Thursday, August 29, 2013

The Changing Face of Social Media

Dorpsomroeper / Town-crier
When I started blogging regularly in 2000 I knew that social media or social publishing was the future for most things. But it would take a long time for the world to catch up.

When I moved from the Scottish Further Education Unit to the Scottish Qualifications Authority in 2003.  I was not really surprised by the high degree of suspicion around things like blogs and then things like twitter .

Even though I have always made it clear that I used these things in an unofficial capacity.  I had to go with SQA's then CEO's blessing to our Scottish Govt sponsoring department to get permission to blog in any capacity. 

I was not doing it to be subversive but simply to reach the parts of the world that a more official means never really reaches - perhaps that is subversive. I was pleased too to see schools and what was then Learning and Teaching Scotland staff getting the blogging bug.

I have to say everyone in the end was always reluctantly supportive of what I was doing usually when I pointed to who and where we were generating business through my use of social media - but there was always, a sometimes silent  majority and sometimes some quite vocal and threatening pokes, usually from other agencies,  that would have quite liked a bit less blogging and tweeting from my direction .

The world has changed - I enjoyed reading our organisation's  latest social media metrics report this month.

·         Within those authors directly referencing SQA, we are encouraged by the continual engagement created by Joe Wilson and Tahir Mohammed, with both authors continually growing their following and becoming authoritative voices in the education sector.

Yes we do social media metrics now -  and  we now have an organisational social media policy.

I hope that means that New Ventures and innovation is getting a bit closer to the heart of what we do and not that I am now being overtaken by events.

If you are a lone educational blogger or twitterer in your organisation - keep the faith and keep sharing - it really will be alright in the end.

I would still like to see a much longer list of SQA staff on this list and I think that many other public organisations have a long way to go too.


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