Charlene Li’s first book ‘Groundswell‘ established that business couldn’t ignore social media, that forward-thinking execs were already embracing its openness and sharing, and, perhaps more than any other book, mainstreamed the corporate use of social media. Now she’s back with ‘Open Leadership’ — a practical guide to changing attitudes within organisations that has a suprisingly radical edge.

The book has the air of a self-help manual — there’s a reassuring tone (openness is just another business decision that organisations need to make), plenty of step-by-step guides and questionnaires to help managers draw up action plans; and numerous examples of successful cultural shifts within major  organisations.

Among the latter I noted the following:

• The American Red Cross overcame its suspicion of social media in time to handle one of the most successful online fundraising efforts yet in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake.

• Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has an all-company question-and-answer meeting every Friday for an hour and has recently opened up the product development timeline to help the external development community using Facebook’s APIs despite the risk of tipping off competitors.

• Scott Heiferman, CEO of meetup.com, has junked the company’s org chart and now product managers just need to convince an engineer that something is worth developing for it to go ahead

My colleague Ross Chainey has blogged about how Nick Clegg emerged as the winner on most measures from last night’s TV debate. But there’s another battle going on in this election — that between traditional broadcast and new-fangled social media.

“In real terms last night was the triumph of broadcast media over digital media,” the head of digital at one of the parties told me this morning.

That’s perhaps unsurprising given that the event was the dream broadcast event. But there’s a more nuanced view of the new media landscape — one that sees  important interplays between the worlds of traditional and social media. It’s argued that this is the fundamental insight that the Obama campaign used to such devastating effect in 2008. So, with this in mind, how well did social and broadcast media play together last night?

There was a lot of focus on Twitter. The aggregation and analytics service TweetMinster says there were 184,396 tweets from 36,483 tweeters with an average of 29 a second during the debate. That’s three times the number involved  during the Newsnight interview with  British National Party leader Nick Griffin earlier this year.

But that pales into insignificance against a peak-time TV audience of 9.9 million.  TweetMinster puts the size of the political Twittersphere at about 50,000. Those  hoping for a surge in new entrants to political tweeting were probably disappointed last night.

One thing I thought was interesting was how quickly ‘I agree with Nick’ emerged as a trending topic on Twitter as tweeters noted how David Cameron and Gordon Brown used the same language in referring to the Liberal Democrat leader.

Following the Twitter stream reminded me of how hard it was to navigate the #iranelection hashtag last summer when the Iranian protests started — it was impossible to keep up. The Labour Party, which has put more into Twitter than the other parties, created a filtered feed of tweets for its own homepage to help followers sort the wheat from the chaff.