We had a very good meeting recently with colleagues from across the University engaged in delivery of training, awareness raising, and guidelines revision for social media activities. It is clear that there’s a lot going on. Louise Connelly, from the IAD, shared with us her early insights into the results of the Digital footprint campaign.

It was agreed that we should update the Social Media guidelines and develop a process for constant updating and sharing changes. The group will give this some thought. And training. More training. Colleagues, both academic and support want “how to” training, as well as guidance on use of social media in the workplace. We shall be arranging more general sessions in 2015 and pointing to colleagues and teams running specific channel training. Shaun Coulman will continue to run the popular Social media community sessions. And hopefully he will keep on baking and sharing.

I am firmly convinced that we should be spending our energies on understanding who’s saying what about us out there in the social space. This will drive recruitment decisions more explicitly as time goes on. This does not mean though that we should spend less time on the delivery of good content and user experience on our website. It just means that we need to spend more than ever on digital and less and less on print. Not sure we are doing that.

University of Edinburgh Social Media Guidelines

Social Media Community wiki (requires EASE login)

Digital Footprint campaign