I went to a meeting with some colleagues from an affiliated team recently and they told me they had created a Facebook Group. I asked them how many members the FB group has. They told me none. I asked them how many people they had invited to join the group, again the answer was none. I hope I have not upset them by joining the group and inviting some other people we work with to join too. They also told me it had taken five months to get permission from their IT department to access Facebook at work and that only two people from the team are allowed to use it.

Thinking about this afterwards, it did make me wonder if, in the short term atleast, social media tools will be more effective for private rather than public sector organisations. In particular, SMEs in creative industries are able to respond to events rapidly and do not have the beauroctratic restraints which public sector employees have to live with.