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Transparency and participation are hallmarks of today’s Web, but what do organizations and individuals do when users leave negative comments on blogs, social networking websites, message boards, etc.? According to JupiterResearch, only 12% of Internet users have left negative comments about a company or product online, however, these people tend to be influencers and so this is a valid concern. Here are some suggestions for dealing with the negative.
Stay Informed. Monitor your blog comments and social networking profiles so that you are aware if you have received negative feedback and can be ready to respond to it. Run periodic Technorati vanity searches (search for your url) to see what people in the blogosphere are saying about you.
Moderate with Discretion. You have the ability to moderate comments on your own blog, but bear in mind that if you don’t allow people to have a voice, they will go elsewhere to be heard. It is often better to enable people to introduce their criticisms in a forum where you can respond.
Create a Conversation. Respond in a positive manner to the criticism and encourage others to join in a discussion about the topic. Demonstrate that you respect that your readers/patrons/customers have a right to their own opinions, and that you’re willing to hear them.
Keep Your Cool. You don’t want to engage in a confrontation with your critic. While we can all think up snappy comebacks, putting that person down will only leave them and the rest of your readers with a bad feeling. Instead, view this as an opportunity to address concerns that others may have been keeping in check, and to learn something valuable.
Be Yourself. Don’t pose as a reader/user to challenge negative comments. Believe it or not, most people will see right through this and you will lose the respect of your audience. People respond best to honesty and authenticity, even if it’s not perfect, so be yourself!
Pass it Along. An immediate response to dealing with anything negative is to get it over with and move on, however, dealing with negative feedback can often lead to positive change. After dealing with the PR end, pass the feedback along to the appropriate department in your organization. Was the negative comment about your customer service? Forward the feedback to that division so they can consider making some changes.
Want more suggestions? Here are a few helpful articles on the topic:
Matt Bolin alerted me to the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries’ Library Arcade. Graduate students from their Entertainment Technology Center have teamed up with the University Libraries to create educational games to help students develop library research skills. They have two games so far – “I’ll Get It” in which players must help fellow students find library resources, and “Within Range”, a library re-shelving game using the LC classification system. They are still in the testing phase, but have made the games available to the public.
As many of you may have heard, The Library of Congress has partnered with Flickr to display their historical photo collections in a social environment. They have uploaded two sets of photos with over 1,500 images each and have invited Flickr users to help describe them by assigning tags to photos. Users can also place comments on the images. The collections include “News in the 1910s” – a collection consisting of sporting events, crime, politics, and entertainment news photos, and “1930s-40s in Color” including photos of farming, factory life, railroads, and women working from 1939-1944. Check them out and add some tags!
Smashcut Media has put together this well-constructed video which explains the concept of data portability in straightforward terms that everyone can understand. Just yesterday I was thinking of how much easier it would be if data portability was a reality and I had just one global account for all of my media as I was adding the photos of my recent Fort Myers trip to Flickr, and then creating a separate Slide slideshow for Facebook. I was considering this earlier this month as well when I was sending out LinkedIn invites to my Facebook contacts. I’ll definitely be keeping tabs on this initiative.
Michelle Boule of A Wandering Eyre has written a new Library Technology Report which is now available titled Changing the Way We Work. She reports on how to integrate new technology into group work and best practices for working in a virtual team environment. She presents several case studies and a listing of tools available. Find out about ordering a copy of this and other LTR issues here.
Got an iGoogle start page? Want to see a different library pic everytime you load it up? There’s a new Google Gadget that you can add to your page which will let you do just that. It’s the Custom iGoogle Skins by Bonstio which will allow you to not only choose from many of the provided themes to spice up your page, but will let you import a random image from any Flickr group which will change each time you refresh the page.
Here’s how it works:
Follow the link above or Select “Add Stuff” at the top right of your iGoogle page and search for Custom iGoogle Skins.
Choose “Add it Now” to add it to your page.
Once you add the gadget to your page, you’ll want to expand it so you can select a theme (click the + sign).
Go to the “Rules” tab and select “Feeling Lucky?” from the drop-down list and click the plus sign next to it to add this new rule.
At this point you have added the theme, but it’s pulling in images from the HDR Panorama group, so you’ll want to change that.
Up at the top of the gadget, click the upside-down triangle and select “Edit Settings”. The sixth option down will give you the opportunity to change the Flickr group id, this is where you will enter the number for any Flickr group.
Finding the Flickr group ID number is a bit tricky so I’ve provided some for you below, but if you hover your mouse over the “Join this Group” or “Invite” links when in any Flickr group, you will see a number at the end of a URL (after “id=”) appear down in your status bar – that’s the number you need.
Woohoo! LISNews has put together a directory of the top 10 Blogs To Read In 2008 based on reader feedback, and iLibrarian has made the list! I’m thrilled to be included in such esteemed company, a great big thanks to everyone who voted for iLibrarian !!!
MySpace will be amping up their security measures in an effort to combat child predators in their online community. Yesterday, it was announced that MySpace is cooperating with the attorneys general in 49 states to implement a number of child protection safeguards. According to the New York Times:
MySpace will classify as private all profiles of users under the age of 18
Strengthen its response to complaints of inappropriate content on the site
Organize a task force of Internet businesses, nonprofit organizations and technology companies to review and develop online safety tools
The site will also accept independent monitoring
and according to the WSJ (via TechCrunch), MySpace will:
Allow parents to submit a child’s email addresses to MySpace to prevent anyone from misusing the addresses to set up profiles.
Make the default setting “private” for 16- and 17-year-old users so they cannot be viewed by adults they don’t already know.
Respond within 72 hours to complaints about inappropriate content and devote more staff and resources to classify photographs and discussion groups.
Strengthen software against underage users.
Create a high school section for users under 18 years old.
Sam Wallin (aka Crash Solo), and other librarians at the Vancouver Community Library in Vancouver, Washington have created a series of 60-second book review videos called “The One Minute Critic”. Originally the video project began as a way to promote an event of the same name, but the effort has since taken on a life of its own. You can check out more of these entertaining and informative videos on the One Minute Critic blog, or on the blip.tv show page.
Erica Marie DeWolf of eMarketing & New Media pens Six Creative Uses for RSS and Using RSS Feeds to your Advantage in which she provides useful tips on how to make the most of RSS technology. Through these two articles DeWolf advises:
Subscribe to a custom News RSS feed
Develop an RSS Feed for your non-blog site
Use eBay’s RSS option
Watch for new music on iTunes
Keep an eye on your personal brand – your name
Subscribe to others’ del.icio.us bookmarks
Subscribe to the blogs and websites you look at often
Manage you and your company’s reputation
Broadcast a feed of your blog or a keyword Blog Search on your website
Common Craft has produced a new video, Online Photo Sharing in Plain English which explains new photo-sharing websites in simple, straightforward terms. For more explanatory videos from their “In Plain English” series, see the Common Craft Show.
A new report from Pew Internet & American Life Project titled Increased use of video-sharing sites has found that 48% of Internet users have visited a video-sharing website such as YouTube. This is an increase from the 33% of users in December 2006. The study also found that visitor traffic on video-sharing websites on a typical day has doubled over the last year.
The big news this week in the world of social networking was yesterday’s announcement that Google, Plaxo, and Facebook have joined the Data Portability Workgroup (DPW) along with MySpace and Yahoo!. The mission of the DPW group is to create interoperability between social networks which would allow members to access friends and media between all of the social communities to which they belonged. For more coverage of this story, check out:
The beginning of the new year has inspired many of us to undertake the daunting task of redesigning our websites, or to create new ones. I have just finished a complete redesign of my website, and thought it would be helpful to pass along the links and research that I did in the process.
Free Website Templates
Why start from scratch when you can download a free, professional-looking website that you can customize and make your own? These template downloads include everything you’ll need to get started including the page code, graphics, and CSS.
Open Source Web Design – Fantastic website with over 2,000 free design downloads including blog templates.
Free Layouts – Over 500 free downloads here including MySpace and blog templates.
Free Hosted Website Builders
These websites not only provide easy-to-use website building tools, and often drag-and-drop AJAX editors, so that you can get a website up and running in no time, but they will host the website for you.
Weebly - Over 30 starter templates to choose from, and easy drag-and-drop interface, and Weebly will let you use your own domain or they will host your website for you.
Webjam - Create personal or group, public or private pages in this community by dragging modules onto a page.
Pagii - Personal webpage or digital scrapbook creator which lets you drag-and-drop images and other content anywhere on your pages.
Freewebs - This site creator has over 300 website templates to choose from, websites can include blogs, chat rooms, forums, photos which can be edited by Picnik, and videos. More than 17 million websites created here.
Jimdo - Easy website creation tool which will let you copy the design of other websites.
SiteKreator - This easy to use design tool has both free and paid options, offering unlimited pages and 10 MB of hosted space.
SynthaSite - A lot of functionality available in this website creator with drag-and-drop widgets including a Flickr search, easy YouTube, Metacafe, and other video embedding, and RSS.
Widgets
Spice up any website or blog with additional content being drawn in by a widget. Here are some examples, but find more at Widgetbox.
Hyplet - Create a Hyplet blogger’s box with all of your contact info and pic.
Eventful - If you are a writer, speaker, or performer of any type, you can list your events with Eventful and then pull them into your website via a widget which you can style yourself via your own CSS, or just use theirs.
Slideshare - Display your PowerPoint presentations on your website by embedding them with the Slideshare widget.
tumblr - Aggregate all of the content you create on your blogs, Flickr, del.icio.us, Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts and then embed your tumblr into your website. (This one’s a bit advanced, but looks great!)
Images
If you’re looking for free stock images to use on your website, there are plenty of places you can go. Here are some starting points.
Website Analytics Tools
After all that hard work, you may want to know how many visitors you’re getting and where they’re coming from. Here are some free tools to help you do just that.
Sitemeter - This tool is very straightforward and easy to digest. The free version will display the number of visitors to your website or blog, their page views, the last 100 referring URLs which led them to your site, and many other statistics.
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