Living on the Edge in Social Media: Two Case Studies of Australian Social Media Issues

Australian government and corporate communications teams in early 2012 were operating against a recent string of social-media case studies that had become teaching material on the conference circuit. The most-discussed was Qantas's November 2011 #qantasluxury Twitter promotion that ran days after the airline grounded its fleet during the dispute with the Transport Workers Union — a hashtag that immediately turned into a public-grievance channel and is still cited in Australian crisis-communications casebooks as an example of how a brand-promotion calendar can collide with a labour-dispute news cycle.

On the government side, the New South Wales Police Force's Twitter account had become a frequently-cited model for how an enforcement agency could establish rapport with the public during incident response — its Sydney CBD coverage during major weather events and its later operational-incident threads were the early benchmark. The contrast between commercial and government social use was instructive: agencies with clear public-information mandates often outperformed brands trying to use the same channels for promotion, partly because the audience expectations were already aligned with transparency.

The case-study literature that emerged from this period — Craig Thomler's writing, the Public Service Commission's social-media guidance, the AGIMO advisories — became the template for the 2013 Australian Government social-media handbook and, indirectly, for several other Westminster-tradition jurisdictions' early frameworks.