Endless Thread - PARKS! Pt. 1: Social media gone 'wild'

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

"To avoid crowds, visit areas that are less crowded." These comically obvious, wise words come from the Twitter account — ahem, X account — of the National Park Service, who has been hitting it out of the park lately (get it?) with its social media content and reaping viral rewards. Who is behind this material? And why has a more than hundred year old government agency chosen to let its hair down on social media?  Amory and Ben talk to the National Park Service's lone social media ranger, Matt Turner, and to Sarah Southerland from the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, whose delightfully outrageous social media presence has captured the hearts and funny bones of hundreds of thousands of people. 

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A programming note. This episode was written and recorded before Twitter became X. But hey, it's still the bird app in our hearts, so that's what we're sticking with for this one. Okay, enjoy. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Allow us for a moment to impart some free

wisdom on you. Most squirrel bites originate at the front or bitey end of the squirrel. Technically the truth. Here's another one. Always hike with proper supplies and equipment. Remember, flippy floppies may lead to slippy-sloppies. Man, I hate those slippy-sloppies. Hey, I hate them. Okay, how about this? It's okay if you fall apart sometimes. Smores fall apart, And we still love them. Damn, right to the core. Right to the s'more. Oh, not too shabby.

All right, let's do one more. To avoid crowds, visit areas that are less crowded. That was the wizard himself. The architect of these wise words posted from the Twitter account of a government agency. The CIA. Just kidding. A government agency that isn't afraid to get a little. little wild with its social media posts.

In fact, you might say this kind of youthful humor is in its nature. Mm, despite the fact that the agency in question itself is more than a hundred years old. We're talking about the National Park Service. Parks Service? It's just park, but we have lots of parks, though. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Sebertson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from WBUR.

Boston's NPR station, and today we are kicking off a series about parks, specifically how the incredibly online world is impacting the incredibly offline world, the natural, wild, wide-open spaces, and in some cases, making them more accessible, educational, and just downright enjoyable. We're starting this series where the idea for it first took root, doom scrolling on social media only to find, not doom, but joy, and a surprisingly witty sense of humor coming from the National Park Service that has helped it reach millions more people

in the last few years by meeting them where they are online. We are among those millions, of course, and we were curious, what is the thinking behind this newfound, funny approach? How does the National Park Service Social Media sausage get made?

and who exactly is making that sausage. I'm Matt Turner. I'm a social media specialist with the National Park Service, and I work in the Office of Communications based in Washington, D.C. Matt started working for the National Park Service, or NPS, fresh out of college, handing out brochures in a historic park in Georgia. What's your move to make sure that people actually take the pamphlet you're trying to give them? Really just tell them it's free.

and you should be free. It's free. It's free. I swear, it's free. Parking is not, but the brochure is. After a brochure passing, Matt became a ranger. He got the cool uniform with the flat hat that pairs well with a woodsy beard, like the one that Matt dons today.

But he also got to start experimenting on social media. It's kind of a collateral duty doing social media. You know, after you've given a tour or, you know, you're working the desk. Maybe you're going to snap a picture of that bird that flew by and tweet that. Or in between, you know, giving a house tour at, you know, Harry Truman's house in Missouri, I would go to his basement and start doing Facebook post and anything I could do. This surprised me right off the bat. The idea that social media would be baked into the duties of a park ranger, it feels a little oxymoronic somehow. But for Matt, this was a chance to dabble

with his social media voice, especially because he was mostly posting to the accounts for individual parks, not from the main NPS accounts. It was safer to try things out. I kind of brought a lot more of the humor and trying to instill some personality and pull back that curtain a little bit more.

Matt was a natural, and his colleagues took notice. In 2018, he traded in his Park Ranger uniform for the keys to the National Park Service social media castle. The voice of NPS on social media was now Matt's voice. Or was it? It depends if you like it or not, and then it went, no. I think probably some of it is my personality, but also I think part of it is just the park service over all these years has developed that kind of outdoorsy, family-friendly. We know a good dad joke or a pun.

I think that is very our aesthetic. Like this tweet from back in May, featuring a picture of a baby. banana slug munching on a leaf, and the caption, Leaf, it's what's for dinner. And then there's Matt's take on an old TLC hit. Don't go chasing waterfalls, cautiously approach and be careful of slippery conditions. In fact, you may just want to stick to the rivers and lakes that you're used to. We're not going to be too edgy or too, you know, far out there.

We're not here to roast people. You know, we just want to keep it really a fun and invite. place for people to enjoy. And I think we kind of hopefully hit that. Matt's being modest here. He's more than doubled NPS's Twitter following. He's grown the Instagram following by a whopping three to four million people. His social media posts get tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of likes, comments, retweets and shares. In fact, I started seeing NPS's social media content not because I was following them, but because so many people were reposting Matt's material.

You never know what's going to go kind of viral on social media. So some things get picked up and all of a sudden people are like, you know, is the National Park Service funny or who approved of that or, you know, what's going on? Yes, what is going on? Why has this government agency chosen to let it tear down on social media? The answer is as old as the media industry itself. If you have something important you need people to hear, you gotta hook them first. That's what we kind of try to do with all of our posts, is to get people's attention, get them to read and get that information.

If Matt can get people's attention with a post like, don't pet the fluffy cows with a little bison emoji, maybe they'll start reading the rest of the thread where he shares actual tips for enjoying wildlife safely. You know, we don't want to be this big government agency saying, you know, don't do that and don't pet that and don't pick that up. We're going to say that, but if we can do that in a little bit more meaningful or a nudging way, I think people would appreciate that. And hopefully when they get to a park, they'll remember that. You know, the park service made me laugh about that. And they made a good point.

So I'm not going to get too close to this edge here. Another hook that tends to work for Matt, bear content, baby. Like this post. Hiking groups. Bears like to have options. Or this one. If you come across a bear, never. push a slower friend down, even if you feel the friendship has run its course.

And that was the one that really took off. People thought it was funny. People thought we were advocating for murder. People thought we were saving friendships. Now, there's no I in team and there's no I in Matt Turner either, despite the fact that he alone is the person behind the National Park Service's official social media content. We wanted to start putting out more wildlife safety tweets and information. So we drafted up some ideas.

You also doesn't take credit for the upping of the social media game some people have noticed for other federal agencies like NASA, TSA, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife. Do you guys all have like a secret coin that you all get to have or anything like that? Is there any secret badge, I don't know, pair of shorts that everybody gets? No, it's a secret. Oh, man. But it's not just the federal agencies who are having. having fun on social media.

Coming up, we take a virtual trip down south and meet another social media sausage maker who, you might say, has gotten even wilder. We like to brag. We're one of the most biodiverse states in the whole country. You can find elk and alligator. Where can you find elk and alligator?

You'll find out in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. neuroscience, chemistry. But, but we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey.

Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab. Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice,

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Oh, well, starting over. Sarah Sutherland doesn't take herself too seriously. You know what she does take seriously? Hydration, especially where she lives. Like it's 113 degrees, I think, today in western Oklahoma. Oklahoma. Whether winters can be in the negative degrees and the summers can be in the low hundreds, which is why on a recent hot as blazes day,

Sarah took to her employer's Twitter account. I work for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. And typed. If you're outdoors in these temperatures, you need to be primarily drinking water. Not Red Bull, not ice coffee, not that purple stuff all over TikTok. Water, with the little claps between each letter. And I believe you have a Diet Coke next to you right now, Sarah. Is this true?

No, don't call me out. It's especially a lot of. ironic that Sarah would be drinking anything but water right now because of the more than 100,000 likes she got on that tweet. I specialize in our social media presence and I serve as our social media coordinator. This tweet also got hundreds of replies. And Sarah responded with the kind of witty one-liners she's become known for in the last year or so by the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation's more than 200,000 Twitter followers.

Is hot coffee acceptable? The response is, why would you use? do that to your body? That's just something I feel. I don't... Or this one. Somebody said, sparkling or still,

like sparkling water or still water. We said this isn't Europe. Nope, this isn't Europe. It's Oklahoma, where the badgers come prancing down the pastures and that's just the beginning.

There are gators, there are snakes of every variety, There are 100-pound fish. I mean, it just feels like the Australia of the United States. I've been saying that. And Sarah's been saying it to a large audience. On Twitter, on the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, or ODWC's Instagram and Facebook,

and a very popular TikTok account that's just crossed a quarter of a million followers. I'm about to show you a photo of a very gnarly-looking spider. If your little baby eyes cannot take it, then this is your time to start scrolling. Right. One, two, three. This is the wolf spider.

But Twitter is where we first stumbled on ODWC's accounts. So here's one. It says, if this gets one million likes, our boss will let us name her baby Armadillo. Twitter, do your thing with a little prayer hands emoji. I love that one. You know who didn't love that one? Her boss's husband, who didn't get it.

get that this was a joke? So her husband starts replying in the tweets, but his settings were like where no one can see them but me. Oh, no. So he's screaming into the void. Like, no, it's not. It's not Arvigillo. That tweet didn't get a million likes yet.

It currently sits at about 150,000. But still, for a state wildlife account, tweets like this have put Oklahoma's Wildlife Conservation Department on the state. social media map. But Sarah says the reason she was hired back in 2020 as ODWC's first full-time social media coordinator wasn't to make the department go viral. That happened way later. When I came on here, they were in the middle of the outdoors-are-al-al-open campaign.

Like, that was the big communication point. And with the indoors at this peak pandemic time being mostly not open, the department had its hands full. Because we're an agency that focuses on conservation and a whole lot of programs that go into Fish and Wildlife Conservation in the state. Like people still hit us up on Facebook every single day asking questions about the law, like hunting and fishing resources. Like it's very important to be able to get to those, answer them. And like that's what really cemented things that, okay, this can be somebody's job. Step one for Sarah, Wildlife School, aka shadowing her new colleagues out in the field to learn things like what the heck a game warden is, which Sarah says is kind of like a law enforcement officer for wildlife, or learning more about the alligator population of red slew from a biologist in a cowboy hat because, oh, Oklahoma.

He just pulls up with a boat and he's like, okay, we're getting in the water. And I was like, with the alligators? Oh, yeah, with the alligators. Sarah learned a lot. And having some of these more hands-on, down-to-earth experiences with her ODWC colleagues really shaped her approach to social media content for the department. So we are a scientific agency full of a lot of science-y people. What if we just stepped back from lingo and stopped talking directly, like,

a scientist and started talking a little bit more like a human being and see what happens. Sounding familiar, anyone? It's been working for Matt in the National Park Service. Also familiar? The emphasis on we. Sarah does have a team, albeit an informal one. It's me and basically my coworkers who volunteer out of the goodness of their hearts for no money who have full-time other duties to just goof off. with me. And Sarah wants people to get to know the team through social media in hopes that the public will be more likely to reach out with their questions if they know they might get answered by, say, Matt the biologist. Okay, so this is a new addition to our eastern Oklahoma bear population.

Or Smokey, a bear-sized guy who really is named Smokey and who knows how to cook a deer heart. and cut the fat, trim it up. Inside, it actually looks like this. Or the incredibly named Tell Judkins, a game biologist who happens to know a lot about plants. All parts of this plant, if they're eaten, can actually cause cardiac arrest. Don't eat it.

One of the top comments on this particular TikTok video, by the way, I'm learning stuff. No. O'DWC's response? Mua. Sarah's informal social media team started its overhaul in late 2020 with Facebook and Instagram, where the department already had pretty significant followings. But Twitter, she says, that was a much more intimidating hill to climb.

Twitter for anybody is hard, especially for government agencies. It's really big and scary. It is like a marble and a slingshot where it is just things move fast and hard, and if it hits something, it's going to come. cost them damage. Also, to be fair to everyone who's skeptical about it, this was post-2020. Things were tense, and Twitter was a place where a lot of that tension went. And to step in being like, here's what's happening with the quail population. I mean, there's no win.

Like, how do you do that? You know? But Sarah and her team stuck with this more affable approach. And with that came humor and memes. It was immediately met with backlash because people hate change, but we just kept consistent and little by little, like, let ourselves be a little more human, a little more vulnerable, a little more personable. And that took as further and further, but it did take time. It took pretty much all of 2021, Sarah says.

We had puns in there that we'd get, like, one reply. We did a Merry Fishmas campaign that I, I had so much fun with. Nobody else got it. We photoshop hats on all those fish. But then, in January of 2022, the ODWC's Twitter page had its breakout single. It was a really, really, really cold day. Darren.

A comms department colleague. He was out to go film some wildlife. And he sent me a text like at six in the morning. It was this old meme of a mountain lion at the back of the door. And it said, if you're cold, they're cold. You know, the Sarah McLaughlin, like, in the arms of a day. Oh, yeah, the MSPCA ads. Yeah.

Yes. That's what the meme kind of was, but it was a mountain lion. So we took it and flipped it on its side. And I think we said, like, you are cold, they have fur. Do not let them inside. And it blew up. crazy. To deal with all of the,

you're not my dad, and but if not friend, why friend shaped, kinds of replies, Sarah busted out some of those one-liners and the greatest hits of Ron Swanson memes. Then again, remember Sarah's analogy for content on Twitter,

a marble in a slingshot? This mountain lion marble was traveling fast, and in the process, it hit a particular nerve when it comes to wildlife conservation, very hard. Sarah got a call from her supervisor. She's like, you have to delete a response on this tweet. I was like, okay, which one?

Didn't even have time to argue about it. And she was like the one that says danger kitty. Specifically, don't pet the danger kitty in response to someone suggesting that they wanted to bring a mountain lion in from the cold. But making jokes about wildlife is a delicate dance. And calling a mountain lion a danger kitty was, In retrospect, Sarah says, a misstep. Because as an agency, you don't want to, like, villainize animals because that can have, like, negative impacts on how people treat them.

And so I was like, yeah, delete it. For some reason, thousands of people recognize that we deleted it, even though it was only alive for maybe, like, two hours. And so now that's a running joke, too. Sarah and her team have a system in place now to try to prevent future danger kitty debacles. So before we hit tweet, we try our best to predict the most ridiculous, harmful, terrible thing that can happen with anything that we say. And if we can find like a realistic avenue, we don't tweet it. Oh boy, I like to call this pre-tweetin the oven, Amory. That's actually

pretty good. It's not bad, right? You can skip this step, but your cookies, they're They might come out a disaster, you know? We try with our whole heart to make sure that we are good to people and we are good to wildlife. Like that is our mantra over and over again. Matt Turner with the National Park Service also pre-tweets his oven, so to speak. But what does he do when bad behavior in a national park goes viral all by itself? Like when a woman stuck her hand into a burning hot spring in Yellowstone National Park earlier this summer.

and video of that ill-advised hand-dipping popped off. Yeah, we always, I think, are looking for opportunities to message when those kind of things happen without coming off as maybe scolding or calling out people directly. In this case, scalding. Yeah. After that, we did do a post about thermal features in Yellowstone with the whole. You did. Okay. All right. Yeah, they're so hot right now all the time. And that allowed us, I think, to touch on those type of viral things without touch on.

Okay. Yeah. See, we're full of them. Sarah from ODWC loves a good pun herself. But she also acknowledges that she probably has more flexibility doing social media for a state agency than Matt does working for the National Park Service. She and her team can get pretty weird. We have this little whiteboard that.

that is by my desk and people sketch their ideas out on it. Like, the plural of yeat is yurt, which is a phrase that has been on there for months. And I have no idea what to do with that. That's good. I won't steal it, I promise. I don't think it means anything, so have it. Is there an example of one that you did not have high hopes for that took off? Unfortunately, a lot of them.

So there was one that like Smokey came up with Where he's like Donut holes should be called Donut plugs Because that's what they are And we had this whole little mini argument Just like it's not a plug It's a part of the donut

And so we tweeted it and it went off It's just it gets on the board Because that's what we're talking about Whether it be like This beautiful message about conservation or the outdoors are if we think donut holes should be named donut plugs. Now, this is where some of you might be thinking a tweet about donut holes versus plugs. That's not advancing the mission of wildlife conservation.

Right? Right? Sarah has an interesting take on that. If you are friends with somebody and they are passionate about something, would you be friends with them if all they talk about it was that one thing, if they never engaged with you back. If we're really going to talk like real people and be real people and be genuine, this is a part of it.

And people appreciate that because Twitter can be such an ugly, scary place. And if we could be like this little spot where you can engage safely with people from all over, then great. We're going to keep that going. I feel like that's a part of our brand at this point where it's like, yeah, this is kind of a place for everybody.

This approach seems to be working, both for Sarah and for Matt from NPS, whose social media followings continue to grow. But does a large social media following translate to an improvement in wildlife conservation? Sarah with ODWC says it's hard to measure. But she attributes more women feeling comfortable reaching out with hunting and fishing questions to her department's TikTok presence. And she says, just being on more people's radars now because of social media has made them privy to things they just might not be otherwise.

Every time somebody sends me a video on TikTok of like a harmful behavior towards an animal, like there was a trend of picking up possums. We had tagged on Instagram. We had a video go out of this young man on a college campus who was picked up a goose, harassed it. We were tagged immediately. And gay mornings were called immediately. And that was investigated immediately. Like we're doing good for a while.

by being good to people. And if we can get this messaging out that can build appreciation for, like, the natural world around them, then we can take bigger steps together. Matt is also encouraged by the engagement he's seen with the National Park Service social media accounts. The comments from people saying they're going to visit one of the parks for the first time

because of something they saw on NPS's social media. And the increased web traffic, too. and maybe foot traffic. We'd like to think that's the truth. To some of the lesser-known national parks that Matt uses social media to highlight. Whether you learn something every time you scroll through the National Park Service and the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation social media pages, or you just come for the lulls and stay for the post that makes you feel like you're going outside,

touching grass. Not a fluffy cow or a danger kitty. Right. Sarah and Matt hope that just by being, Being able to have this more down-to-earth relationship with and access to the natural world online will hopefully inspire you to deepen your relationship with it offline. Yeah, to go outside and touch some real grass and to feel more empowered when you do it. This one lady from the UK responded to one of our tweets saying that she didn't know salamanders were a real thing. She just had seen them on Harry Potter.

That was a real conversation that we got to have on Twitter. and be like, oh my God, no. Like, there's salamanderers outside, and here's how you find them. Go. And, like, we will send you maps. Like, we actually do that. Have you tried birding, get on eye natural, take a picture of a bird, and a bunch of other people have taken a picture of the same bird,

and they can tell you exactly what it is. And then now you have friends, and now you know what that bird is, you know. And now your life is figured out. Yes. Welcome to the show, kids. With our lives all figured out, we said a hearty see-a on the internet to Sarah Sutherland and Matt Turner. Although Matt had a few parting wise words for us. This time about composing social media posts.

No more than three puns. Noted. Noted. Ben, do you have anything else? I'm still trying to figure out if you have some sort of secret, what you're sort of, you know how like, like motorcycle riders will pass each other on the highway and they'll give each other that like low wave. Like, is there a park department version of that? I don't know. I think maybe just a social media manager one

where it's just a nod and probably a sigh. Another day. By the way, we asked Matt and Sarah after the fact what they make of all the changes happening in the social media space right now. Like Twitter's on again, off again, impending doom. since Elon Musk bought the platform and new social media spaces like threads and blue sky.

Their answers were pretty similar, so we'll leave you with Sarah's. She says, the landscape is changing, but change is the only certainty. We're just going to try our best to be present where we're needed and build community on the way.

Endless thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station. This episode was written and produced by me, Amory Sieverts, hosted by me and? Ben Brought Johnson. Mix and sound design by Paul Vycus. The rest of our team is Dean Russell, Quincy Walters, Grace Tatter, Samutajoshi, Emily Jenkowski, and Matt Reed.

Endless Thread is a show about babies named Armadillo. Not really, but Baby Armadillo is due at the end of this month. So if you want to make that happen, you know which tweet to like. And congratulations to Papa and Mama Armadillo. No, Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between touching grass and reading social media posts about touching grass, or at least it is for the next month. Next week in part two of our park series, we get slimy, literally. To me, this just looks like something took a poop and then something took a smaller poop next to it.

See you then.