Debate: Improving communication effectiveness or wasting taxpayers’ money? The use of social media influencers in public organizations

Introduction

Recently, many organizations have identified social media influencers (SMIs) as relevant communication intermediaries, mostly because they provide access to and influence hard-to-reach stakeholders, for example teenage and young adult consumers. Research on SMIs has defined them as ‘third-party actors that have established a significant number of relevant relationships with a specific quality to and influence on organizational stakeholders through content production, content distribution, interaction, and personal appearance on the social web’ (Borchers & Enke, 2021, p. 261). With their audience considering them credible sources of information, SMIs can provide valuable support to organizations, while equally being a potential menace (Li, 2016).

Influencing in the public sector

While increasingly addressed in marketing and communication studies, the role of SMIs is still almost absent from the academic public administration literature. Nevertheless, collaborating with SMIs has been one of the recent avenues explored by public organizations to increase communication outreach, approach citizens in a personalized and emotional way, and create dialogic communication and a sense of community (Reinikainen et al., 2022). SMIs’ selection relies on their distinct profiles and follower segments, with the idea of targeting messages at strategically-defined groups. Although they have been slower to adopt SMIs within their communication strategies, public organizations tend to mimic practices found in the private sector, since they increasingly turn to SMIs to prevent certain types of behaviour or change them, strengthen their legitimacy, or promote themselves.

However, risks may also arise, since tailored posts for public organizations will most likely contrast with usual influencer content and potentially undermine content coherence—a key factor of SMI effectiveness (Pöyry et al., 2021). The contrast with the usual tone used for official communication might confuse citizens. Therefore, it is worth considering how much authority and control (over their messaging) public organizations retain, as they have no power over the past, present, and future content created by SMIs. They could therefore potentially be associated with that content once a collaboration has started. This ‘indirect endorsement’ is not limited to the public sector, but it is amplified because inappropriate content or negative press might damage the administrations’ image and create dissatisfaction among the taxpayers.

As observed in different campaigns, the content created by SMIs for public organizations does not necessarily draw the expected attention, foster engagement, nor increase interactions. Moreover, it raises ethical questions about the use of public funds. Often initiated during the Covid-19 health crisis to reach a specific audience, this new tendency regularly upsets public opinion and damages the image of public organizations. This relates to at least four elements:

• Use of influencers that already raise similar content on their channels for free (health prevention or sport promotion for example).

• Use of influencers who do not have an exemplary lifestyle that matches the values of public authorities and appeals to the majority of citizens.

• A lack of transparency about how, and how much, money is spent on SMIs.

• More generally, citizens not wanting to see their money spent on marketing and communication.

A trend here to stay

Governments need to deal with an increasingly online communication environment, a growing number of people getting informed on social media, and (especially young) people who do not use traditional mass media like TV news programmes and newspapers. Yet, public organizations have traditionally used mass media and their own communication channels to communicate. Campaigns have mainly been informational in nature and have relied on one-way communication through websites and press releases (Werder, 2020). Today, this strategy is insufficient to reach all target audiences, convey important public messages, and build meaningful and trustworthy relationships with certain citizens. Consequently, public organizations should be using SMIs, but under strict conditions. Public organizations need to be careful about selecting their SMIs; they need some control over the information diffused in terms of the respect of key public values.

The risks mentioned above, and the mistakes observed in certain communication campaigns that have used SMIs, for example in Australia (Pishias, 2020) or in Indonesia (ICW, 2020), result from having a weak legal framework in place, and the fact that practice is ahead of theory. This calls for a better understanding of SMIs in the public sector, through an analysis of existing practices, and theoretical developments. In addition to the above-mentioned points (for example SMIs’ selection), a more careful and effective spending of taxpayers’ money would require, for instance, to focus first on raising awareness, or to prefer ‘microcelebrities’ over ‘macrocelebrities’ (stars with a large community). However, transparency is still needed to better assess how much money is spent on SMIs for each specific campaign. This opacity has been observed in several cases, including in Scotland despite freedom of information requests submitted to the government (Scottish Government, 2022).

In conclusion, even if SMI communication is still limited in the public sector, its use constitutes a natural extension of the more traditional communication tools. It should not be stopped, nor should it be considered as unethical. All financial and management risks raised in this article should be carefully considered; however, what matters in public sector communication is to reach the citizens effectively, whatever medium it may take.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Raphaël Zumofen

Raphaël Zumofen is a Research Fellow at the Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration (IDHEAP), University of Lausanne, Switzerland and at the School of Health Sciences of the HES-SO Valais-Wallis in Sion, Switzerland. His research interests include accountability, digital communication, and management issues in the public sector.

Vincent Mabillard

Vincent Mabillard is an Assistant Professor at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics & Management, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. His research focuses on transparency, public sector communication, and place branding strategies.