Tom over at A View from the Cave has shared his notes for a talk he recently gave in Washington, DC on social media as well as what can be learned from development bloggers.
Among other things, Tom gives very good tips about how to best use social media. One of those tips is to write shorter, straight-to-the point posts, which is something to which I definitely need to pay attention. For me, however, the best part of Tom’s notes is when he discusses how
“In all instances, the winners were able to be honest about their thoughts on subjects. This can be attributed to the fact that they were either anonymous or an academic, but these bloggers are the ones who have a strong audience and one which makes thoughtful contributions. It is a model which the Guardian Development site has seemingly tried to emulate since they too can be more direct.”
It is certainly true that both anonymity and academia offer a kind of freedom (the former perhaps even more so) that is generally not accessible to someone working for a national or multinational aid agency or for a development NGO.
This blog is less than two months old. Already, however, I have enjoyed considerable unexpected benefits from blogging. The most important of these benefits is, quite simply, that blogging allows me to structure and organize my thoughts on the topics on which I choose to write. My friend and colleague Don Taylor, whose blog is on health policy in the US, says he has derived similar benefits from blogging.
Since the topics on which I choose to write here overlap with my research agenda, this means that blogging actually has positive impacts on my research agenda. For example, my blogging about rising food prices and food price volatility has already generated two ideas for new research papers on this topic.
If you use social media — Twitter, Facebook, blogging — in your work, I’d be interested in knowing (in the comments below) how you use it in relation to your own work.