When I first left the BBC and was considering whether to have a fancy corporate sounding name for my business, or to pretend that there was a whole team of people rather than just little old me, I decided to be up front and not pretend. I also chatted to my former boss about whether to adopt the dispassionate, third person tone of much consultancy and he said “Why be like everyone else. Be yourself. That is what people are buying”

Most of my work comes through referrals, speaking gigs or my blog and twitter. As those of you reading this will know I am reasonably forthright and open about what I think in each of those spaces. As a result people who I work with know what they are getting in advance. The advantage of this is that I get to work with those who I consider really, really nice, smart people!

Do your clients, or indeed your boss, know what they are getting up front?

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In the process of pulling together previous blog posts for a project I came across my first post about Twitter in November 2006:

Twitter

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In conversation recently a potential client was diffident about using twitter or blogging about their products because they saw themselves as boring compared to “glamorous” brands such as Coke. I suggested that in fact the opposite was true, I find the bland messages of corporations like Coke unconvincing and mind numbing whereas finding out about the products and services I rely on day to can be really interesting.

As I reflected in this answer on Linkedin I see this as another example of what Rob Paterson called “the intensity of the mundane”. In the right circumstances nerdiness and passion about even “boring” subjects can be really fascinating.

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I have been following the tweets from @HeathrowAirport over the past few days as one of my main ways of keeping up with the volcanic ash flight ban. I am the first to have a go at corporate use of Twitter when it is badly done or inappropriate so I just wanted to record what a cracking job they have done.

I have no idea who is behind it but they have got just the right balance between information and personality. You get the feeling there is a real person behind the account but they are not trying to be everyone’s mate. There is a lot of valuable, timely information being imparted but there is not so much that you start to tune it out. I have particularly enjoyed the obvious enthusiasm with which they have described the novelty of being able to inspect the runways in daylight and their genuine relief today when people started flying again.

Other businesses considering using Twitter should watch and learn.

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If you’re one of our many twitter followers, you’ll know that this month we’re making a noise about women’s rights.

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Stowe Boyd writes this morning of the issues of geolocation tools and privacy. I have been an early adopter of Brightkite, Foursquare, Twitter geotagging, Fire eagle and Google Latitude. The only ones I use now are Foursquare and Twitter and even then not all of the time. Like Stowe I often zoom out to city level rather than being specific about my location. I don’t automatically post locations to Twitter to try avoid annoying people with too much noise and only do so when I think there might be a chance of meeting up with someone.

My experience so far has been 100% positive with many serendipitous meetings that I wouldn’t have had without letting people know where I am.

I am always surprised when people write as if they were victims of technology rather than in control of it – I guess it is a bit like email!

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Reading the various commentary pieces about Christmas Day’s attempted terrorist attack it seems blindingly obvious that tightening existing systems and reinforcing existing approaches is unlikely to help us become safer. David Brooks in an interesting piece in The New York Times does a good job of exposing why current thinking doesn’t work but he fails to go the next step and imagine new ways that might work better. I reckon the social web holds potential to at least partly help.

I have written elsewhere about the collective “ooh that’s interesting” principle that I think is the most fascinating aspect of our new web technologies. Our ability to notice things is individually enhanced because, even if it is only Twitter, we have somewhere to write, somewhere to express ourselves, somewhere to “be interesting”. If we have done a good job then other people will go “ooh that’s interesting” and amplify or comment on our signal making it less weak. If enough people notice more, write more and comment more then our collective ability to know what is going on and do something about it increases.

This is true in so many situations but seems particularly so when dealing with the unpredictability of terrorism. Imagine if people who knew the terrorist, like is Dad, had expressed their concerns online, imagine if someone who read that picked up on the fact that the guy was flying on this particular flight. If it turns out to be true that the terrorist had managed to circumvent security in Amsterdam when boarding the plane, imagine those who saw this had tweeted it. Imagine passengers on the plane had been reading Twitter just before take off and noticed a reference to their flight number and became suspicious.

Yes all of this could be misapplied and one could easily imagine scenarios where it led to panic and possibly injustice. But even if we don’t want to rely on citizens being brave enough to finally take the action required to prevent the next atrocity don’t we have it within our grasp to weed the weak signals from the strong ones? To work out well enough who we trust and what is real quickly enough to at least help the authorities do the right thing?

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Euan Semple :

I worry a bit about mob rule. Not a lot – just a little.

There is huge potential to “mobilise” vast numbers of people around a particular idea or opinion in tools like Twitter. While mostly a good thing this can also turn ugly. It can easily turn into a mob and as with any mob damage can be done and people can be hurt if too many get swept up in the crowd.

However we can all play our part in putting the brakes on. Most of us who have been blogging for any length of time learn that moment when you decide whether to amplify a weak signal or turn down the volume. The decision that even if something is noteworthy you won’t fan the flames.

I am optimistic that once more people learn to recognise this moment and apply it to the newer tools like Twitter we will probably manage to stay on an even keel.

Probably ….