The Webinar Experience and Library Land Influencers

One of the main things I learned from our overview of webinars last week was that there are many things that can go wrong in a webinar! There are the myriad technical issues, such as the BlueJeans fiasco in class where PowerPoint would not sync with our screens and we would be redirected out of the session. As other classmates mentioned in their webinar watching experiences, sometimes the presentations would just be bad. The presenters misrepresent their content or they do not include images to capture attention, for example. In my opinion, most of these issues can be overcome by repeated practice, knowing the needs of your audience, and embedded expertise on the subject at hand. I guess I will know for sure during our webinars next week!

Speaking of our webinar project, I am happy I have a partner instead of doing it alone. Taking turns moderating and presenting is not only a relief in terms of handling responsibility, but it also gives you better vantage points of how webinars are conducted and how they serve their audience. If I was presenting the whole time, I might be unaware of an extensive conversation in the chat box, meaning I could be missing out on the questions my audience has or the key points of the presentation that capture their interest the most. Shutting yourself off to any one part of this webinar instructional experience does a disservice to your own professional development, as either experience of presenter or moderator informs how your instruction adapts and evolves for future teaching.

For this week, we were tasked with finding social media influencers in Library Land and identify whether they have a professional presence on at least two platforms.  Fortunately, I found this task to be quite easy due to my creepy, yet ingenious, networking habit of logging people I meet at conferences or internships into a spreadsheet. I picked around five people from this spreadsheet and found some of the social media platforms they use to share their professional knowledge. Twitter, no surprise, was the most common platform that these influencers used to talk about librarianship or user experience research. LinkedIn was also a common platform, but I do not find it useful in the sense of learning professional expertise because LinkedIn is more of a platform where the point is to be on it rather than generate meaningful content, much like Facebook. I think what surprised me was seeing how many of these influencers connected to their Pinterest pages, which not only documented Library Land fascinations but also their own personal hobbies or pop culture obsessions. I am not sure how powerful Pinterest is as a networking tool, but it does nicely blend the personal and the professional in a tasteful way. It made me wonder how these influencers portray themselves depending on the platform and whether a following on a certain platform leads to more opportunities than others. Overall, I would say this exercise helped me understand how influence can be defined and re-defined on different platforms as well as reiterate how vital a social media presence is in order to stay professionally relevant within our respective occupations.