It was a cold an wintry day. The windchill was -10F. The snow was up to the top of my boots, and many places hadn’t shoveled yet. The meeting was early, and it was barely light when I arrived, thoroughly bundled up. Outside the local Ann Arbor Google Headquarters, it looked like this.
Inside, it was much more warm and welcoming, and looked like this.
The topic of the day’s meeting was using Web 2.0 for higher education and marketing. I signed a nondisclosure agreement, so can’t say a great deal, but there are a few things I can share that are not terribly specific and don’t recreate any portion of a presentation.
1. They used Prezi for most of the presentations. I disliked it for reasons of cognitive and sensory accessibility, which provoked an interesting and engaged conversation in Twitter. More on that in the next post.
2. They shared lots of metrics and quotations that basically said, “You need to be online and in social media NOW, and you need to do it right.” This included case studies and examples of academic institutions doing it right.
3. Mobile, mobile, mobile. And location-aware.
4. They talked briefly about metrics (nothing really new), listening tools (ditto), and Q&A tools. This last is a category I am aware of, but had not thought of in the way they were, and this is where I see the potential greatest relevance for librarians. Basically, we need to be thinking about positioning ourselves in online Q&A spaces as accessible experts in information, much as many libraries have down with instant messaging, but moving it more into community public spaces & forums.
5. The NEW UM Gateway goes live tomorrow morning. Watch for it. We talked about ways to use social media to engage our audience in ways that will allow their content to be considered for the gateway space.
Emerging Technologies Librarian 
I constantly spent my half an hour to read this weblog’s posts daily along with a cup of coffee.
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