This blog post first appeared on blogs.fco.gov.uk on 30 June 2009  

I might have been part of a ethnomethodological study last week. I was part of a panel at the Gov2Gov event at Canada House, talking with a flock of geeks about how social media is changing society, government and international relations.

It was a good event with lots of interesting people in the room, well organised and run by Dominic Campbell, Lovisa Williams, and Chris Heuer.

It was the hashtag (#g2g) that made me feel a bit like I was part of an experiment. Participants were encouraged to use the hashtag to talk about the event online before, after, and particularly during the event, and the live tweets were projected onto a huge screen in the room during the discussions.

But from where I was sitting, I couldn’t see the live coverage. So as I spoke I was aware that some of the audience were providing live commentary to the web, and some were following the commentary as it was projected behind me, rather than my wise words as I spoke.

Now I reckon that speaking to a room full of people can be difficult enough. But people being amusing and clever in real time – literally behind your back – could make a man paranoid.

Reading them now, the tweets from the event make unremarkable reading. But the experience made me think about the difference between what people say, and what people say on the social web.

There’s no doubt that some tools can embolden the author. That’s almost certainly true of Twitter, particularly if the author posts anonymously (or without it being clearly apparent who the author is).

It’s also made me think about when digital can augment physical engagement (by queuing questions, rebroadcasting, or offering an alternative opinion in this case), when it is just a fun sideshow, and when the choice of digital tools could alienate a wider audience.

For the record, I am not active on Twitter. I decided that the always-on, 10-opinions-a-day nature of Twitter suits my objectives and my personality less well than other tools. I think the macro blog suits me better than the micro.

I do realise that we may already have passed the point at which Twitter is an essential business (as well as personal) tool. I might already be missing out on conversations that aren’t taking place anywhere else. But for the moment I use search.twitter more than I use http://www.twitter. I’m a Twitter lurker. I keep my micro-thoughts to myself.

Having said that, I do like to micro-blog. We’re using Yammer in the Foreign Office, and I’m loving it. Private micro-blogging tools like Yammer seem to me to be a perfect tool for medium sized (and distributed) networks like Digital Diplomacy Group. Email is no good for informal knowledge sharing; Yammer seems to solve a problem we didn’t realise we had.

One of the things I like about Yammer, is that it is all clearly attributed. So it fits with the Foreign Office model for digital engagement, in which we always try to be open and transparent, and explicitly clear about who is talking.

Attribution is often less clear on Twitter. People don’t always say who they are (and sometimes they appear to, but aren’t). That’s why I’m more excited about John Duncan’s use of Twitter – which is clearly attributed and seems to be providing useful opportunities for real engagement – than I am by our corporate channels, which we largely use to broadcast (even though I know that a corporate Twitter channel is unlikely to heckle me as I speak).