Social media and user-generated content: the key roles of publishers and libraries in the future.

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1 Social media and user-generated content: the key roles of publishers and libraries in the future. Apantree Kandet* Librarian Practitioner Academic Resource Center The changes from the information society have arrived and the ways that people find information are now different from before. There are many new forms of information resources, through which most materials are becoming electronic, making people need some system to support the innovations of information technology. Digital technology has become an important instrument for people, helping them to interact with information. The widespread use of digital technology has made people change their traditional behaviour and expectation of finding answers from the new experience of new information resources. New media platforms, as information channels, are popular among users for connecting with social networks via the internet. These platforms are the new channels from which to access information from digital devices. Moreover, the aspect of users participation with social media to share experience or information and build interaction among users in their groups, such as by sending s or live chatting, are the new challenges for libraries and publishers to help people to get the benefit from new technology in the information society (Berman and Kesterson-Townes, 2012). The demands of users in relation to digital consumption behaviours are affecting libraries and publishers, in that they have to move forward to prepare digital content and digital material as multiple media forms to be available for their customers in the age of social media and digital culture. They should have begun to change their role to develop more strategies to combine existing services and new media, by focusing on users behaviour in modern communities (Huvila, 2012). This essay will focus on the role of publishers in the context of social media and user-generated content, and possible future directions for libraries and publishers, by showing the advantages and disadvantages about this topic. The essay will also present other views from articles and related resources in order to provide an overview of the possible role of publishers and libraries in the future. The role of publishers: looking forward through the past Since the manufacturing of printed texts was invented by Johann Gutenberg in 1448, the form of the book has changed from one generation to the next. The process of the book publishing industry has developed steadily, in which currently the key change in print processes is the technological revolution, moving from the printed word to digitization (Thompson, 2005). In the past, the traditional role of the book publishing industry has been to focus on information dissemination as a producer, by making and controlling information such as printed books, magazines or newspapers, from authors to the public. Actually, the purpose of publishers in delivering information to customers is not much different from today, but it is different in the form of modern resources, which constitute the challenge for publishers, to face various kinds of media: not only print media or traditional media but also electronic resources, which lead to the transformation of the role of traditional publishers to find creative ways to 1

2 communicate with users and provide new channels for promoting and marketing their products (Thompson, 2010). Building social media applications; the challenge of publishers to create new tools The way to create and disseminate information resources in the digital age has made opportunities for the book publishing industry to restructure their business by focusing on users behaviour and users needs, which relate to social network sites or new media. The trade market of new media has developed rapidly, social media being a new channel for publishers to deliver information or promote and market their products to customers. This has been used in terms of user interfaces which allow clients to communicate and track them. In the present day, many publishers are using Facebook, Twitter and weblog to broadcast services or products. There is no need to pay fees, they just create public pages via social media applications and develop attractive content or promote company activities such as games or discount promotions, in which clients can participate and get the benefits from such activities. Moreover, publishers can use social media platforms for exchanging information or knowledge between publishers and clients, from which they can get opinions, comments or feedback from users instantly. These new trends mean that users can be audiences and producers at the same time (This issue will be discussed in the user-generated content section). Figure1: Cambridge University Press on Facebook 2

3 From Figure 1, this picture illustrates the Cambridge University Press Facebook page, which is an alternative way to promoting and branding the organisation, by using social media strategies. There is a link to the original website at the top right hand corner, from which users can use this button to go directly to the website of Cambridge University Press. In addition, on the left hand side of this picture, there is an example of content delivery to show the description of the new book that they have published, which the user can follow in detail and share with others. The role of publishers in the context of social media is the way in which to use new technologies to add the value of extra services in the online environment, which can be available twenty-four hours a day and is appropriate for all users who use the internet (Thompson, 2005). Figure 2: Chulalongkorn University Press Fanpage on Facebook The second example is the Chulalongkorn University Press Fanpage (Figure 2); this is the publisher of Chulalongkorn University in Thailand. The main objectives of Chulalongkorn University Press are providing and publishing academic text books from both general and academic staff in the University to disseminate to the general public at reasonable prices (ChulaPress, 2009). Figure 3: New promotion for the National Book Fair

4 The picture in Figure 3 shows the way in which publishers use Facebook to promote publishing products by offering a good deal for clients who buy their products (for this example, customers will get free premium bags as a gift for every purchase of at least 6). In the middle of the page, it shows that people can share this page with others, which is the marketing technique of publishers - to do viral marketing by using social network applications. It therefore shows how social media tools help publishers to distribute products, and how these tools help with branding itself. Moreover, it also gets benefits from users who spread the information to others by word of mouth, which is a very low-cost marketing strategy. According to Lis and Berz (2011), the numbers of people using social media tools are increasing; 84% of Europeans spend time on social networks for and Facebook is the most popular of these social network tools, in which people can participate in sharing knowledge or getting information from the pages that they follow. Hence, the adoption of social media, particularly Facebook, to develop online platforms in the form of publishing fan pages is the way to understand what clients want or be closer to customers, to know about their feedback or what are they thinking about products, in order to create and provide any kind of content which can be reached by users needs. Furthermore, publishers, through the role of social media platforms, have moved rapidly to change the form of marketing and distributing; publishers can have social media platforms themselves, to communicate with users via publishers homepages. Building applications or creating effective categories are significant to transmit information or knowledge along target groups, which are easy to access and have great updatability in the online environment (Berman and Kesterson-Townes, 2012). Developing digital content is significant for publishers; in addition, web-based social activity is becoming a new service innovation as a multimedia platform for sharing or exchanging information between clients and publishers, which can draw people to publishers websites, where customers can be producers as well, and generate content on the sites (Yang, Weng and Hsiao, 2014). 4

5 Figure 4: Example of the Cambridge University Press website Figure 4 shows the detail of digital books from the Cambridge University Press website. The big red circle shows a mini icon of social network applications, which users can share with the public or friends by clicking on the icon; it will link directly to an application that they want to share via their personal account; moreover, customers can give feedback or suggestions about the product through this website, from which publishers can apply this information to develop their services and collections in the future (shown in the small pink circle). In addition to various kinds of electronic and non-electronic products, the Cambridge University Press website also has many services to support user requirements by creating more applications such as events, offers, news and authors spotlights, which shows that the publisher is not just a content provider but tries to add real value to their content to let users get information through a one-window access. Publishers, in the role of social media platforms, support social movement to create communication networks, which are the virtual space for publishers or companies and their users to get benefits together, and it is a place for interaction and collaboration - to share ideas, knowledge, photos, etc. (Boateng and Liu, 2013). Although social media can offer advantages to most publishers, it has weak points as well, which can be described from the examples above, about the number of people who Like or Follow publishers Facebook pages, that show the low number of people who have actually followed pages. This is especially true for Chulalongkorn University Press, which has been on Facebook since 2011 but has only 1,720 people who have followed a page (retrieved 3 March, 2014) or even Cambridge University Press, where only 57,883 people have followed a page (retrieved 3 March, 2014). This is the issue that publishers should know: why people 5

6 are not interested in tracking their website and how to encourage them to follow or participate in their services. User-generated content: new feature for publishers websites According to Lampert and Chung (2011), a fundamental aspect of user participation in social media communities is that users who have basic computer skills can share content through the concept of anyone can do it by making contributions in part of the content creation, which they can use in social media to create content in various forms, such as audio, text, videos and pictures. The concept of anyone can do it - as content creation by users in the forms of user-generated content, in which users can be contributors or producers - is growing rapidly in the digital environment. Online users can share and edit digital content on websites such as Wikipedia, or create and share their own documents to the public via open source software applications (Singer and Ashman, 2009). Nowadays, publishers are seeking new ways to create applications that users can interface with, because they want to know what people think and what people do in online communities; the aim of publishers is to reallocate marketing resources to hit the niche target groups. The starting point of user-generated content in publishing is to facilitate collaboration as a feedback channel to making a connection between clients and publishers. Moreover, publishers can get the benefits from user-generated content by making Trends among users, as a business branding management strategy (Lis and Berz, 2011). For instance, when people want to buy books or e-books from Amazon, some people will check the rating of the books or look for customers reviews before purchasing to assist their decision making, to ensure that the products are good quality by using the level of the ratings as a quality guarantee (Figure 5). Figure 5: Books ratings from the Amazon website 6

7 Where does the star rating come from? Figure 6: The details of star ratings In Figure 6, under the book cover it shows the star rating on a scale of 1 to 5, which comes from customers reviews. This not only shows the amount of people who rank it but also the reviews from users who have had experience with this book. Furthermore, Amazon websites allow people to track the comments via , and it also lets people post their comments about the products through a discussion board. 7

8 Figure 7: Book rating and review of a Cambridge University Press book Figure 7 demonstrates that Cambridge University Press is using user-generated content by allowing people to rate and review their products as well, but the difference between Amazon and Cambridge University Press is the amount of people who rank the product. Having observed many pages of the Cambridge University Press website, it was found that most of the products have no reviews or ratings from customers, especially as regards textbooks, while on the Amazon website, it has a lot of people participating with the website by reviewing, rating or giving feedback. One reason, perhaps, of low ratings or reviews on the Cambridge University Press website is that the content of the website is not suitable for general users, plus the design of the content looks formal and not user-friendly. The way in which to approach marketing and branding for publishing products is not only by employing social media or creating high quality content, but it is also about knowing what people want and how to reach the customer requirements. Social tagging interface feature on blogs: increasing your visibility The tagging interface feature is a feature of social software whereby users can use tags or a # (Hashtag) as a keyword to filter or classify the same topics together, which makes people find it easier. The social tagging feature is popular among users for interacting, sharing and contributing content, especially for bloggers. According to Bodnar (2011), the definition of Hashtag is described in The Ultimate Inbound Marketing Glossary as A hashtag is a tag used on the social network Twitter as a way to annotate a message. A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by #. Example: #yourhashtag. Hashtags are commonly used to show that a 8

9 tweet, a Twitter message, is related to an event or conference, online or offline. The growth of blogs in internet culture is increasing, so that users can be producers or authors, through which they can disseminate their works via social media platforms, using tags to control the website as search tools. Finding your posts in the form of keyword phases are a great way of promoting and organising blogs (Viziblity, 2011). The use of the social tagging feature among publishers will focus on generating content and creating categories in terms of grouping similar tags or content, which aims to improve the implementation of digital content services and activities in terms of alternative browsing methods and bookmarking systems (Figure 8). Figure 8: Cambridge Journals blog on the Cambridge University Press website Open access: transparency and free access for scholarly communities Open access publishing is the new method for researchers and authors who want to publish their research under the conditions of copyright and an open access licence, making their articles visible in crowded markets on open access publishing, which has no cost to the reader and also has a peer review service, where expert reviewers will give some advice and evaluate articles before publishing, to make sure that the articles will be published in high quality publications (Springer, 2014). In terms of open access, publishers and libraries will be host communities to generating collections of data and creating subscription-based journals to access articles with no barriers (Labguru Blog, 2013) 9

10 Conclusion The changes in book marketing in the digital environment have affected the publishing process; publishers and libraries have to extend their services to interface with digital consumers, from which they can take advantage of new technologies to make new services. The co-operations between publishers, libraries, scholars and users to making academic communities by using social media platforms will be seen clearly in the future. Publishers and libraries are not only content providers but they are also being content contributors, developing hybrid collections to support user requirements with the right levels at the right time. Moreover, making digital space in areas of social media platforms can help scholars or researchers to market their works, thereby breaking down the wall between publishers and authors/researchers to create partnerships in the research community (Fieldhouse and Marshall, 2012). Publishers and libraries have to generate an online digital content delivery to their customers in a variety of channels and provide tools to access digital content, which is compatible with various operation systems in different forms of media, through one-window access with specific reading devices such as mobile devices, e-readers, Kindles and ipads (Chowdhury and Chowdhury, 2011). Furthermore, publishers and libraries should use the strong points of social media software tools to develop and integrate their websites in terms of crossdisciplinary contributions, to support user needs. Meanwhile, knowing about user behaviours and how they are seeking information is the core challenge to developing and combining social media platforms that can enable users to access information at individual levels in the right way. Library staff, web publishers and web developers should learn more about how to use social media software tools and make it useful for their clients, as well as know how to collaborate with users and researchers to create academic communities in a sustainable way to support the strategic activity goals of the organisation. 10

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12 Thompson,J.B.(2005) Book in the digital age: the transformation of academic and higher Education publishing in Britain and the United States, Cambridge: Polity Press. Thompson, J.B.(2010) Merchants of culture: the publishing business in the twenty-first century, Cambridge: Polity Press. Viziblity, (2011) Tag, You are it! 3 reasons why tags are important. 21 February Visibility: Blog. Available at: [Accessed: 3 March 2014]. Yang, M., Weng, S. and Hsiao, P.(2014) Measuring blog service innovation in social media services, Internet Research, 24(1), pp