Reputation Management Lessons from the #myNYPD Fail

Tuesday was a terrible day for the New York City Police Department. Specifically, the people responsible for protecting and serving the department’s reputation made a pretty big gaffe on Twitter, and 24 hours later, the damage continues.

Image courtesy of stockimages/FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

While it’s all too easy to chuckle at mistakes like this and move forward as though nothing important has happened, I think this particular episode holds some important lessons for companies who hope to use social media to boost their status in the online world.

The NYPD Blues

The Twitter fail began with an innocent request. The department asked users to pop up photographs that show them interacting with a member of the police force, and share that photo on Twitter with the hashtag #myNYPD. Good photos would then be shared on the department’s Facebook page.

This kind of interaction isn’t uncommon. Just this morning, I had two such prompts pop up on my own Twitter feed. In one, I was asked to provide a photo of my dogs. In another, I was asked to share a line from a poem that I like. It’s routine to ask users to join in an online conversation like this, and Twitter makes those discussions really easy to hold.

But in the case of the NYPD, people chose to share photographs that weren’t at all positive. The few that I saw included photos of officers:

• Beating people with truncheons


• Dragging people by the hair


• Frisking small dogs


• Running over people with motorcycles

In short, this is really nasty stuff. Really, really nasty.

Parsing the Problem

It’s possible that this issue wouldn’t have come up at all if the NYPD folks had simply stuck with Facebook. Earlier this month, a Pew Research Center study found that the vast majority of information shared on Twitter was extreme. There is no middle-of-the-road conversation on this site, the study suggests, as people are either vehemently for something or against it, when they have only a few letters in which to express their opinion. If Twitter is a negative space, asking for engagement is bound to be risky.

Similarly, the execs at the NYPD probably know that they have an image problem. They faced a significant amount of negative coverage during the Occupy movement, and the stop-and-frisk policies of the administration also came under fire from residents of the city. Asking for honest feedback when your image is a little stained is just inviting an attack.

Bigger Questions

Choosing the right forum and the right message is always going to be an important part of a reputation management strategy. That’s just a given. But the bigger message here seems to involve the time it takes to rebuild a reputation and drum up positive feelings about you and your company.

On the surface, asking others to write about you and chat you up seems like a great idea. You get a whole lot of hits in no time at all, and that might help you to control the conversation about your company online.

But there are huge, huge risks with this method, as this story clearly demonstrates. When you invite comments from others, you have no control over what they might say. And in the end, you might have yet more to clean up.

So, by all means, use Twitter and connect with the world. Each Tweet is indexed by Google and other search engines, and that allows you to buy back a little space when people search for your name. It’s smart. But, don’t allow others to control the conversation. No contests, no hashtags and no pleas for sharing, especially when you know you have a reputation management problem. It’s just not smart.

Instead, create your own copy or hire someone to do that for you. It might take longer, but you’ll have a lot more control over your online reputation.

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1nqa6aN