We've come a long way, baby, as country singer Loretta Lynn once sang. Once, the idea of using social media in the public sector was bold and revolutionary. Now it is common place. Perhaps the greatest thing about this is that it puts a human face onto civil servants who are human too.

When I joined the civil service nearly a decade ago, we were in the midst of MySpace, Msn and Friends Reunited (with a sprinkling of the ‘very professional’ LinkedIn). Soon after, Facebook appeared with its open API, Twitter with its own and with fantastic ease you could post or tweet about almost anything.