A new low for spicy brand accounts
How the NYC Board of Elections got way too comfortable online.
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Sir, this is a Wendy's—er, primary election. —Kate
I’m hesitant to ever dunk on a brand's social media account. Backlash and vitriol aimed at what appears to be a non-human social media entity is actually absorbed by real humans working 24/7 to maintain the illusion of a well-oiled corporate machine (albeit one that often adopts an inexplicably spicy voice on Twitter). That said, I can understand the frustration with the Twitter account for the NYC Board of Elections.
While NYC's Democratic primary for mayor has been called for Eric Adams, the announcement came after two long weeks—which was expected, due the ranked-choice voting process introduced this year—and one giant, most definitely unexpected gaffe in which 135,000 test ballots were counted in error. (The Board of Elections itself was, notably, already infamous for its bungling and nepotism.) On the tail of a presidential election in which unfounded claims of voter fraud were amplified to the point of a literal insurrection, what people needed was clarity. Instead, the BOE's Twitter gave them emojis.
Throughout some of the tensest moments of the election, the Board's Twitter account responded to legitimate complaints with useful information and ... issued unhelpful clapbacks. “can you tell us what's going on actually instead of tweeting this,” WSJNY City Hall reporter Katie Honan replied to the latter back-and-forth.
Mostly, whoever runs the account clearly wanted to reveal the human behind a screen, responding to tweets that were sympathetic to that reality with prayer-hands emojis and multiple exclamation points. Which is partly why I’m having a hard time figuring out where to land on this, because I’m fully aware that social media employees are some of the most overworked, publicly mistreated people in the modern workforce.
“What is OK to post one day is tone-deaf the next,” one anonymous social media manager told me in an earlier post. “We can plan and plan and plan but you still have to wake up in the morning and say ‘what happened while I was asleep that might make this post insensitive in a way we don't intend it to be?’”
Perhaps this helps explain the uptick in "personality"-driven brand accounts like Tinder or Wendy’s or, uh, the New York City Board Of Elections. These accounts have all adopted strikingly similar casual, winking personas. As an attempt to humanize the operators and discourage or soften negative feedback, it’s a valiant goal, and I’m sympathetic to it.
But the BOE isn't a brand, it's a public service, and a crucial one. It doesn’t need to drive engagement or grow its following. It doesn’t need clicks or people to purchase its product. It needs to relay information in a clear, timely manner. Imagine living in New York City during what many called the most consequential mayoral election in a generation, turning on Twitter notifications for the BOE account to track developments in a newly complex process to determine the candidate favored to win in the fall, and getting a push alert for this.
As someone who would absolutely cry from a single critical tweet, I can’t really put my full weight behind the sentence “when you are a social media manager for a company that fucks up, managing the online response to that fuck-up is in your job description.” So I’ll let another iconic NYC Twitter account say it.
I should also note that it's a misconception that social media people are always junior employees or "interns." In fact, it seems likely that the BOE's account is run by the organization's Director of Public Affairs and Communications—who earns, per a public record, $124,875 a year.
Yesterday, the account wrapped up with a thanks to poll workers and other BOE employees. It will likely remain largely dormant until the mayoral election this November, between Adams and a man who looks like an Irish seafarer in a red hat ... which is something the BOE should definitely not tweet.