Category Archives: social media

December 28, 2009 · 10:46 pm

Social Media Marketing: Tapping into our patrons

Librarians have been paying close attention to social media, aka web 2.0, social networking etc for some time, but are we missing an important part of the social media explosion? Books like Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business, and Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, among many others, discuss the importance of social media marketing.

Did you know that it took nine months for Facebook to add over one hundred million users? Did you know that the fast growing demographic segment of Facebook are users between 55 and 65 years in age? Did you know that businesses are expected to quadruple the segment of their marketing budget allocated for social media marketing?

Experts versus people

Today I am thinking about the wisdom of crowds versus that of experts. The wisdom of crowds is typical known as statistical groups. The theory holds that large groups of people (the larger the better) are statistically more accurate than experts. This is ONLY true when any one person within the group is likely to be more than 50% right.

This principle underlies the philosophy of our democratic system. So my question is what role do experts and/or librarian play in this type of information system? Do we provide a check/balance to the crowd?

I guess from my point-of-view, I believe that people are good. That they want to add to the information flow in an honest manner. That they don’t change wiki pages they know nothing about.