It’s time to give reach the same status as reputation
You can tell what a government department values in its communications by looking at who gets invited to the top table.
After the head of communications, chances are the media manager gets the most access.
They are brought into senior meetings, trusted with sensitive information, kept in the loop, and given the authority to shape communications decisions.
On the other hand, the people responsible for reaching and connecting directly with the public tend to sit further down the pecking order. Social media and audience roles rarely carry the seniority or SLT access routinely attached to media management.
Some organisations do have senior channel leads, but they may sit in marketing teams, away from the top table.
Ministries and agencies often assign seniority to managing reputation and building relationships with journalists, but much less importance to earning attention and building relationships with the public. Which is curious, given organisations can shape their relationship with the public far more directly and proactively.
Consider this. A single media query can trigger hours of discussion among highly paid senior staff. Responses are pored over line by line and sometimes - painfully - word by word.
Meanwhile, a major social media channel can fail to perform for months or years without becoming even close to being an executive concern.
I recently looked at the Instagram account of a large government department, and across its 50 most recent posts, it had received 35 likes in total. Thirty-five.
Other government accounts with tens of thousands of followers regularly publish posts that receive literally no interaction.
They are far from isolated examples, with a huge number of government pages consistently producing content that few people notice or care about.
A structure built for another era
Partly, I think, this is structural. Government communications teams were built for an era when the morning paper and six o’clock news almost exclusively determined what the public knew.
Partly, it is simply practical. The public sector is generally better at reacting to an immediate threat than investing in a future opportunity. A difficult media query creates urgency, whereas weak social or channel performance rarely does.
More importantly, senior leaders seem to understand reputation primarily as something that can be lost - and therefore something to protect through each carefully managed media response.
But reputation is also of course accumulated over time, through thousands of encounters with the public, and increasingly those encounters happen online.
And while organisations might acknowledge this shift, they rarely acknowledge or fully appreciate how brutally competitive the modern information environment has become.
Government information now competes with every creator, brand, news outlet, citizen journalist, politician, meme, and cat video in the feed. Platforms give no special treatment to public-service content like in the good old days. It has to earn attention the same as everything else, then be useful, interesting or entertaining enough to make it into the group chat.
Politicians have already recognised this. They increasingly speak directly to audiences, appear in informal video, and prioritise content designed to earn attention and be shared.
Government departments and agencies, on the other hand, are moving much more slowly, and the consequences of that can be seen in their content and the seniority of those creating it. The advisors running these channels often receive information late, have limited access to leaders, and lack the authority to challenge boring or otherwise unsuitable material.
By the time something reaches social media, the important communications decisions have often already been made. The social advisor’s job can effectively be to resize the announcement and publish it - what I grimly call ‘making it palatable for human consumption’.
Good luck building long-term attention and channel trust like that.
Reach belongs at the top table
Good channel management takes skill, experience, platform knowledge, intuition, bravery and a deep understanding of audience. It also needs sufficient authority to challenge the organisation - and leadership - and to shape communications decisions early.
The UK Government appears to have recognised this.
In April 2026, the Cabinet Office established a Government Media Unit to operate in what it described as a “highly fragmented and unstructured media landscape”. Its stated goal is to “reach, connect and rebuild trust” with citizens.
In a July speech, UK Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister Darren Jones said government work estimated that only around 2% of the public engaged with government communications.
The unit has been built as an in-house creative agency, and advertised senior strategy and creative leadership, backed by producers, videographers and social creators.
Direct reach with citizens is being prioritised as a senior strategic function.
Strong media management remains important, of course. Independent media scrutiny and direct public communication perform different democratic functions, and government needs strong capability in both.
But in 2026, the bigger strategic opportunity lies in the ability to gain and hold public attention consistently, directly and - crucially - proactively.
That requires senior audience and social strategy roles with access to leadership, proper resources, and responsibility for measurable public impact.
It requires more access to - and interest from - the top table.
Otherwise, senior public servants will keep spending more time going through a single media response word by word than they do thinking about their entire social media and channel strategy.
Departments will keep hiring smart junior people to manage their channels, then watering down their ideas and content into outputs few people will notice or care about.
They will continue to meticulously manage their reputations - right into irrelevance.
What do you reckon? Comment below or email me at seamus@seamus.nz