One of the greatest lessons in social media is that everything begins with listening and such is true for any form of leadership. Governments and their administrations have much to learn. Not only are new media channels rich with insight, they are also interactive. There are people on the other side who have expectations of recognition, acknowledgement, and engagement.

Two years ago, Iranian activists used social media sites as engines to organize massive anti-government demonstrations. But now, activists say, the limitless freedoms available online are proving to be a distraction from real-world dissent.

With a predominantly English speaking subscriber base, it has been hard to view Facebook’s demographics as representative of the Arab consumer. At the same time, no homegrown social network has been successful in appealing to Arabic language Internet users in numbers and the region’s Arabic language social media environment has remained a fragmented one. This is now changing: fast.

It's never been so easy to find out what people whose experiences of the world are very different to our own, think and feel. Often the perspectives of an organisation's staff and would-be service users can be as different as any two people on Twitter, and as such, they may never cross paths...this is where both our greatest challenges and opportunities lie in the social web.

The number of people using Facebook during May fell in the US, UK, Canada, Norway and Russia, according to new data. The slowing growth in user numbers may indicate that Facebook has hit the limits of expansion in the countries where it was first successful – and perhaps even that some early adopters from those countries have stopped using it.

We are led to think that diplomacy is a function of this or that Secretary of State, or the exchanges between Presidents -- and of course, that's true. But the foundation of public diplomacy happens through the tight knots tied through high quality, high impact people to people encounters.

A transnational world is emerging through social media. Corporations are global. Supply chains are global. The conversation is global. The world is integrated as never before. Yet states guard their sovereignty with a strange ferocity.