Nice example of #vcs social media use

Purely to share something with readers (hi mum!) that I thought would be of interest, and in no way just to get this off my chest, here's a little story for you.

A couple of weeks ago I had a request from a trade magazine to contribute to a feature they were writing. Realising that the organisation I work for had a lot of (what I thought would be) useful things to say about the topic, a significant amount of effort was put into the article, collating a wide range of opinions, thoughts, experiences and expertise from colleagues, friends, contacts and people in general. This was done through email, conversations, Twitter and a website and required me simply to aggregate what everyone had contributed (about 30 responses in all) into a cohesive whole.

Being pretty pleased with the result (which was even dead on the word count) I submitted the article in anticipation it would be met with, well, something.

Unfortunately, just one line of the article submitted was used. Even then, the information that was used conflated something that had been said with something that hadn't, giving quite a misleading effect to the reader.

Now, I appreciate that not every beautifully crafted, insightful, clever, witty, thoughtful, intelligent and highly valued word I write should be published for all to read. But that such efforts went unnoticed (possibly even unappreciated, though I can't easily substantiate that), was a bit galling.

So I published it anyway, using Scribd, and my organisation's website.

As well as this getting out to a fair few people anyway, those good folks over at the Guardian's Society Daily also picked up the article, meaning that the experience and insights of the people who kindly shared their time with me on the topic in hand didn't have those thoughts lost.

I thought this was a nice example of how (a) social media allows people to bypass the old means of publishing, and (b) it really doesn't take much effort in sharing information - in whatever format - to appreciate the efforts that people have put in.