Charlie Pownall 查理·保诺 - British Gas archive

You only need the length of the taxi ride from Singapore’s Changi airport to the city centre to appreciate that this is an uncommonly well-run place. Neat, tidy and superbly organised, even the trees lining the road into town seem to blossom year-round.

All of which rather jars with a story dominating my mobile news-stream on my return to the airport about the New York Police Department’s latest foray into social media.

An attempt to crowd-source feel-good photos for its Facebook page using the #MyNYPD hashtag, it has backfired spectacularly in a manner all too reminiscent of JP Morgan’s #AskJPM or British Gas’ #AskBG fiascos.

NYPD Encourages Everyone To Tweet Photos With the Cops, Things Go Predictably Awry http://t.co/UymZ0gTFLm #mynypd pic.twitter.com/TW5WdF3yAe

— The Village Voice (@villagevoice) April 23, 2014

I visit New York infrequently and can’t recount having any encounters with its police force, let alone negative ones. Yet the NYPD clearly evokes some pretty raw emotions, something it was presumably aware of before orchestrating the campaign. They will certainly be on its mind now.

Framing conversations properly is one of many challenges facing governments and authorities in social media, yet Facebook et al also provide unparalleled opportunities to inform citizens and build their trust, the subject of a talk I gave to a roomful of government officials at a Community Engagement Conference yesterday in Singapore.

My basic premise: in an environment in which public trust with government is low in many countries and citizens are hugely empowered, public authorities must understand the broader context of their activities and work hard to find ways of involving online audiences in their communication, as opposed to approaching social media as an informational one-way street.

I had also been expressly asked to cover the pitfalls of engaging online, something the powers that be in Singapore are conscious of, perhaps to a fault. And which the NYPD now finds itself having to consider in rather more depth.

Here are my slides:

Hell hath no fury like a customer scorned. Just ask British Gas, whose recent foray into social media via a Twitter Q&A using the #askBG hashtag to explain a 9.2% price hike met with undisguised contempt from its customers.

True to form, the UK’s tabloid press and other media were only too happy to record in excruciating detail the live public dismemberment of BG’s corporate carcass on social media.

Much has already been said about how BG could better have handled the conversation, notably that it should have been better prepared to respond to the wide range of questions and allegations thrown its way.

Quite so, but while this sounds fine in principle it can be tricky to achieve in practice. 16,000 tweets is a lot for any organisation to cope with.

One option would have been for BG to have fronted a team of executives from different parts of the business rather than a single customer services spokesman. Not only would this have created far greater response capacity, it would also have enabled the responses to be more helpful, insightful and authoritative.

Yet fielding a bigger team may not have been necessary had British Gas thought more carefully about its hashtag.

As we saw with McDonald’s infamous #McDstories (spectacular backfire) and #Meetthefarmers (neutral to negative reaction) sponsored promotions, the broader a discussion is cast, the more likely people are to talk about things you may not expect or want them to.

By choosing a hashtag explicitly related to the issue at hand, BG would have had a better chance to contain the parameters of the discussion and shape its outcome.

Of course, the bigger question is whether BG should have hosted a Twitter Q&A in the first place.

With a reputation for unwarranted price hikes and third-rate customer service, there was always a risk that a public discussion on a highly topical, contentious and political topic hosted on a channel tracked by ranks of Tweetdeck ogling journalists could go astray.

—Charlie Pownall 查理·保诺

Reputation management and communications

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