Today I posted a couple of videos to the blog to demonstrate how quick and easy it is to use social media tools to create content and how RSS can be used to push that content to other sites, devices and even the VLE.
People have often said to me that they don’t have the time to engage with social media. Personally I think we are at the stage where you can’t afford not to. At the conference I was at today once more people were saying where do you find the time?
As I have said many times on this blog one of the core reasons I engage with social media is that it saves me time.
A recent example was when I was tasked with finding a particular e-safety video. A quick Google search did not turn anything up, so I posted to Twitter and was well pleased with the number and variety of responses I got.
Other examples include, posting photographs to Flickr, this means when someone asks to see photographs of the college or a particular piece of tech, then a quick e-mail and link will often suffice. More importantly as people know about my Flickr account they will go and look there without me even needing to worry about being involved.
The same goes for this blog, a place for me to set out my opinions, views and news. People can see what I am thinking and my recommendations, again without me needing to do too much once I have written the blog entry. Likewise if someone asks me for information, if I already have it on my blog, this can save time. Just a quick note about writing, one of the challenges that many people find is, finding the time to write or what to write about. I have found that it is easier to write lots than it is to write a little. This very blog entry has probably taken about twenty minutes, five minutes on the Tube on my iPhone and another fifteen minutes on the train on my laptop (used Evernote to transfer the text).
Another service I use is Delicious, a service that allows me to bookmark websites, a great way of organising my favourite websites. So if you want to know which websites I am looking at, Delicious allows you to do that.
Social media has the potential to make life easier and better, and like any tool, device or service, excessive use is not what it is about, it is about using the service to make life easier and better.