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IT TURNS out you can govern in 140 characters. Social media
is often accused of coarsening our public discourse and of making us stupid.
But some innovative public leaders are taking to their keyboards and finding
that the payoff is a direct and personal connection with their communities.
To understand how statecraft by Twitter works, I spoke to
three avid practitioners, who are spread around the globe and work at different
levels of government: Carl Bildt, the Foreign Minister of Sweden; Michael
McFaul, the US ambassador to Russia; and Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary,
Alberta.
Bildt is a veteran blogger, but he was dubious about Web
2.0, as the social media revolution is sometimes called. "I was rather
sceptical on Twitter," he told me. "I thought: What can you say in
140 characters?"
But Bildt, who has more than 116 000 followers, soon found
Twitter to be "very useful" and also "fun".
"As a matter of fact, you can say something in 140
characters," he said. "The restriction isn't as absolute as I had
thought."
One way Bildt uses Twitter is promote his bigger-think
pieces. "A lot of the tweets are links," he said. "If I write an
op-ed, then I can tweet it."
Bildt combines his Twitter posts with a blog. Twitter is for
links and instant comments; the blog is for longer, more considered arguments.
Bildt tweets in English and blogs in Swedish.
One of Bildt's followers is McFaul, the US ambassador to
Russia. He likes the way Bildt mixes life and work, one moment tweeting about
Syria and the next gently complaining about the long line for takeoff at the
Istanbul airport.
"The thing I feel most nervous about is blending the
personal and the professional," McFaul said. "That's new to me. I'm
learning where the lines are."
For instance McFaul, who is originally from Bozeman,
Montana, posted a picture of himself and his wife dancing to country music
played by a Montana band in Spaso House, the ambassador's residence in Moscow.
"I never would have done that three years ago,"
McFaul said. "And yet the guys say any time there is something personal or
something with a photo or video it gets much more pickup or retweets than a
statement on Syria."
"The guys" to whom McFaul refers are the US state
department's social media team, led by Alec Ross, who is the senior adviser on
innovation for Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Secretary of State.
Ross spearheads the state department's enthusiastic
social-media campaign. As McFaul posted earlier this week, quoting Mrs Clinton:
"Our ambassadors are blogging and tweeting, and every embassy has a social
media presence." (Indeed, Ross' influence is global - Bildt said that the
American briefed the Swedish diplomatic corps at its annual meeting last
summer.)
Like Bildt, McFaul has a multilingual, multiplatform social
media strategy. McFaul is a Twitter newbie. (In just over two months, he has
about 850 posts and more than 22 700 followers.) He blogs when he has a more
complicated point to make and uses Facebook when he wants to converse with a
community.
He tries to write mostly in Russian, but occasionally uses the
Latin alphabet if his Cyrillic keyboard isn't handy, and will post in English
if he wants to communicate with his followers outside Russia.
Bildt has found that by integrating social media into his
normal routines - he writes blog posts in the car or on the plane and "has
it in the back of my mind all the time" - "it is not so
time-consuming".
For McFaul, who is writing chiefly in a foreign language,
social media amounts to a second shift: "I have my day job as a
conventional ambassador, and then starting at 10 pm until I get tired I
interact on social media."
McFaul's moonlighting role as social media ambassador has
particular relevance in Russia, where the government controls much of the
traditional media, especially television, and civil society has moved to the
internet in response. As a result, McFaul says, social media is more than a
tool for communication – it is also a well positioned window into the national
debate.
McFaul's social media outreach has not protected him from
controversy. Indeed, Russian leaders, including president-elect Vladimir V
Putin, have been suspicious from the outset of McFaul, who is a longtime
student and occasional advocate of democratisation.
Just this week, Foreign Minister Sergey V Lavrov accused
McFaul of arrogance for remarks made to a Russian news agency about missile
defence.
But his social media presence has given McFaul the tools to
reach beyond the sometimes hostile national media and speak to any Russians who
care to listen.
Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary, couldn't operate in a
more different environment. He is an elected leader in a Western democracy. But
he, too, has found that social media gives him the power to get his message
across directly, without relying on mainstream media platforms.
Nenshi has a salty style - he once said on Twitter that a
critic should "look into pharmaceuticals" for his
"limpness" issue - that has earned him more than 53 000 Twitter
followers, including foreign fans who say if they lived in Calgary they would
vote for Nenshi.
In a city of just over 1 million, that gives the mayor a
loud and independent megaphone.
"The really interesting piece about all of this is the
way it disintermediates the traditional media," Nenshi said. "I'm
well on my way to having more Twitter followers than one of the Calgary
newspapers has readers. It puts my interactions with the media in a new
light."
- Reuters
* Chrystia Freeland is the editor of Thomson Reuters Digital.
