Earlier this week, the NYPD ran a social media campaign to collect photos from ordinary people interacting with NYPD officers.

It did not go well. People on Twitter started posting pictures of police involved in violent situations, and criticizing the police.

My goal isn’t to armchair quarterback the social media strategy. Mistakes are made, the important thing is to think about what went wrong and ask “what could be done better next time?”

I’m not going to address the ethics and morality of law enforcement. There are members of the law enforcement community who are good, there are those who misbehave, and I see nothing to gain by speculating over the ratios of each. My interest is in this from a social media perspective.

However, the contention is where we should start. I don’t believe the NYPD is entirely good or bad, but there’s no denying that some people have strong feelings against them.

The nature of hashtags is that they can be trending topics that are widely promoted and searched. Running a highly visible hashtag campaign means that the folks promoting the hashtag are turning over control of the message. It’s as if the NYPD purchased an enormous billboard in Times Square, and let anybody show up and write a message.

Hashtag campaigns are a great strategy for positive engagements, as it encourages the spread of individual messages. It’s a risky strategy where there are strong negative feelings about the group organizing the hashtag campaign.

If the NYPD’s social media team wanted to collect crowdsourced images, a better strategy would have been encouraging people to reply directly to their main account. They get the same benefit, but it limits the viral spread to retweets, and doesn’t enable the default search functionality associated with hashtags.

And of course, these kind of social media campaigns are what my friends over at getchute.com help manage, and they’ll help you avoid common pitfalls. If only the NYPD had consulted with them. ;)