NYPD community-building in the Twitterverse? Why it was a #epicfail.
| New York
@NYPDnews, the official Twitter handle for the New York Police Department, got a lesson yesterday on the meaning of #epicfail.
That鈥檚 online slang for a complete and utter failure for something that shouldn鈥檛 be so hard.
It began innocuously enough. @NYPDnews sent out a Tuesday, asking its social media fans to tweet some feel-good photos of the department鈥檚 finest working city streets.
鈥淒o you have a photo w/ a member of the NYPD? Tweet us & tag it #myNYPD. It may be featured on our Facebook.鈥澛�
It鈥檚 a tactic called 鈥渃rowdsourcing鈥� in the online world: a person or organization pings the rough-and-ready hordes on social media, asking them for information or ideas 鈥� or friendly content to share.
Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio have made a priority of improving relations with New York communities since taking over, following a year of bitterness and rancor in well-publicized disputes over stop-and-frisk, the controversial street tactic that a federal judge found unconstitutional. 聽
But after their friendly PR ping, the Twitterverse exploded with responses, and by early Wednesday, more than 70,000 wags weighed in with a torrent of sarcasm and anger, making #myNYPD the , replacing #HappyEarthDay. 聽
鈥淭丑别 will also help you de-tangle your hair,鈥� , posting a picture of a woman led away with her hands cuffed behind her, with a cop yanking back her hair.
鈥淗ere the engages with its community members, changing hearts and minds one baton at a time,鈥� taunted @OccupyWallStreetNYC, showing a shot of an officer about to strike a protester with his service baton.
鈥淵ou might not have known this, but the NYPD can help you with that kink in your neck,鈥� , tweeting a picture of a shirtless man with an officer鈥檚 knee on his neck.
These photos had no context, of course, and crowdsourcing like this is never the more fair and accurate way to gather information. And there were more than a handful of smiling cops with locals and tourists and such, but hardly what the NYPD had in mind.
"The NYPD is creating new ways to communicate effectively with the community,鈥� the department said in a statement, as the trend continued to rage Wednesday. 鈥淭witter provides an open forum for an uncensored exchange and this is an open dialogue good for our city."
And now the hashtag has spread to other big city departments. On Wednesday, copycat tags like #myLAPD and #myCPD have begun to of police aggressiveness in Chicago and LA as well.
鈥淭his is just part of a long line of Twitter fails,鈥� says Aram Sinnreich, a social media expert at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information in New Brunswick, N.J. 鈥淭丑别se continue to happen when organizations try to use a social network for their public relations efforts without putting much effort into it.鈥�
Last fall, after JPMorgan Chase helped take Twitter public, they used the social media site to in which an executive would give career advice to young aspiring bankers. For a company fined about $20 billion for financial shenanigans the last two years, let鈥檚 say it didn鈥檛 go so well.
Home improvement giant Home Depot last fall also tweeted a chirpy PR photo during its sponsorship of college football. It depicted on Home Depot 5-gallon plastic paint cans: one, who wore a gorilla suit, was flanked by two black men. 鈥淲hich drummer is not like the others?鈥�
The result? #epicfail, to say the least.
鈥淭丑别 funny thing about it is that, whoever is advising, these organizations never seem to learn,鈥� says Professor Sinnreich. 鈥淲hat鈥檚 happened over and over again is that these inorganic, inauthentic efforts to create viral social memes in the form of hashtags have backfired.鈥�
聽鈥淏ut then they have been used by the broader population to speak truth to power,鈥� he says.
