Earlier today I gave a presentation at the Oxford Social Media 2011 event hosted by Oxford University Libraries. The brief was to discuss ways to market yourself as a librarian using social media, and rather than just update my previous presentation on a similar topic, I chose to change the focus slightly and concentrate on the marketing and personal branding side of things rather than the fundamentals of social media.

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The second workshop I ran at the CoFHE/UC&R Joint Conference was aimed primarily at new professionals, although much of the content was relevant to all – it was titled “New professionals: build your network using social media”. I updated some of the material from similar presentations I have given previously, and extended the scope to include tools and tips to help build a network.

The main focus of the presentation was blogging and microblogging as they are the social media tools I’ve gained most from personally. I also touched on the use of social networking and we had interesting discussions around Facebook and LinkedIn.

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Last week I did something a bit different – I was asked a few weeks ago if I could be interviewed for a podcast about social media, and was pleased to accept. It was actually for a social media module at University of Aberystwyth, so I was especially pleased to be involved as I had provided feedback from my course that it had been a shame this had not been covered during my Diploma.

Nicole Schultz (who also has an interest in social media) is responsible for developing the module and she came up with the great idea that it would be good to include podcasts from a number of different angles of social media. She has already interviewed companies who are using social media, a web designer, and other aspects of social media, but she wanted to interview me about my use of social media – how I got into it, what I use it for, and tips to pass onto other students.

It was great to meet Nicole (I also picked her brains about my dissertation, will post about that soon), and I really enjoyed the relaxed nature of the interview. It will be made available as a podcast for students studying the module and I think it’s a good way to practice what you preach and actually get students using social media during the module. The recording device was great too – really small and includes USB connection on device to download straight to PC. If I do some interviews for my dissertation I’ll definitely be looking into getting (or borrowing!) something like that.