Better #4

Welcome back to Better. 

Ask pretty much anyone working in public sector socials who they keep an eye on and Palmerston North City Council inevitably comes up.

The PNCC team has been crushing it on their channels for years now, and their TikTok has rightfully garnered plenty of national and international attention.

But more than that, they just seem to know their audiences, understand and respect their channels, and have fun in an effective, engaging way.

So how do they do it? What’s in Palmy North’s secret sauce?

Read on to find out.

Cheers,
Seamus 👋

Gotta say, it was a blast catching up with Olivia Wix, Comms Manager at PNCC. Everything she says just makes so much damn sense. Which isn’t surprising at all if you’ve spent any time checking out her team’s socials.

We talked humour, TikTok, DMs, Barbie, and sign-off. It was a lot of fun.

Here’s the interview.

Firstly, where do you work, and what do you do?
I’m the Communications Manager at Palmerston North City Council. I’ve been at Council for almost five years, the past two as manager. I grew up in Palmy and then studied and worked in journalism and comms in Wellington, Auckland and Bay of Plenty before returning to Palmy in 2018.

What’s the team set-up?
Our comms team is made up of nine people, but at the moment we are two people down as we’re recruiting for a role and another team member has taken a 9-month overseas trip. Our team at full capacity includes two people who look after everything to do with our website (including traditional IT functions), we have a social media specialist, a videographer/photographer, four comms advisors who do comms and stakeholder engagement, and myself, the manager (I do a few of the major, reputationally risky engagement projects). Three of our team are part-timers.

Describe your content and social strategy. What's the general approach?
Our content is pretty well known by councils and some in the social space as I’m not afraid to take risks, so we do push boundaries and be innovative to help tell our stories, engage people and share important information. I’d hope people would describe us as fun, kind and informative.

We have pretty strict rules about what each of our channels are used for and stick to that quite firmly. We’re the third youngest city in New Zealand which means a large portion of our community uses social daily for entertainment and information. A big part of it for us is also the DMs where people are logging requests for different services – things like potholes and bins being emptied.

You clearly aren't afraid to use humour, and do it really well (which is not easy), how do you build that into your strategy? Is it a formal part or written into it?

So … we don’t actually have a social media strategy. We do have a very light-touch external comms strategy and social fits into that. To me that’s because what works for social is the essence of good comms – engaging, being transparent, being customer focused etc. We also have very clear audiences we consider for each of our channels, but again that’s no different to other comms. I’m much more of a ‘get stuck in and do the thing’ type person, rather than having a bunch of strategies or comms plans for everything we do. We’re good at what we do and experience, intuition and a deep understanding of our community means we know what the right thing is for them. 

Humour is actually a really key part of how we do comms and it is very strategic. If you see us post something rather fun, check out the post just before, or just after – it will be important info for our community. We’re conscious of working with the algorithms to get info to our community, and humour can help do that. Our team brainstorms ideas or if we see trends we joke about how we could make it fun for our channels. We are a very creative bunch and do have to tone it down sometimes. Pretty much my rule of thumb is that for any content I need to be able to sit in the council chamber and explain to our politicians why we did that thing and how it connects to our strategic goals and direction. If we can do that, then I’m in.

You also play off the whole self-deprecating Palmy vibe really well – how hard is that to balance with not looking like you're taking the piss?
Everyone likes to talk shit about Palmy, but when you live here you know it’s actually a pretty cool place. We’re not Wellington, Auckland, or Melbourne and that means a lot of our younger people head off to study and explore other cities and the world, before coming home to settle down when they have families.

The people who live here choose to live here for all the perks. The Spain football example recently is a good idea of how we roll. Their team called us boring. If we were worried about that we would have done a traditional media response trying to prove we aren’t boring. Instead we posted a jokey breaking up letter, and then took credit for their win. That shows we can have a laugh at ourselves and that we’re far from boring.

You have really nice, clean, modern collateral – how prescriptive are you in using your brand?
Thanks! We love our brand, it’s bright, youthful and fun – just like us! Our marketing team manages the brand and there are areas where the brand works really easily on social, but also where sometimes we need to do things a bit more ‘rough’. TikTok is a good example where we can’t have a polished brand as the content doesn’t perform as well. Brand isn’t just a logo or a colour, for us it’s how we talk, how we engage etc too, which is probably more where social comes in.

How did the Barbie logo come about? Genius, BTW.

Ohhh thanks, that was me, and I’ll take all the credit [laughs]. I was seeing on TikTok all these amazing marketing collaborations between Barbie and all of these other brands and joked to our marketing manager about having fun with our logo and posting something about why we didn’t get approached. 

Sometimes we ‘fill in’ our arrow in our logo for different things – like Pride and Matariki. This was our first real commercial one though. Again, this is where knowing our audience so well is handy – our average user on facebook is 30-45 and a female. I’m within that demographic and Barbie is this nostalgic part of our childhood, yet we also saw the young people on Insta and TikTok loving it. We pulled the pin and used our brand pink and designed it so we didn’t breach copyright. We did it the day the movie launched and it went down better than all of us expected.

You have the most popular council TikTok in New Zealand, how did it start? Why did you decide to launch that channel, and what were the initial hurdles?

Back during the first Covid lockdown, I was working in our emergency operations centre and at the end of long days I’d go home and watch TikTok as a way to kind of de-stress. That was back when TikTok had just started taking off in New Zealand. Ever since then I wanted to launch one. I could see back then that it would be a powerful tool for us because we have such a young community. It’s been something in the back of my mind ever since, and then at the beginning of last year I got more serious about doing something. The local council elections last year seemed like the perfect time to try it out with young people, who tend not to vote as much as older demographics, but also who aren’t usually ratepayers. So we launched last August and instantly we knew it was the right call.

What have you learnt along the way? Have you changed anything as you've gone along?

TikTok fascinates me because it is so focused on what you as a user are watching, and none of the other platforms are that specific. Our team ranges from early 20s to mid 50s. We quickly learnt that if we were all seeing a trend, then that’s something we should jump on. The other thing is it is the platform we have the most rules about. TikTok for us is all about getting young people to be proud of Palmy, changing behaviour, and showing what a council does. There’s a reason you haven’t seen my face on it – I’m too old for the demographic we’re trying to reach. You also won’t see bylaw consultations there or reminders to pay your rates.

It's your most experimental channel, how did you as manager convince people internally about your approach?
I wrote a one pager explaining why we should try it and thankfully my bosses said go for it. Those bosses weren’t big users of social media, but trusted us. Within a few weeks we went viral for a TikTok about wastewater and what has been flushed down the loo and ended up at our treatment plant. The comments said things like, ‘Oh I didn’t know you couldn’t flush that’. Going viral and seeing those comments helped bring people on board with it.

What kinds of responses do you get, both internally and externally, to some of the more out-there posts? From what I've seen it's hugely positive, but you probably have some critics, too?
Most of our bosses, and even our elected members, aren’t the TikTok generation so they weren’t consuming the content like they would if it was on Facebook. But we started to get feedback quickly - things like someone was getting their nails done and heard someone mention our TikTok, or someone being out for dinner and our TikTok would come up in conversation. Or someone’s teenagers would show them our TikToks and say they were cool. So while some of our bosses didn’t consume, or even understand it, the feedback meant they could see that what we were doing was working with the demographic we were trying to reach.

I think like all councils, people love the ‘go fix the potholes’ comment, and we just have fun back now and say things like ‘you don’t want a social media girlie fixing potholes’ [laughs].

What's your socials sign-off process like? Are you across everything as manager, or do you just trust your team to do their thing?

A mix of both. I have a very high risk tolerance and my team knows and learns that very quickly. I do ‘sign off’ consultations or major transport project posts as they’re always the big reputational ones. Most posts I will see more as an FYI, and that’s mainly because we work on an account manager basis for the comms advisors and I have oversight across the whole organisation. So it’s not a case of ‘No, we’re not doing that’, but more a ‘Oh that connects with xyz, let’s merge the two together’, or ‘Have you thought about xyz too?’.

Your social results speak for themselves – massive follower growth and amazing engagement – why do you think more councils aren't doing something similar?
I think it’s a mix for other councils. They think it’s too resource heavy, or else their bosses are nervous. It frustrates me like heck, because social media is just like any other customer service and should be treated as such. 

When we do good content on social, the volumes to our call centre drop. And an informed and engaged community is more likely to get involved in decision making. Also, the world is changing. I book all my appointments via DM or an app these days – I don’t remember the last time I called someone for an appointment. We need to respond to how the world is changing, rather than the way we’ve always done things.

What would be your advice to other councils or public sector organisations wanting to experiment more or use more humour in their content?

Do it. If you need a hand, reach out to me and I’m happy to talk to them about our success and provide all the data that shows why it’s the right choice.

Quick 6 with Olivia Wix…

1. Strategy or tactics? 

Tactics.

2. Favourite platform?

TikTok. Sometimes I worry I’m going to get thumb arthritis.

3. Least favourite platform?

LinkedIn.

4. One public sector account to follow?

I like Waka Kotahi’s TikTok channel, and am so jealous they have traffic cameras! I’d love to see them have more fun on Facebook.

5. One non-public sector account to follow?

At the moment I’m quite into looking at pages that are making their own sounds - Chipotle and some other big American companies are doing this. I’ve been thinking about making some of our own sounds so it’s like research. Comms-wise I like Molly McPherson PR on TikTok. She talks about lots of the big crisis stories that are in the news, including celebs, and I love hearing and laughing along to her advice.

6. Something you wish you’d known earlier in your career?

Nothing really. I’ve been blessed with great bosses, and mistakes teach you things. I’d rather make mistakes every now and again than never take a risk or be innovative.

Ok, that’s it for this edition, thanks for reading, friend 👏

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See you again next month for more tips on how to get a little bit Better 👋