{"id":108899,"date":"2020-09-21T09:30:13","date_gmt":"2020-09-21T14:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inalj.com\/?p=108899"},"modified":"2020-09-21T10:00:25","modified_gmt":"2020-09-21T15:00:25","slug":"on-social-media-manager-work-an-interview-with-valerie-hawkins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inalj.com\/?p=108899","title":{"rendered":"On Social Media Manager Work : an Interview with Valerie Hawkins"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an interview with Valerie Hawkins, social media manager, done by Naomi House<\/a> of INALJ. This is part of INALJ’s 2020 series on non-library jobs for library workers<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

On Social Media Manager Work :
\nan Interview with Valerie Hawkins<\/h2>\n

\"Photo<\/a>Q1: Thanks so much for taking the time to help us better understand what Social Media Manager work is and how LIS folk can get into this field. First could you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you got your MLIS (or your educational background) and what you do for work?<\/b><\/p>\n

My bachelor\u2019s degree is in Interdisciplinary Studies, which I earned from Roosevelt University<\/a> in Chicago, which is the best reflection of all the interests that I have and the skills that I\u2019ve developed in finding out more about them. I\u2019ve always been interested in fiction and nonfiction writing, film, television, music, dance, theater, computers and online networks. I studied all of these at the college level, some to a greater extent than others — like the two years I spent studying screenwriting at the film school of the University of Southern California (USC)<\/a>. But it was there that I had my first library job, a student work-study position at USC\u2019s Doheny Library, working in Special Collections and Circulation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Back home in Chicago, I was \u201cbetween jobs\u201d when I saw an ad in the newspaper \u2013 so you know this is decades ago! \u2013 for a position in the library of the American Library Association<\/a> (ALA). I\u2019d heard of ALA and Banned Books Week, from having visited neighborhood Chicago libraries through the years, but I\u2019d completely missed that the ALA national headquarters was downtown. The job wanted two years of library work experience and I couldn\u2019t believe my luck, that my work-study job could count toward real-life employment!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Plus the job wanted internet skills, and I had already put together a couple of websites based on my pop culture interests \u2013 including pages on Janet Jackson and Dorothy Dandridge, which had information and linked over to others\u2019 websites on them. So I breezed through the typing test, and among my interviewers for the ALA job was the Office for Research and Statistics director, the late, great Dr. Mary Jo Lynch, who passed away earlier this year. Later, she told me that she\u2019d had a good feeling about me, and I had really impressed her when I had gone through the ALA website and found her email address, so I could send her the interview thank-you note directly. This doesn\u2019t sound like much now, but the ALA website was rather difficult to navigate back then, so for someone outside the organization to successfully find information on there and then demonstrably use it was close to miraculous.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was hired to manage the couple hundred periodical subscriptions and the inter-office routing of issues to staff, and to answer questions on the ALA Library Reference Desk, by phone, mail, and e-mail, and by chat\/text for awhile there. And I helped with updating existing and creating new ALA Library Fact Sheets \u2013 which are now called the <\/span>ALA Library Resource Guides<\/span><\/a>, with most of them revised with Springshare LibGuides a few years ago. This led to more work for ALA on the web, and, over time — as I was there nearly two decades — led to working on ALA\u2019s social media properties, including Facebook pages and Twitter accounts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I was able to use my Facebook and Twitter skills at my present job, in a library at a community college, rather unexpectedly, once the shelter-in-place order came down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To alert the students that the library was still available, though now only on a virtual basis, the dean of the library directed the staff to put together weekly themed social media posts across all of its accounts, on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. There were weeks focusing on gaming, on showing the staff reading books\/listening to audiobooks, and on graduation, which showed the old graduation photos of all of the staff. It was fun and well received!<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I handle day-to-day Twitter and Facebook duties for the online Chicago magazine founded by my sister Karen Hawkins, <\/span>Rebellious Magazine for Women<\/span><\/i><\/a>. It is important to promote the magazine\u2019s own content — its articles, columns, interviews, essays, reviews, podcasts, event announcements and reports, and its memberships, advertising opportunities, and branded t-shirts and tote bags. But one of the daily features of the magazine is how it applies its feminist independent media lens to its location, the city of Chicago. My sister created a \u201cfeminist agenda\u201d calendar of Chicago events, centering the events being given by female and female-identifying creators, as well as by the organizations supporting and the businesses owned by those communities. There\u2019s a daily 8:30am CT <\/span>@RebelliousMag<\/span><\/a> tweet and <\/span>Rebellious Magazine for Women Facebook<\/span><\/a> post for that.<\/span><\/p>\n

And I’m also on the founding team of <\/span>Skilltype<\/span><\/a>,<\/span> where I’ve been managing research and social media since 2018.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q2: Now can you tell us how You personally got into doing this type of work?<\/b><\/p>\n

There was no real rhyme or reason to it, and it proceeded quite gradually through my time at ALA. Mainly, I was interested in knowing more about the Internet and how it worked and what was on it \u2013 and what wasn\u2019t on it, and I was reading the various books and blogs and monthly magazines with all of that information, plus I attended a couple of the annual COMDEX computer conventions in Chicago. And I just happened to be in a job where that information could be directly applied to my job duties, although a bit above and beyond the relative simplicity of my job description.<\/span><\/p>\n

Like I said, doing the ALA Library Fact Sheets led to my doing more online work for the ALA Library, including compiling bibliographies on library topics in the OCLC WorldCat<\/a> online catalog, and growing social bookmarking accounts on Delicious and Diigo of categorized librarianship links, which were both used to add supplemental information to the fact sheets.<\/span><\/p>\n

I had created personal accounts on the social media platforms coming along at the time, and I had noticed that there were libraries and other library workers that had created profiles and groups on them. There were questions about ALA and librarianship, and they were a lot of the same questions that I was already answering on the Reference Desk, including some that were right on the ALA FAQ (since discontinued) I\u2019d helped compile. So I decided I would create separate accounts that identified me specifically as a library worker in the library of the American Library Association, so I could go ahead and provide answers to those questions, and anyone reading them could be confident about my answers. I created accounts on LiveJournal and MySpace on June 9, 2006, and then later on BlackPlanet, Facebook, and Twitter, with the threefold goal of interacting with other library workers and with those aspiring to be; to promote the ALA READ posters; and to intentionally put in more places online the answers to ALA\u2019s most frequently asked questions, especially the forever evergreen questions of how to become a librarian and how authors can get their books into libraries.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My accounts preceded and arguably helped make the case for ALA to have an official presence on social media, by showing that its existing members and possible future members were already there. And so later, my participation was directly requested in helping to manage and provide content to the <\/span>I Love Libraries<\/span><\/a> and the <\/span>ALA Official<\/span><\/a> Facebook<\/span> Pages that were started, and the ALA Librarian directed me to create a Facebook Page for the ALA Library (since discontinued), and to create the <\/span>@ALALibrary<\/span><\/a> Twitter account, which was originally just for the ALA Library \u2013 and was actually a shortening of my own account, @ALALibraryVal \u2013 and it was later \u201cpromoted\u201d to being the official Twitter account of the entire organization, co-managed by a selected group of staff. I created the lists linking together the ALA Twitter accounts and the ALA Facebook Pages, which still appear on the <\/span>ALA Connect with Us page<\/span><\/a>. And I gladly agreed to be a founding member of the ALA Staff Social Media Working Group.<\/span><\/p>\n

The later years of my ALA Library Reference Specialist duties were spent using both well-known and somewhat obscure social media platforms. Along with ALA Library staff and interns, I updated and created pages for the ALA Library Professional Tips Wiki, which led to a weekly Ask the ALA Librarian feature in the <\/span>American Libraries<\/span><\/i> AL Direct e-newsletter, and that evolved into a blog, first named Ask the ALA Librarian and then later re-named <\/span>Ask the ALA Library<\/span><\/a>, which was later connected to the ALA Library\u2019s Pinterest account. I collaborated with other ALA staff to help develop ALA\u2019s presence in the Second Life virtual world, which included a Facebook Page, Twitter account, WordPress blog, and <\/span>Flickr Group<\/span><\/a> of its activities on ALA Island and beyond. And I re-designed an existing ALA Netvibes dashboard, to better display the news feeds from all of ALA\u2019s blogs and journals across the association, and renamed it <\/span>What\u2019s New on ALA\u2019s Blogs<\/span><\/a>. On my own time, I was one of the volunteer editors for the old dmoz directory, I submitted missing details on TV and movies to the Internet Movie Database, and I had some tweets pop up in others\u2019 entertainment news articles, plus I was in David Pogue\u2019s <\/span>World According to Twitter<\/span><\/i><\/a> book.<\/span><\/p>\n

Meanwhile, a library co-worker created an e-newsletter named ACRONYMS for the Chicago HQ staff that was so popular, when she announced she was leaving ALA, the first question was assurances that the library would be continuing it. I agreed to take it on, and getting content wasn\u2019t difficult, as I was using Google Reader and then Feedly for that, but I found designing each email-only weekly issue of stories to be cumbersome and time-consuming, and attempts to send it outside the Chicago office always mysteriously failed. I did some research and found the Scoop.it platform, which picked up news stories, with formatting and original link intact, with a click. With Scoop.it, I not only finished ACRONYMS more quickly, but the completed issue resulted in a public website link, which could easily be shared with the staff in ALA\u2019s other offices — in Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and Middletown, CT \u2013 as well as with ALA members and the public. It was featured in the <\/span>2012-2013 ALA Annual Report<\/span><\/a> for that reason. I was later able to spin off two supplements from ACRONYMS, one focusing on social media articles \u2013 which Scoop.it came to highly recommend within the platform, and it came to serve as the knowledge base for the Social Media Working Group \u2013 and the other focusing on weekend \u201coff the clock\u201d events, naming television and online streaming events everyone could watch, and then also listing city-specific events, to acknowledge it was being sent to four different cities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Q3: What makes this a great field for LIS workers and likewise, what do you think makes LIS workers strong candidates for hiring managers in this field?<\/b><\/p>\n

All of the social media work I did at ALA used my existing librarianship skills \u2013 in organizing similar and dissimilar sets of information, and regularly checking them for changes and updates \u2013 and just provided responses and answers in new online distribution ways. Working in social media is a research position, which answers specific reference questions with its posts, messages, videos, etc. What is it that your users want to know? Is it basic questions about your programs like what they are and when, who can attend, if there\u2019s a cost, where they are and if there\u2019s parking and\/or public transportation available? Also who is in it and how to contact the library if there are additional questions, especially concerning accessibility for the disabled? Prepared answers to anticipated questions are the key, built on a foundation of organized, reliable information.\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

With Twitter, I draw a lot of information and re-tweets from curated lists of accounts that I first started years ago, which are spread across all of the Twitter accounts that I handle. Twitter has always had lists, but the platform itself didn\u2019t seem to take an interest in them until this year, coming up with lists of their own they\u2019ve named Twitter Topics, which they have put together for you. I presume they\u2019re useful if you need to hit the Twitter ground running with information you\u2019ve had no opportunity to research yourself. But eventually you\u2019ll have to use your own judgment as to the quality of a resource.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The biggest change I\u2019ve made is to a Breaking News Twitter List that I have, which originally was just local, national, and international media outlets. But in light of COVID-19, I added hospital personnel, epidemiologists, medical journalists, and any others who were tweeting the actual facts of the matter about the virus and its effects and impact. I\u2019d been following the progression of this novel coronavirus overseas since late last year, and I had no doubt it would turn up on our shores eventually. But as dangerous as it sounded, I thought the USA would be okay, because we certainly had more resources than any of the other countries affected, and I was confident the CDC would be mounting a broad defense for the multiples of millions that make up our population, alongside WHO, as we\u2019d done with H1N1. I vividly remembered helping compile online pandemic flu resources for the ALA Library years back. But these are clearly very different times we\u2019re living in now.<\/span><\/p>\n

With the global pandemic, being able to communicate important, necessary information in a clear, direct voice over social media became even more vital. Library workers can quickly determine the most necessary facts to communicate on a subject, as well as discern what actually are the facts in the face of both accidental and intentional misinformation and disinformation attempts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With <\/span>Rebellious<\/span><\/i>, we just needed to switch up from listing the now canceled in-person events to announcing the new virtual ones replacing them. For the now digital-only feminist agenda, there were virtual book launch parties and author talks, live streamed stage play performances, and online comedy improv and dance classes and deejay dance party sets. A regularly updated feature on women-owned restaurants was supplemented with re-tweets from their Twitter accounts announcing their new curbside pickup and delivery options. With a feature done a few years ago on Chicago\u2019s unsung female professional sports teams in mind, I made sure to help announce when those teams were returning to competitive play. A feature on the virtual movie screenings available from Chicago\u2019s independent movie theaters and organizations included one that was showing the Ruth Bader Ginsburg <\/span>RBG<\/span><\/i> documentary, which I was able to connect to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center now having the <\/span>Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg<\/span><\/i> special exhibition until the end of the year. Some of this wouldn\u2019t have been possible without having previously done the work of researching and compiling Twitter lists of Chicago\u2019s various education, entertainment, and sports organizations and facilities and annual events.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Q4: What is the best way to get your foot in the door or your first Social Media Manager job?<\/b><\/p>\n

The difficulty with claiming to have expertise in social media is that everyone can claim to have expertise in social media, from having used it themselves. The point is to show your social media skills in a professional context. I created a social media portfolio for myself over on Medium<\/a> a few years ago to show my post-ALA work, especially in using newer social media platforms like Wakelet, Flipboard, Pinboard, and Listly.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not like I had to convince my sister, I\u2019ll admit! I\u2019ve been <\/span>@RebelliousVal<\/span><\/a> in conjunction with the magazine since she launched it in 2012.<\/span><\/p>\n

And it\u2019s fair to say Skilltype founder Tony Zanders came looking for me more because my name was on all of the ALA Library Fact Sheets than anything else! Skilltype just launched July 1, 2020, and right now we\u2019re focused on various go-to-market activities you’ll be hearing more about soon.<\/span><\/p>\n

Q5: Finally what are some of the most important skills \/ certifications \/ etc that LIS folk can do to prepare them? Any last tips?<\/b><\/p>\n

Whether you\u2019re working for a library or a company or corporation, there\u2019s no shortcut to putting in the research. Social media is a voice; the most effective voice is one that speaks from a place of knowledge and relevance, that is concise but complete.<\/strong> What is it that users would want to know, or need to know?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

One of my favorite Twitter accounts, that I stumbled upon when I was still working at ALA, was <\/span>@Onionista<\/span><\/a> of the National Onion Association. It\u2019s still around! And of course the first question about it is, \u201cThere\u2019s a National Onion Association??\u201d And the next question is, \u201cAnd I would care about the National Onion Association because–??\u201d But it\u2019s delightful! The avatar is a female cartoon character, joyfully tossing up a couple of the different kinds of onions. The original tweets consist of big, colorful photos accompanying a wide array of recipes that use onions, and there\u2019s now a cartoon character to illustrate their messages on the health benefits of eating onions. Everything there clearly advocates for the onion, and that\u2019s why the account as well as the association exist.<\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s social media marketing and management certifications and degrees seemingly available from everyone, from relatively new online academies to centuries-old colleges and universities, and all points in between. The technical information is concrete and usually appears on the websites of the various platforms. It\u2019s developing content and a strategy to communicate that content that is a little more complex and may call for you to seek guidance. That\u2019s where the various educational options come in, but make sure to explore your own local public library, which may have not just books and videos, but also online classes that you can take at no cost. The information is out there.<\/span><\/p>\n

Interviewee Bio<\/strong><\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/div>\n
Valerie Hawkins (she\/her\/hers) has been working in libraries for 25 years and counting, including 19 years spent in the Library of the American Library Association. She tweets as <\/span>@LibrariesVal<\/span><\/a> and displays news and information online on libraries and library workers using <\/span>The Tweeted Times<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Medium<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Wakelet<\/span><\/a>, and <\/span>Netvibes<\/span><\/a>. She holds a B.A. from Roosevelt University in Interdisciplinary Studies (film, writing, media, getting in good trouble).<\/span><\/em><\/div>\n
\n

****<\/p>\n

Views expressed are those of the interviewee and not INALJ or their employer. Photo provided by the interviewee and permission granted to use it for this interview.<\/em><\/p>\n

All INALJ Library and LIS jobs<\/a> may be found here. How to Sponsor or Post a Job<\/a> information here.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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This is an interview with Valerie Hawkins, social media manager, done by Naomi House of INALJ. This is part of INALJ’s 2020 series on non-library jobs for library workers.\u00a0 On Social Media Manager Work : an Interview with Valerie Hawkins Q1: Thanks so much for taking the time to help us better understand what Social…<\/p>\n

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