A direct window into the debate

Chrystia Freeland meets three public leaders who are exploiting social media to forge a direct connection with their communities

IT TURNS out you can govern in 140 characters. Social media is often accused of coarsening our public discourse and of making us stupid. However, 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 across 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 skeptical on Twitter. 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. If I write an op-ed, then I can tweet it.”

Bildt combines his tweets with a blog. Twitter is for links and instant comments; the blog 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,” says McFaul. “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,” says McFaul. “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 Ms Clinton, “our ambassadors are blogging and tweeting, and every embassy has a social media presence”.

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.

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 10pm 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 window into the national debate.

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 that has earned him more than 53,000 twitter followers, which, in a city of just over 1m, gives the mayor a loud and independent megaphone.

“The really interesting piece about all of this is the way it disintermediates the traditional media,” says Nenshi. “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.”