Simple))

Winer has been the 'Champion of Champions' for RSS and for what he has coined the River of News. In Searls' post 'Take Us to the Rivers' he provides a historical outline of what is known as a 'river of news'- essentially a scrolling list of headlines as it happens and begs publishers to listen to Winer.

The reading experience is quite different, visit the nytimesriver and then the front page of the New York Times website . Scanning each which one did you just get the most value from if your aim is to get a quick overview of what is happening in aggregate and not what the NYT editors deem as most important?

There are of course successful media publishers like the WSJ who's digital App strategy i think has brought them together unlike what it did to the Technology Review team, but these are the big brands with targeted audiences. They can afford diversification of delivery methods and their audiences will pay for immersive experiences, whether they are behind premium pay walls and/or through Apps.

Consumers of news content of course will have different wants, consumption habits and needs. You can (and should) even break down these consumers into at least two buckets- personal news consumers and enterprise news consumers (there are certainly others that publishers target- political junkies, sport fanatics, etc.). By keeping their content Kissable, most publishers can benefit by focusing on the content and the editorial value and leave the ultimate consumption experience to the user and the tool/aps/experience experts.

I personally like "sitting on the bank of a river, watching the boats go by" and today's sexy speed boats like Flipboard are a news consumer dreamboat where the fellow passengers are handpicked by the captain (that would be you of course), but when i am trying to keep up with content (news, blogs, social whatever) for work trying to deeply understand the diverse business needs of my partners, clients and competitors- i want to be a passenger on the Octopus.

Perhaps Winer, Searls, Pontin and myself will get an invite to take a trip on the Octopus so we can come up with some strategies to get publishers to listen. @PaulGAllen drop me a DM to let me know when the Octopus ports in San Francsico.

Disclaimer: i know absolutely nothing about Yacht's and can't vouch for the # of rivers the Octopus can sail down ;-).

Image | Flickr | andraspfaff 

Note: I recently joined FirstRain as Director of Business Development after 12 years at Dow Jones/Factiva working with Enterprise customers on information delivery and consumption solutions- my focus and passion is to find, deliver and insure adoption of enterprise B2B business intelligence information solutions. As always, the opinions expressed on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent those of my past, future or present employer or any organizations i might belong to unless explicitly stated that is the case.

Charlie Davidson, CEO of Attensa who i have known for years via other industry events, sent me the invitation. Attensa is trying to solve the problem of Information Overload for businesses because "Overload not only hurts productivity, but also prevents people from using the information and knowledge that is critical to revenue generation, innovation and overall business results."

This weekend i headed over to the Renegade Holiday Craft Fair in San Francisco. In general i love crafty gatherings, from the beloved summer street fairs to special events like the one i went to today, i always get inspired and of course find some scores that i would never fine anywhere else.

I have been going to Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference for about 7 years in one form or another- from a full conference attendee, to a expo vendor, a virtual attendee and a keynote/expo attendee which i did again this year. Moscone center is nearby the office and I find it extremely valuable to attend conferences- great for networking and for seeing and hearing first hand what the big vendors or technologies are coming up with.

Last night after putting the baby to sleep, I was catching up on my work after spending the majority of the day at dreamforce and was watching the tweet stream from #df11. It was late and the conference attendees where at the Metallica gala concert. Pretty entertaining tweets- from 'they handed out earplugs as we walked in' to the always entertaining @jowyang 's tweet:

But these funny observations was something I had noticed myself- a lot of suits and slick back hair. Now I am not against this (maybe the slick back hair I don't particularly like but whatever it's better then a mullet)- and I myself wear 'proper' business dress to all conferences since I am always running into clients. But I thought the conference looked like more business types then before (I refuse to believe that developers are wearing suits now a days- but they seem to have upgraded to the standard valley dress of khaki's and button downs).

My friend Kevin Marks, who is now at Salesforce and was wearing a snazy jacket, pointed out that Dreamforce11 had all the developer sessions in Moscone West while the business sessions where in Moscone North - we were chatting in the north area and I agreed - and there were a lot of suits there.

With 47,000 attendees, there was a different feeling- Dreamforce seems to me to be a growing must attend for top execs- from the hallway and expo floor conversations I observed . I am sure the developers sessions are still important but the "visionary" stuff that Marc Benioff (CEO) is pushing seems to be working on these guys (yes mostly guy- and yes it was nice to see Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts on stage and loved her talk on the Social Enterprise). All the keynotes are now available on YouTube.

Anyway- on the way from Moscone West to Moscone North through the massive crowds- a street grate got the best of my most beloved shoes- the ones I wear to every conference because they are the most comfortable- I would say that over the years (do I dare admit that these shoes at around 10yrs old?!!)- these shoes have seen hundreds of keynotes and strolled through miles and miles of expo halls- from the small intimate conferences like the beloved defrag to the biggie 'close out Disney World' Gartner conferences.

I will miss you dear shoes.

PS: for those lady friends of mine who we have discussed that the Shoe Mender is a girl's best friend and good shoes are worth fixing and over again. This pair has spent its share of time at the shoe repair shop- this morning as I walked past Jack's shoe repair on market street on the way to the office I suddenly almost had a change of heart- but no their time has come. (Sounds like a trip to DSW is called for!)

I had five minutes to share some 'best practices' and 'real-life' twittering stories with my fellow co-workers on an internal Twitter 101 Session that our Social Media Marketing Manager put together. The attendees where mostly sales and marketing colleagues. It is a relatively new program we have in place, and i applaud them for taking this step. They went through general how-tos which would be useful for any new user.

My notes outline follows at the request of @tjsweeney to share some context of what i talked about.

• I have been tweeting since March 2007, currently have 2,811 followers (since the presentation it has gone up to 2821) and have over 4,000 tweets (so tweeting for 1601 days so an average of 2.5 tweets a day)
  
• I started tweeting during the famous 2007 SXSW Twitter tipping point- where Twitter hit 'mainstream' well the mainstream of Silicon valley that is. During that conference, tweets went from 20,000 tweets per day to 60,000 tweets per day. We all shook our heads and said how will i manage all this? Today there are over 200 million tweets per day. I still find value every day in my tweet stream.
• I use Twitter to be smarter, hopefully provide some value to my followers and to help me build my personal 'brand'
• How do i let people know i tweet? Beyond engaging with them if they are on Twitter, i link at bottom of my corporate and personal email (currently linking to my aboutme page) and also tie it into my LinkedIn account- when i tweet it gets posted there- provides a somewhat different follower list
• I currently use Tweetdeck to manage my streams, Blackberry Twitter or Twitter Ipad when i am on the road. Flipboard i use mostly in the evenings to catch up on my evening 'tweets' and deeper reads
  
• Have various saved searches on Tweetdeck (e.g. Competitive Intelligence, Librarians, Supply Chain, Enterprise Sales, semantic web) and follow companies and people who are prospects/clients or just plain smart peeps.
  
• Lists are very helpful, and there are a lot of wonderfully curated lists or you can create your own and make them private or public
  
• Hashtags- for example to follow a conference like #sla2011 , even if you are not there you can still 'attend' and interact
• I use bit.ly to shorten my URLs and find their tracking data very valuable to see how many clicked on my link.
• I have many Clients who follow me- i can see that they follow me but they also tell me- often before a meeting starts instead of talking about the weather we might talk about a certain tweet i made earlier in the day- and vice versa- i try not to get on the phone with a client without checking their 'output channel'
  
• I have clients who Direct Message (DM) me and i might do the same to them i find the engagement and response rate to be much higher
• To my last point, Twitter has a big vanity aurora around it. regardless of who you are you want to see who retweeted, @ed you, DMd you , favortied your tweet- instantaneously
• I spend a lot of time finding (mostly through google search although i recently found the twitter advanced search feature) and listening to what prospects may be saying . One thing i try to do sometimes is wait for someone to tweet something - then i know they are in front of a device (laptop,mobile,table etc.)- per my previous vanity point, they want to see who replied. i might not reply through twitter because what i want to talk to them about is not a conversation to start there - but i might send an email or give them a ring because i can assume they are working on their 'device' and are connected
  

My last point and probably the most important for people in sales and marketing was to be authentic. For example, i follow our Twitter brand accounts , i retweet things from the Dow Jones twitter accounts that MY followers will find valuable not as an advertising . I have seen others do a dis-service to themselves and the company by blatantly retweeting or promoting product specific things and nothing else. It is ok for the brand twitter account to do that but your personal account needs a good mix of personal and business.

Tweet away my friends.

Here is a prediction: It might not be called Flipboard- but the Flipboard experience will become a format for publishing content, just like today content producers publish content in PDF, Word documents, video embeds, etc.

This weekend here in the Bay area was nothing special thanks to all the rain. We certainly need it so the rain was welcomed and did stay away from most of the Neil Young Bridge School Benefit on Saturday which was nice since that was the only outside plans i had. So Sunday was a perfect day to sit on the couch (when the baby was napping) and spend some quality time with the iPad. Flipboard continues to be my favorite and most used App on my iPad (that is my own usage otherwise it is Angry Birds and Peek-a-boo Barn- you decided which one is addicted to what ;-)

I really enjoy the experience of using Flipboard- if you haven't had the pleasure i have embedded a well done video that will show you the general idea of how Flipboard works. The idea is that Flipboard becomes a living changing social magazine- of things that you are interested in and your network is pushing to you. The content of course is only as good as the 'feeds' you add/follow, and the network you currently follow on twitter and facebook- but the interaction with the content is just beautiful.

Aside from the interaction with the content being visually stimulating, i think it is the alignment with how i enjoy and productively consume content- yes many times i still print out things to read because on a flat screen i have troubles consuming it, the Flipboard experience i think changes that.

Now applications like CoverPad who has a new add-on for Wordpress are coming out with tools to make your content act like Flipboard which i think will lead to other tools that will easily allow content produces to provide a Flipboard like experience for their content consumers.

Imagine a user using a tablet with touch screen visits:

• your corporate website, they quickly flip through your product offerings, customer stories etc.
• your employees visit your corporate intranet and flip through articles from corporate (video included), HR announcements, sales wins, product brochures, proposals etc. (how cool would a SharePoint add-on be??)
  
• your customers visit your retail store, (e.g. REI, Nordstroms) and flip through your catalogs.
• Your daily newsletters (internal and external) are sent out and the content consumers interact with them by flipping through current and past 'issues'
• Any many other ways....

Content creation will need to be richer on the production side so producers need to think about that, just like Instapaper and other "read it later" services i believe will change the way online content is written.



Some of you may say, hey Daniela isn't this something the Client Solutions group at Dow Jones can do? Well yes, i sent a note out to corporate a couple weeks back and heard crickets- but we have a lot going on so i need to re-ping. Plus the way we work best (and fast) is to have a client who wants/needs. So i need to find a good use case that we can test this on!

Finally got around to uploading my ebooks to Scribd which is a service that provides social reading and publishing that has a easy to use interface for users and content owners.

The following two ebooks i wrote while working at Dow Jones (where i am still currently). One is about Hybrid Approaches to taxonomies and folksonomies in the enterprise that came out in 2008 and the other one is about how social media is changing the enterprise which i co-wrote with Robert Scoble, Shel Israel and Greg Merkle in 2009.
~enjoy!
The Taxonomy Folksonomy Cookbook: Finding the Right Recipe for Organizing Metadata

You can also view the French Version of the Taxonomy Folksonomy ebook.

Conversational Corporation: How Social Media is Changing the Enterprise

You can also view the French version of the Conversational Corporation ebook.

Currently the New York Times has fewer print readers than Twitter followers.

"The last set of figures released, on 31st March 2010, put the New York Times’ print circulation at 951,063 and reports this week say revenue from circulation is in decline. However, with 2.6 million followers, the paper’s Twitter account is a roaring success. Particularly when you compare it to its rivals."

Following on Twitter could be something pretty passive especially for people who follow many, while physically picking up a paper (and having to go to the store to buy even more) is definitely not passive. I think a more interesting statistic to compare to print readers would be what the referring traffic is from Twitter to the New York Times site and engagement time- how long does a consumer spend reading the physical paper and how long does a vistior that comes from Twitter spend on NYTimes.com?

Image|Flickr|Jarjan