Social Media Workshop

I have created this blog after attending a really informative social media workshop, 'Social Media; tools for reasearh and collaboration' at Edinburgh University. Speakers Lesley Thomson, a Knowledge Manager from Scottish Government and Helen Muir, Research Support Librarian at Queen Margaret University, gave excellent presentations and specifically spoke about using Social Media for research and collaboration. Phil Bradley was the afternoon speaker that day and he went over the use of Social Media and search facilities. How we use social media, how we now use websites, ways to search for information and ways to store information for later consumption. Everyone now talks about 'Information Overload'. Phil pointed out that we have always had too much information. All that is wrong nowadays is that the filter mechanism has broken down somewhat.

Phil spoke about blogs, not only for research purposes, but also to share good information and best practice. If we have good information, information that people are interested in and can trust, then we will get more followers and we will become more visible in our professional capacity. Our organisations will therefore benefit too.

Although I keep a daily personal journal, I have always resisted what I thought of as the 'me, me, me' of a blog. People often e-mail me about this or that project I have been involved in, best practices in my day to day work. I now realise that in order to be more visible I need a blog and that blog needs to be populated with lots of good content, sharing of best practice and hopefully some humorous anecdotes.

However this may need to wait for another day as I have been called to 'get the curry on'! Trying to be creative here too and not in the culinary way!