Today I attended the CIPR Social Media Conference, and very interesting it was too. The line up of stellar speakers included Thomas Knorpp, Digital Media Manager at Sainsbury’s, Gary Gale, Director of OVI Places at Nokia and by way of an interesting twist on the former we also had Dominic Burch, Head of Corporate Comms at ASDA. Before you ask, no, there weren’t any fisticuffs between the two!

Of particular interest to me was a session by Euan Semple on Wikileaks. Whilst working at the BBC Euan was one of the first to introduce social media tools into the organisation. He was lucky enough to meet Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the web to ask him ‘has the Internet become a good or a bad thing’, his reply: “it’s just a thing” – a platform that can be used for good or bad intent.

Essentially Euan argued that Wikileaks was both a wake up call and an accident waiting to happen. He rightly pointed out the ridiculous situation of the US state department calling for ‘its data back’ when the situation had clearly spiralled out of its control. The upshot he belies is a new era of a new ‘information democracy’ where the public is free to pry into activities the Government and other organisations get up to in our name. He argues that potentially the global banking crisis wouldn’t have occurred had this regimen existed.

Whilst I agreed with a lot of his views, I still think that there is a lot of information that still needs to be carefully guarded and which could unfairly tarnish reputations or even cost lives if released into the public domain without going through responsible media channels first. In the UK we do at least have the Freedom of Information Act – this for me strikes the right balance between being able to query the authorities on certain information but to do so within the correct parameters.