I recently read three completely different social media guides in a row. While I did, I thought about how difficult it is to take an unconditional attitude towards guides in your own field. You’re constantly tempted to comment and criticize. So I decided to educate myself by picking up only positive things from the books.
The Twitter Book, by Tuomas Enbuske and Finnish prime minister Alexander Stubb, with its laid-back, magazine-style voice, encourages readers to start tweeting. In my opinion, they have the right focus; Twitter frees public discussion from gatekeepers. “Freedom is more essential than ‘quality’ dictated from the top.”
Harto Pönkä’s Social Media Handbook emphasizes that social media is about connecting people, groups, and networks. Networking is more efficient on Twitter than on Facebook or LinkedIn, because of the potential to create one-way connections. Another key point is that the communal nature of networks depends on activity and duration—not the platform but the interaction.
Pekka Sauri, the deputy mayor of Helsinki, is the author of Public Administration and Social Media, which examines the topic from the point of view of city administration. The city’s central task, according to Sauri, is to combine the various interests of its inhabitants. Social media can consolidate urban intelligence into superbrains that can solve any problem. Participation succeeds only if the public administration is transparent, and it is made transparent through communication and interaction. Social media is a great tool for this, but officials must have the courage to change themselves from faceless authorities to human beings.
All three social media guides are available as electronic books. Reading them made me consider whether this format is making books a bit lighter and shorter. On the screen, it is in fact easy to skim through a hundred-page publication written with a newspaper-like style.