2011 has already been a watershed year for social media. Steady growth in the number of platforms and users over the last six or seven years is giving way to mass participation as everyone and their Mum and Dad get in on the act (literally – Facebook’s fastest growing age group in 2009 and 2010 was middle-aged). The new media are becoming mainstream as users side-step laws designed to restrict the dead-tree press reporting on celebrity lifestyle choices, testing legal boundaries and providing an alternative source of news and information.

As Philip Sheldrake (@sheldrake) writes in the CIPR’s Social Media Measurement Guidance, “social web participants produce, share, curate and publish as well as consume” information, and better mobile technology has allowed people to participate in disseminating news through networks they choose to participate in. Online social networks are not news channels, but are increasingly a part of how news stories are consumed. User-generated content, available through online social networks, is playing an increasing part in breaking news stories ahead of the established news media, with the operation that resulted in the death of Osama Bin Laden being possibly the most striking example. Enthusiasts for new media models see this as a potential threat to journalism and the slower media networks which rely on broadcast and print communications infrastructure.

As the recent lesbian blogger incidents have shown, hoaxes are a risk in a world of user generated content. Truth is not something usually associated with the internet anyway, so it is unlikely that social media would be any different. Engagement is the primary aim and there are numerous exciting possibilities for social media, for example in promoting democratic participation. 650,000 people told their friends via Facebook that they had voted in the UK General Election by mid afternoon on May 6 2010. In the middle east, social media has played an important role, alongside mobile technology, in spreading the message of the protest groups.

However, as Stephen Waddington, managing director of PR agency Speed Communications, points out on the CIPR’s Conversation, online social networks are used as much for propaganda as they can be for sustaining movements for freedom. If they offer cheap, flexible access to a mass audience of individuals, the same is true for governments which are becoming well practised in suppressing the Facebook profiles of dissidents or disrupting the use of Twitter hashtags to promote damaging content, as well as using these tools to promote their own messages.

Professional journalism therefore still has a crucial role to play, as Waddington underlines, in providing a reliable source of fact-checked news. It becomes harder to distinguish rumour from truth among the all the noise on the networks, so trusted sources of commentary will become more important than ever and the established news brands such as the BBC have an opportunity to build on their reputations and provide this. The question for them is how they will adapt to use social media to their advantage.