I (@bobarno) recently wrote about my reluctance to use Twitter and the pros and cons of sharing information with everyone who might be a follower. Not about the benefits of twittering, which I fully appreciate and understand, but about my own reservations and the extent of my own involvement. My concerns were competitive intelligence repercussions, and maybe my own desire to be as spunky (in a tweet) as I try to be on stage.

Well, this is obviously a timely subject matter, faced by many busy executives. In the last couple of weeks conversations with like-minded entertainers, speakers and bookers have all raised similar concerns. On May 27, Molly Murray-Threipland (who often writes about twittering in The New York Times), made the observation that it isn’t teenagers who are the largest tweeting group, but the 45 to 54’s.

Just three weeks after I wrote my own blog post, Business Week (May 21) dedicated its main theme, cover page, and several articles to the same issues. The two lead stories were Learning, and Profiting, from Online Friendships and Web 2.0: Managing Corporate Reputations.

In Managing Corporate Reputations, Gina Poole, vice-president of social software programs and enablement at IBM—that’s right, her life centers solely on how to train and harness IBM’s employees’ twitter posts—said, “You’re building your social reputation, so you don’t want to be a frivolous or an uninteresting person,” and the article summarizes “while many see Twitter as a place to indulge one’s inner self, IBM wants employees to “add value” in all their online postings.” Of course that’s seen from the perspective of the corporation and its concern of corporate image and identity.

On being perceived as mundane versus a source of brilliant repartee with deep content, take look at Kevin Mitnick’s tweets. Kevin (@kevinmitnick), one of the world’s most famous or infamous hackers, depending on your point of view of anyone who has served time in “the box” (prison-slang for a full-board vacation, courtesy of the U.S. government), twitters occasionally and has many followers. Kevin is an astute …˜social engineer’ (maybe one of the all-time best), a great observer of human behavior, and equally funny (privately at least); but Kevin does not share his latest skill sets or pen-testing exploits in his tweets. A follower (of Kevin’s) recently complained: “You never tweet anything interesting! Just your travel schedule. Tell us what you’re working on. something! Unfollow.” Kevin replied “Sorry I don’t meet your expectations of tweeting interesting stuff meniscuss—maybe i should tweet your passwords—hehe.”

Of course what they really want is some insight in “hacking” so that they can do what Kevin does, for fun or profit. High-profile pen-testing is a murky world and probably very profitable for those with the ultimate knowledge base. The hackers at the top of the food-chain have strong relationships, globally, with the …˜bad guys.’ Is it conceivable that Kevin, or someone like Kevin would tweet: “in St Petersburg today hanging with Dmitri Androsov & the Hell Knights Crew, & we’re working on some cute BackTrack exploits.” Not a chance! Acknowledging sources, or anything that would let your readers deduce your ‘deep’ friends would have to be restricted.

That’s like me asking a pickpocket in Barcelona where or to whom he sells his stolen credit cards and then blogging about it (or tweeting it). So, real content will be filtered, and yet you don’t want to be self-serving, self-promoting, or boring. Especially not boring! You have associates, you have followers, you have friends and, hopefully, adoring fans who linger on your every word. No, I’m not talking about my own world but the Twitter-users with followers in the thousands.

BusinessWeek mentioned that many companies, like Intel for example, have “software that acts as an automated SWAT team scouring the online world for intellectual property and personal information.” Going to Cyveillance’s home page and then drilling a little deeper you will get an idea of how sensitive or important this all will be, very soon. It’s my guess that we are in the very, very early stages of filtering, corporate image manipulation, and surveillance of employees’ twitter behavior. This will be an explosive new field for Internet forensic experts, replete with great new business opportunities. A whole new business model, begging for a snappy title. Maybe some sort of digital markings in the signatures, just like those digital rights management fingerprints embedded in music and video files, so you can track back where the comment …˜writer’ really came from. Motives of tweets is what we want software algorithm to reveal; scary thought? We’ll wait and see.

There are new signature models in reverse image search engines, but they rely on that you first imbed or send in your image to a database. It’s in its infancy, but sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms will improve and I’m sure the day will come when blog comments and tweets can be analyzed at source.

It’s the anonymity of blog posting I have reservations about. On the other hand whistle-blowers are healthy and necessary. But being able to cloak and hide with no real responsibility for your comments makes abuse easy. As I mentioned at the very beginning of this post, I do appreciate tweets; in fact I enjoy them. But I also would appreciate more discussions about the abuse of the format. Eventually we might find a format with better transparency.

To some extent the system censors itself. If the tweeter is only writing self-promotional tweets, don’t follow him or her. If I’m concerned about competitive intelligence, I won’t tweet about how great a time I’m having in Slovenia (last week) for Microsoft and its Windows 7 introduction (where I was a keynote presenter together with Edward Gibson, Head of Security at Microsoft). (Did you you catch me sneaking in my self-promotional line?)

Why would a hotel chain, for example, let its image and reputation (real or perceived) be shifted by a few unhappy, but very vocal customers (or guests) writing in on a consumer blog? BusinessWeek used the following sentence, and it says it all: “new security products…troll social networks for confidential or damaging leaks.”

Here is our own recent example, as an extension of the above. In early May we had an amusing experience with The UPS Store, which Bambi (@bambivalent1) documented in her post Sloppy business at UPS.

Bambi’s post gets a lot of hits. And some comments from readers pointing out that this wouldn’t have happened if we’d visited FedEx instead. Do we have followers among FedEx employees or management? Of course not. But FedEx, presumably, has crawlers for the term “UPS” (its main competitor.) Bingo, we get it! The story doesn’t need further explanation.

So, to conclude about social networking space, twittering, and blogs: what’s real and what’s fake? Can you really trust any travel site where someone recommends a hotel, a restaurant? Favorable or negative reviews and consumer opinions can have critical impact on the business. We believe that all the large travel sites have extensive filtering—they depend on their relationships with the big travel consortiums and of course on banner ads.

I said earlier that we are in the very early stages of sophisticated filtering. We will soon see more clear evidence of manipulation of the message. As the internet becomes more important for most transactions, opinions by users will gain importance. What’s different today, versus just a few years ago, is that the buyers, the guests, the visitors, suddenly have a weapon and a method to channel their dislikes—they have power. It’s no longer a few complainers who write in on a comment card seen only by the corporation. Now, suddenly, every complaint and negative observation can be lumped together and read by whoever wants to make the effort to find them.

That’s the good news when you research a place or product; but it also becomes possible to manipulate. How difficult is it to plant a negative or indifferent review about your competitor?

We’ve already heard about click-farms and paid product reviews. With better digital signatures confidence tricksters and shady businesses will have a harder time to hide. The scary thing is that today’s system can be abused—and is, on a daily basis.