I've long been an evangelist for social media, and while my tweeting and blogging isn't always as prolific (or newsworthy) as some of my colleagues, I love the way social media opens up new horizons for us to have honest, open and very different conversations with our residents.

I'm not alone in this in my home patch of the West Midlands.  A white paper recently
published by IEWM identifies the region as a hotbed of best practice; our geography and the challenges we face here in the heart of the country has helped us to share innovation effectively and encouraged us to take risks where others have feared to tread.

But as local government learns to embrace the power of social media, what of the dangers?  Twitter trolls and online abuse have been the subject of much media debate this summer, and anyone who looks after a council Facebook page or Twitter account will be well used to the robust (to put it mildly) comments about their organisation and its perceived failings that regularly appear online.

To some extent we're used to this; over the years the letters page of our local newspapers have taught us to take it on the chin.  But there's always been an eagle-eyed sub-editor toiling away in a newspaper office somewhere to edit out the wholly defamatory accusations, and check out the wild allegations in an angry letter to the editor.  There's no such check in the Twittersphere.

So extraordinary rumours with no basis in fact or reality can multiply and spread like digital wildfire.  It's an extraordinary thing to watch, and a phenomenon that means the traditional press office approach of careful rebuttal and considered response needs radical rethinking.

The growth of social media means there are no secrets anymore.  Everyone knows something about your issues and decisions as soon as they're made.  Probably that's a good thing.  Certainly it's fundamentally changing the way we do business.