For his work with Harris Tweed Hebrides, Wilson was named Global Director of the Year at the Institute of Directors Scottish awards ceremony in February 2011. He was then named UK Global Director of the Year at IoD Awards in September 2011. Maintaining his long-standing interest in land reform, he was a director of Community Land Scotland, formed in 2010 as an umbrella body for community-owned estates covering 500,000 acres, mainly in the West Highlands and Islands. In 2013, he became a UK Business Ambassador and was asked by the Secretary of State for Scotland to carry out a review of Scottish exporting, which was published in 2014. He writes regular columns in "The Scotsman" and other publications. Up until July 2015, he wrote regular columns for the "West Highland Free Press", which had been sold to its employees by the founders in 2008, and of which he had been the founding editor, but was controversially sacked when he defended fellow columnist Donald Macleod, who had written a piece about the spread of Islam in the UK. Wilson defended MacLeod's right to freedom of expression before he too was told in an e-mail from the editor his columns were no longer wanted. A third columnist, Maggie Cunningham, resigned in protest.