Gordon Brown has his flickr account, his twitter stream, and his forthcoming WordPress site. (Built by New Media Maze)

Cool.

But where is it getting him? He’s the most unpopular prime minister in history.

Let’s face it, the Great Gordo is hardly a ringing endorsement for social media.

I don’t mean to be ungrateful. He’s helping make social media respectable -which is great for all of us who are in it - but what is social media doing for him? Not much.

The truth is, that all the social media efforts coming out of Number 10 are driven by advisers and consultants. Yes, it is more cost-effective and cooler than traditional marketing. But in the end, it doesn’t make an impact unless the personality involved is actually writing the twitters and WordPress posts and the captions under the Flickr Pictures.

This is the problem with Social Media and big institutions and big people. The medium is intimate and personal. Even if you just blog a few opinions, your audience gets a sense of who you really are. If you already have a Big Media presence, perhaps you want to hold more of yourself back, rather than give more of yourself away.

Of if you do, like David Cameron, allow the press to know about your family and children, you want to do it in a controlled sort of way. You don’t want to risk writing something thoughtless before breakfast, and then find that the Today Programme has just picked up your gaff.

It would be a huge risk for a politician to be so up close and personal as required by Social Media. A blog by a PM could degenerate into a sort of Dear Bill column, that used to adorn Private Eye in the days when it was funny.

But then one has to ask, What has Gordon got to lose?