Cory Booker, Twitter Visionary

AUSTIN, Tex. â€" Cory Booker â€" the mayor of Newark and a virtual Twitter superhero for his chronicle of the city â€" made the trip to the annual South By Southwest conference here on Sunday to impart his tips and perspective on why Twitter is a valuable tool for governance and civic engagement.

Mr. Booker credited a phone call from the actor Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk on Twitter) for turning him on to the reach of social media â€" “I thought I was getting ‘Punk’d,’ ” he joked, referring to the MTV hidden-camera show produced by Mr. Kutcher â€" and said he agreed to try the service for three months. After a month, Mr. Booker said, he was hooked, calling it “transformative.”

“The future of government has to be getting to 2.0,” Mr. Booker said, calling for “a collaborative model where we’re all like Wikipedia” and a space “where we all become partners in transformation.”

Mr. Booker is no rdinary Twitter user. Fewer than 300,000 people live in Newark, yet Mr. Booker has over 1.3 million followers on Twitter. As Steven Snyder, an assistant managing editor at Time magazine who moderated the discussion with Mr. Booker, pointed out, “We’re used to very scripted politicians,” and Mr. Booker’s Twitter feed “is the opposite of that.”

Mr. Booker took to Twitter to invite his neighbors who had lost power during Hurricane Sandy to take refuge at his house, and he used it during a recent blizzard to find local residents who were trapped by the snow â€" stopping by their homes to shovel them out or deliver diapers.

His Twitter good deeds have even prompted a gently mocking hashtag â€" #CoryBookerStories. (Sample post: “One time I needed a kidney. Cory Booker instantly ripped out his own, handed it to me & flew away. #CoryBookerStories.”)

To hear Mr. Booker tell it, Twitter simply provides him with an effective and hyper-efficient ave! nue to provide the services that are part of being mayor. “I will find out before anybody in my government when a light is out, when a pothole is there,” he said. “I can now show up with a space heater and blankets. I can now take a level of action I couldn’t before.”

Social media, he said, can also empower citizens to take more of an active role in government: “Our voices are really more amplified.”

“This is a period in America where we must bring more authentic engagement to our political sphere,” Mr. Booker said. “We’re losing the soul of our politics.”

His hourlong discussion was rapid-fire and earnest, which largely matched the mood of the crowd. During the question-and-answer session, he made a point of asking each questioner’s name and talking about where they were from. At one point, a woman raised her hand and asked the mayor what advice he had for her two boys â€" ages 12 and 13 â€" about civic engagement, and if they could shake his hand after the panel

He paraphrased the novelist Alice Walker, “who said the most common way people give up their power is not knowing they have it in the first place.” (And of course, he added, her sons could be first in line to meet him.)

Based on the Twitter messages while the panel was going on, the audience was largely impressed and, to use a word that frequently popped up, “inspired” by Mr. Booker. Afterward, nearly a third of the people who were there surged to the front of the auditorium, eager to continue the conversation and greet Mr. Booker, who gamely stayed on to pose for photographs and shake hands.

But a small group of tech entrepreneurs and political operatives gathered in the back to complain that while Mr. Booker had clearly mastered social media as a tool, he had not harnessed its full potential to shape government.

Still, Mr. Booker seemed to captivate the room, mixing Twitter humor (“Sleep and I broke up. I’m now dating coffee â€" she’s hot.”) with feel-good c! ivics les! sons (“I cannot be anymore the mayor who sits behind his desk and waits for the world to come to me.”)

When a man wearing a Red Sox hat took the microphone, Mr. Booker joked that they should not be calling on a Boston sports fans. When the man replied that he was from New Jersey, Mr. Booker, who has publicly flirted with the idea of running for New Jersey’s Senate seat in 2014, made a point of noting that.

“You’re from New Jersey, which means you might be a potential voter of mine,” Mr. Booker said. “I take back that insult.”