Social media experiences

The Peter Singer story:

I’m guessing you know who Peter Singer is, having taught philosophy, so I’ll jump right in with the story. Late this summer, we received a request from a publisher to reprint an article (by Peter Singer) that appeared in the 1974 edition of the Philosophic Exchange. This is the first time that we’ve received such a request when it wasn’t on behalf of the author of the article. In those cases, it’s an automatic yes. In this case, I searched out Dr. Singer, who was still active and teaching at Princeton, and sent him an email explaining the situation and telling him that (although we held the copyright), we were passing this request on to him. Whatever remuneration there was, should go to him, as well as the decision as to whether he wanted his work to appear in this forthcoming publication. I quickly received a nice note back thanking me, and saying he would respond to the request. Then, last week, that same paper came up as our Featured Paper of the Day, and I tweeted it, and sent him my congratulations PotD email. He immediately responded, and tweeted it himself. Almost instantaneously there was a flurry of activity on the website, and people all over the world started downloading this article. We had more than 300 downloads of that article in the next few hours. It was fascinating to watch those pins drop.

Establishing the alumni connection:

This next story is chronicled below. When this month’s Activity Updates came out, I identified 5 or 6 people, whose works were in part responsible for areas in which the repository excelled in the previous month. Several were from the Education department. For each of those, I sent a little congratulatory email (as seen below) to the author, and copied their advisor in, as well. Finally, I sent a summary on to Janka, the department chair. I was pleased to see that Frank, one of the advisors, followed up with his own email to the student. I think that one will mean more to Karen, than anything I could send, and it represents to me another way that Digital Commons can help build and maintain connections with Brockport’s alumni.

All this being said, I know I don’t do nearly the amount of marketing or work in social media that I did in the early days of the IR, but experiences like these convince me that the time is worth the effort!