Better #48

Kia ora,

I had planned a very different intro for today, but given everything that’s happened over the past few weeks, it didn’t feel right.

The destruction caused by the weather across New Zealand has been awful. People cut off, buried by landslides, and washed away in rivers. Damage to homes and infrastructure. And alongside that, the misinformation, finger-pointing, and blame - deeply unsettling, and for public sector communicators, an unfortunately familiar (and frequent) part of the job now.

So a genuine shoutout to emergency communicators everywhere. You do crucial work in emotionally charged, high-pressure circumstances, and when we need you most, you show up.

Zooming out, it’s hard not to feel that something broader is shifting too.

In Australia, instead of unity following the Bondi shooting, we’ve seen politicisation of a tragedy, infighting, and what many Australians say has been a disappointing month of politics.

In the US, it’s increasingly difficult to even agree on what we’re seeing. One headline summed it up for me: ‘Trump’s America is so divided, people can look at the same video and see two completely different things’.

Globally, the old logic of might over right is reasserting itself. Long-standing structures and assumptions are shifting, and the way things “worked” on the international stage is no longer the case.

I’m naturally a pretty optimistic person. A decade working as a journalist exposed me to a lot of human messiness - but never broke that optimism. Still, things feel particularly heavy at the moment, and more than that, they feel extremely disrupted and unstable. Here in New Zealand, we can’t even count on the stability of the ground beneath our feet.

For me, for the first time since Covid, it all feels slightly off-kilter.

So what can we do?

I’m no counsellor (thankfully!), and I don’t pretend to have answers at that level. But I do know that, despite declining trust in institutions and authority more broadly, people still tend to turn to the public service when things go wrong.

As public sector organisations, we form part of the everyday structure of people’s lives - especially in moments of stress and uncertainty. And that carries responsibility.

And at its heart, that responsibility is about trust - trust built in the moment, yes, but also long before it’s needed. We build it in peacetime, so that trusted attention exists when it really matters.

I’ve always found the “trust” aspect of comms a little challenging. There can be this big gulf between what we actually do (and can realistically influence) and the trust measures our organisations are judged against in annual surveys.

We know the big institutional drivers of trust: responsiveness, reliability, openness, integrity, fairness. But they’re table stakes, and both obvious and at the same time hard to meaningfully “move” or “increase” given our operating environments.

So where does that leave us?

Trust researcher Rachel Botsman argues that trust has eroded at an institutional level partly because of scale. Systems have become so large and complex that people struggle to find any sense of human connection within them.

“I'm a huge believer that we have to start to find smallness within bigness,” she says.

“We have to revive trust at a local level, really repair the fabric of communities and the things that people can touch and see when they leave the house. And once we feel like the thing's working close to our lives and our homes … that then starts to transcend upwards into these larger institutions.”

For me, that connects strongly with something novelist George Saunders said in a recent New York Times interview. That the biggest shift in human relations he’d seen over his lifetime was a big decrease in daily human-to-human contact in favour of a lot more impersonal interactions.

“The number of interactions we now have each day that carry a strange impersonality has skyrocketed. And I think it’s corrosive. We’re devaluing human-to-human contact, which is really the only thing that there is.”

For those of us working in public service communications, all this can be both a challenge and an opportunity.

We can’t single-handedly reverse declining trust in institutions (the traditional bedrock under the feet of our societies). But we do operate right at the point where systems meet people - often in moments that are confusing, stressful, or emotionally charged.

Which is where trust becomes real, where “smallness within bigness” actually lives in a meaningful sense.

As communicators - particularly on social media - our work shows up in these small, everyday interactions: how information is delivered, how people are treated, how uncertainty is acknowledged, and whether people feel heard and respected.

Do we make those interactions human and personal?
Do we bring warmth, care, and patience?
Or do we default to distance, process, and impersonality?

Do we show up as humans ready to help, or do we hide behind tiles and graphics, cut-and-paste responses, and AI-generated captions?

I don’t know if this kind of impact is easily measurable. And it won’t suddenly stabilise an increasingly unstable world.

But will it make a real difference to the people right in front of us, in the moments that matter most? Will it help, slowly and imperfectly, to rebuild some trust?

Too bloody right.

Cheers,
Seamus Boyer 👋

I’ll admit, it takes me a little while to get going after a holiday.

And when that happens, a bit of inspo from people who say and do things better than me can be a big help. Real quotes, from real pros, about real situations.

So, from strategy to trends, and a bunch of things in between, here are some of my favourite quotes from last year’s editions (mostly).

Pop them into your brain 👇

On crafting content

Matthew Turner - U.S. National Park Service

We try to follow the idea of the “Three ‘E’s,” educate, engage, and entertain. We also never want to post just to post or to check a box. Everything we share should have value in it, mainly an educational component. We want people to leave a post having learned something (maybe without realizing it) or at minimum, gaining a better appreciation for a specific park, programme, subject matter, resource, etc (and want to come back for the next one).

We also know people use social media to be entertained. Adding subtle puns (we don’t go too crazy), a nod to pop culture, repackaging a meme or trend to fit our audience and brand, or just infusing some personality allows people to connect on a more personal level.

On trends

Trent Hile - Sydney Water

I think timing is key. You want to be early enough that your audience hasn’t already seen half a dozen different takes on the trend in their feed. Obviously nothing kills a trend quicker than every brand and organisation doing it to death – and we’ve probably been guilty of this in instances too. If you are late to the party, then you want to be confident that the post offers a unique angle that aligns with your voice and message. And if you’re going for humour, it’d want to be funny.

When choosing what to jump on, we weigh up what trends relate to our business and whether it will resonate will our audience. I often ask myself, if I saw another brand post this, would I like or share it? That’s usually the gauge.

On starting from scratch

Briar Edmonds - Health NZ

Having done it now, next time I'd probably spend more time presenting to different teams, showing where we've come from, the state of play, and where we want to get to. I’d spend more time explaining, ‘Here's what we need from you, here's what we can give you, and what we can't give you’.

On algorithm-friendly content

Bradley Saunders-Garner - New Zealand Defence Force

You can't always have 50 million views on a reel … but you do have an opportunity to make content that will keep you afloat, content that’s algorithm friendly, while you're putting out the less-engaging footpath consultation CTAs. 

A lot of the most engaging content that you'll put out won't necessarily be key messages or the strategic stuff, but that's how social works, and has worked for a hell of a long time. So it’s about balancing your content. 

The algorithm ain't going to keep you afloat. You’ve got to keep yourself afloat. Try, fail, learn, and try again. It’s the only way, and maybe you’ll strike gold on content that resonates with your audience or an audience sub-group. 

Take your win, learn, adapt your strategy, and keep on grinding.

On taking back power

Mollie Coulton - ex-Wellington City Council

People say to me, ‘I don't know how you do your job, how do you reply to those people? You must get so grumpy?’ And I think the difference is, I have the ability to reply, whereas other people looking in, they don't, so they feel powerless, whereas I at least am able to get my emotions out in a nice, beautiful comment [laughs]. And that makes me feel better about it, I get to take my power back by being able to respond in the way we do. I feel like if I was in a position where I couldn't respond the way I do, and I wasn't given the trust to do that, I think I probably would be a lot less chipper than what I am.

On letting the audience decide

Michael Corcoran - ex-Ryanair

There's a place for councils and governments and politicians to win if they find that little hook. But the one thing they have to be able to do is be open to failing and failing fast. To be willing to test and learn and to let the audience decide, because that is the most important thing. Otherwise you'll be dead by committee, over-engineering it, overthinking it, or over-polishing it.

Instead, have a simplified strategic view, have simplified guiding principles - not hard and fast rules - that go back to the strategy every time. And let the audience decide. Iterate, iterate, iterate. You will find something that you can deliver, that will reach and have some sort of impact. It mightn’t be at the Ryanair level, but it will do something.

On embracing accessibility

Callum McMenamin - digital accessibility consultant

The thing about accessibility is: you don’t even need to care about other people to value it. You can be selfish. And if you don’t need accessibility right now, you will later. We're all one random medical condition - or one trip - away from being disabled in different ways.

The main reason things aren’t accessible is ignorance. People aren’t evil or actively trying to exclude disabled people - they just don’t know. And public-service accessibility teams are really under-resourced as well.

On not letting the trolls win

Nicole Skews-Poole - Anchordown

“I think we need to understand and acknowledge that social media looks and feels different now, and that it is going to increase your resourcing around content moderation in particular. But it’s equally important to understand that organisations must stay firm in this storm and double down on ensuring that the public can still access good sources of information online.

The way that most people engage with social content is to simply view it, without liking or commenting. So comments are often not a true indication of public sentiment, but we still act like they are. Instead of worrying about getting negative comments, if a piece of content is important for your organisation, then it is still really worth sharing, and every bit of content you post can be a clear assertion of your values.”

On closing off comments

Donna Elkins - City of Sydney

We turn them off after two days, which gives that post enough time to live and have those conversations unfold. And when we close comments, we always provide a forward path, so if you have more to say, or you want to make a complaint, you've got a way to do so. So we're not closing the door, but we’re protecting ourselves from having a constant moderation challenge of ever-growing threads and places where people can come in and leave comments.

Closing comments gives us more focus.

On creating space

Tommy Livingston - performance coach and counsellor

Within any team, there's going to be some people that are going to struggle more than others, and that's totally fine, and they're the ones that might need some extra support. But in general, just creating space for people to be able to process and talk about what it is that they're going through, or what they're noticing, or what is being thrown at them, I think is critical. And that's probably one of the things that is the easiest to do. 

People fail to do it because managers are often too busy, they're too stretched. They're too focused on outcomes. But if I were working with a social media team, the first thing I would look at is, where are your regular opportunities to debrief and reconnect - to just chew the fat.

That’s it for today, hopefully you’ve found something to get you moving.

Before you go, I want to hear from you (yes, you 🫵).

Which government socials do you love? Who should I interview next?

I want to bring you as much value as I can this year so hit reply on this email and let me know.

See you soon for more tips on how to get a little bit Better 👋