If you’ve been keeping up with our blog posts, we recently talked about the consequences of social media carelessness; when momentary mental lapses can seriously damage a company’s brand image.
Today, we’re looking at something a little different: how poor social media choices can lead to a huge PR nightmare.
The NYPD’s latest campaign had innocent origins: they wanted people to go out and take happy photos of their neighbourhood police officers and send them in through Twitter with the hashtag #MyNYPD.
Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse when people started sending in photos like this:
Or this:
Photos courtesy of TheVerge.
What’s the problem?
There are two main issues here.
The first is an issue of negative publicity. Police brutality has been a popular subject for many people, even outside of the New York area. Events like the Occupy Wall Street movement and protests around the world have resulted in heavy negative publicity for police officers everywhere, especially among the younger crowd. As such, campaigns that encourage audience participation need to be approached with extreme caution.
If your audience has a negative view about your company, it is your job as marketers to acknowledge that and plan your campaigns around it. Ignoring the overall negative sentiment while still asking their audience to contribute content resulted in a PR catastrophe.
The second issue is one of public relations. There is a valuable PR lesson to be learned from the NYPD’s mistakes: you need start controlling the conversation. If you have had negative publicity (or a poor brand image in general) all your campaigns should avoid or play down the negativity and focus on all the good things your organization has done.
Interested in more PR tips? Keep checking back to the Curve blog! We’re planning a special series on PR tips and tricks for businesses very soon!