I'm between two halves of a holiday - the first week in the UK and next week in Ticino - so I thought I'd share a few thoughts about what my experience of the British Museum.

When you're a forty-something, pretty well everything that was familiar to you in your youth has changed, and you get grumpy about how they ruined yet another good thing. The British Museum is close to University College, London, where I was a student, and I loved going there. It was big, rather academic, and rather peaceful. The exhibits were arranged and looked after with great care, and you felt you could spend years in there, learning about cultural history the world over. What made it particularly unusual in the '80s was that it was not commercial in any way at all, while virtually every other piece of London's cultural history was having to transform itself to earn a living. But it, too, was transformed in 2000, with the rebuilding of the reading room and the Great Court, designed by Norman Foster, and is now, with 6 million visitors, the most popular cultural centre in the UK.

What feels completely different now - apart from the visual transformation - is the world-famous exhibitions around the year, and that the place is packed with people - and, of course, shops. All of which is good, as far as I'm concerned. I am normally a bit allergic to gift shops, but found a lot of really interesting books and reprints. I love the transformation of the courtyard, which is sensitive to the original Georgian architecture of the surrounding building but creates a bright, interesting space within it and brings the various exhibition rooms into a coherent whole. But what I enjoyed most of all was that so many people were clearly enjoying the experience of a collection not in any way dumbed down or repackaged, but just opened up.

The museum's history as a custodian of so many cultural treasures of the world is controversial; but doing it so carefully and creatively has made the Museum - for me anyway - a world treasure. This was brought home by the voices and faces of groups as I walked around the courtyard, surrounded by cultural artifacts from all regions and periods of global history. Hearing so many languages, and seeing so many faces whose features resembled one or other of these artifacts showed better than any advert how the museum affirms our common human history. I can't remember another experience that has done so quite so vividly as walking among these visitors.

When Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, was published a couple of years ago, the idea swept through the world of online PR that you have to be authentic. It has grown stronger through the influence of wikipedia and social networks, which mean, in effect, any attempt to dress yourself up can be ruthlessly reported on, and you'll end up looking dishonest and stupid. That's the first reason you need to be authentic. The behaviour of the social group on the web is to be very open and communicative. If you join the group (and this means any level of real public engagement on the web) you have to play ball. If you don't join the group, the web won't do very much marketing for you.

That's actually a very good thing - and it's pretty deliberate. The Open Source movement is very influential, for example - think of Netscape (or, now, Mozilla) and Apache. Of course, the web's straight-talking ethos is also enshrined in the W3C guidelines. Without strong checks you can say more, of course; and the more powerful you are, the more you can say. Which means the powerful end up manipulating the medium and damage the integrity of the web. Clearly it's in the common interest that everyone can get at the truth, but on the web, uniquely, it's easy for people who passinately uphold this idea to actively fight misinformation with every weapon they have, fair or otherwise. And that's why companies have to be extra careful.

Authenticity is not just for the web, of course. A couple of decades ago, I worked for a growing chain of bicycle shops. We felt we were doing well, and wanted to present an upmarket image. We had the glossiest bike ads in London, maybe in the UK, for a few months. I don't think they sold a single bike for us. What in fact customers loved about us was that we were down-to-earth (many bike shops talk down to customers, most of whom, understandably, don't know how it all works or what all the bits are called). We also gave good advice and service, explained how things worked, and gave our honest opinions. The reason the business grew was that our customers recommended us. And when we identified the secret of successful customer interactions and multiplied it through relationship marketing, business grew fast. So the second reason you have to be authentic is, it works everywhere.

Web 2.0 - the social web - actually does resemble real society in many ways. The reason is straightforward - if it resembles what we know, we will adopt it faster and know how to use it. So what works for word-of-mouth will normally work on the web. The key is finding out what makes your best customer relationships work, and reflecting that in your web presence - best of all through interactive tools.

The title is a great line from David Meerman Scott, in The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Arguments about who Shakespeare really was will probably never die out. And, though they are important, they really can't be all that important. The debate never seems to stop us going to see the plays, quoting lines and phrases from them (normally unknowingly), and watching Hollywood adaptations of them. Likewise, though your marketing tries to tell the world everything important about you and the excellent and innovative products you have created, is it important that people are interested in you for your own sake?

Up to now, probably yes - the way people learnt about products was marketing collateral and websites. Now, though, they are just as likely to find out about them through users and reviewers online. And that's not just consumer products - there are forums and blogs on the web for the most technical of subjects, and sometimes the more technical, the better. So, as people are starting to spend less time reading marketing literature, the literature is starting to look a little inauthentic.

This has been a long time coming - look at the trend in films and TV for real-life content, from "reality TV" to Michael Moore's documentaries. Now it's coming to you. The only way to respond to the challenge is to write what people want to read because they are interested in the subject, not because they are especially interested in you. So, practically, what does that entail?

Effectively, what you need to do is to start an interesting conversation with strangers. An easy analogy is being at a party where you don't know many people. As you drift around, you hear people talking about something you know about. You smile, catch someone's eye, find an entry, introduce yourself and talk a little. But most of all, you keep listening. Find out what interests people. Then, if that's something you can do well, and you're sure they want to hear from you, talk about it.

Same thing on the Web. Listen, join in, find out what people need to know. And publish a useful article on it, if it comes to that. Building the relationships is an absolute necessity in the process, so that you have a really good idea of people's information needs, and have a ready audience that will enjoy, critique and pass on your content.

You can't afford to drop conventional marketing and PR, not now or in the foreseeable future, but your main interface with prospects and even customers in the future will likely be the audience you are building now with these online activities. So now is a good time.

First practical step is, list all the online information resources, including blogs, that are important to you, your customers and - perhaps even more important - your customers' customers. Second step, think and observe. What can you bring to the discussion? What interests people? Third step, communicate. Blog comment, blog, forum post, for now, later maybe articles and ebooks. Just publish - don't sit and plan too long - it's time to start!

It's not surprising that marketing on the web has an American voice. After all, marketing was more or less invented in America, the best books on advertising and copywriting

have been written by Americans, and the best recent web marketing manual comes from David Meerman Scott, also an American. We are all speaking the same language now - English of course, but to an increasing extent English that he is shaped by the medium in which it is written, the webpage.

But the modern way of PR on the web goes further. It is not only that US marketing English is more direct, active and compelling than its UK counterpart, but now the medium itself. Americans are known to be in general more direct and less formal. This has been remarked on for at least a century. A couple of years ago, I read Anthony Trollope's North America, an account published in 1862, based on Trollope's a six-month tour of the region. Though not a great book, it is an interesting one, as Trollope was a very keen observer. One of his repeated observations is that every American he met felt equal to anyone, had a sense of ownership of the land on which he stood, and prized the freedoms guaranteed by the constitution, including, of course, freedom of speech. Where an Englishman - unless upper class or highly educated - would have felt in a position of inferiority, the Americans Trollope met, irrespective of wealth or class, felt inferior to no-one, with every bit as much right as the next person to state their opinion.

Nowadays, in a culture increasingly dominated by social networking and the blog, the American way has won. Where Europeans might feel that if everybody can say their piece about something, what will emerge is the lowest common denominator, American culture has none of this snobbishness or reserve, and celebrates the survival of the fittest. And in the largely meritocratic world of the blog, that attitude is right.

It is not equality and freedom, though, that have shaped the web, and that respond to an American approach to communication: social media also reflect the the way Americans interact. In five minutes of meeting an American, he or she will typically have elicited the main facts about you, and have got a good idea of what you are up to. In England, to take an extreme contrast, your eye colour, accent and maybe shoe size will have been noted, and the main facts about the recent weather firmly established.

So do we have to be American, now? As a Brit, I am not sure I want to be, or can be one, as it would probably mean pretending to be someone I'm not. But being inspired by a few aspects of the "American character" - speaking freely, being open, direct and communicative, and avoiding intellectual snobbery - is essential if Europeans are really to "get" the web!