NASA's Social Media Strategy Is Genius—And Kinda Maddening

On July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft turned all its sensors to Pluto for a 20-hour flyby. Before it went dark—no contact with Earth—New Horizons sent one last chunk of data home. Contained therein was the best picture of Pluto in history. (If anything had gone wrong, it could have also been the last.) And when NASA received that image, the agency did something unique. NASA posted the image on Instagram.

Last week's coverage of the flyby was hair-raising, historic, and dominated by social media. That wasn't just because NASA dropped an Insta-bomb. From putting the science team on Reddit for an AMA to pulling questions from Twitter during live press briefings, the New Horizons mission had the social savvy of a tech company's product rollout. And it's not just New Horizons, either. NASA has a brand-wide social media strategy as ambitious and carefully planned as a Hollywood blockbuster. Except NASA's a public agency. So NASA had to think carefully about the legality and ethics of using privately held social media. And the press has to ask how NASA's increasing reliance on it affects independent coverage.

"Social media strategy for us as a whole has been focused since 2009," says John Yembrick, the agency's social media manager. "We have over 500 social media accounts across the agency." You've probably followed them, from astronauts and rovers to entire laboratories. NASA's follower count across all platforms reaches well into the millions. The agency has actually won awards for its social media. NASA is a #brand.

Yembrick and the social media team started gearing up for the New Horizons flyby three months in advance. They held weekly phone calls with the New Horizons mission to discuss the kinds of information that would be released and to strategize timing, platforms, and engagement.

The Instagram idea came out of those meetings. NASA's media office and the New Horizons team had decided to debut the image at an 8am ET press conference. But Yembrick and the social media team thought it would be cool to give the world a sneak peek¹ an hour earlier, and Instagram would be the perfect platform. NASA PR gave the idea a thumbs up. "This mandate to reach as many people as possible has been in NASA's charter since 1958," says Jason Townsend, Yembrick's deputy on the social media team.

But like all government agencies, NASA can't exhibit favoritism toward a private company. From the most conservative position, giving an image to Instagram favors its owner, Facebook, over (let's say) Tumblr, or Flickr, or Snapchat. But those distinctions are tricky on social media, because the platforms are, in one sense, public. Nobody needed an Instagram account to see the Pluto image. But Instagram and Facebook have been playing up their capacity for and desire to deliver news-like content. "That's always been the question," says Fred Wellman, CEO of public relations firm ScoutComms, and a retired Army public affairs officer who helped pioneer the branch's social media strategy. "The challenge is avoiding revenue generation on your back."

For now, that's a pitfall that NASA has been able to avoid, by focusing on how well a platform helps them reach the audience their charter insists they speak to. For example, the Pluto photo was not only NASA's most liked photo, but it also gained them 300,000 new followers. "Now 300,000 new people are learning about NASA," says Townsend. In order to use a social media platform, NASA (or any federal agency) and the company must first negotiate a federal-compatible Terms of Service agreement to make iron out any problematic clauses that would prohibit federal employees from using the tools. For instance, if the company claims intellectual property rights to any content posted to its platform. "We're not on every platform. It has to be on the government's terms of service, and has to be approved by the agency's Chief Information Officer," he says.

But the thing about Instagram winning by having that strong NASA presence is that the company is profiting off NASA's back, because of the traffic they got by hosting the image before anyone else—media or civilian—had it. (It was supposed to be an hour of exclusivity—NASA prefers to term this a "preview," because real exclusivity would technically violate government regs—but it turned into about four hours owing to delays in NASA's posting the picture on its own website). The Instagram version was a mere 640x640 pixels, which means it would blur if anyone blew it up much bigger than a Polaroid. Many news organizations held off on publishing their stories until a high-resolution version became available, which in a way delayed the public's access to independently vetted news. In that intervening time, news stories about Pluto posted the image in an Instagram embed, which drove users to that platform and (potentially) helped the company earn ad revenue.

Of course, you could say the same thing about WIRED: We loot NASA's image coffers for our stories, which in turn earns our owner Condé Nast money on every click. But the difference there is that WIRED has access to all the same materials as other media companies, at the same time. That wasn't the case with Instagram.

This isn't just about journalists whining about access. (If there is such a thing as a born journalist, that person's first words were probably, "F*&%ing embargo!"). In a new survey from the Pew Research Center, only around a third of all US adults see Facebook or Twitter as an important way to get news. Most people are still turning to the media for context, no matter when or where the first pictures from a space mission show up.

Wellman, the former Army publicist, says the danger of social media is it lets agencies play to their "superfans" and turn their backs on critical coverage. "We could put on the Army's Facebook page that 'Today we killed 20 Afghans in an accidental bombing' and the superfans would respond with 'Oh my God, I love America and soldiers and they're amazing,'" he says. To be fair, NASA has made all of its scientists available to the media, and available for interviews.

But that doesn't mean a social media obsession can't harm coverage. Organizations can sometimes let social media metrics obscure their core goals and mission. (Trust us on this.) On the evening of July 14, the world was waiting for New Horizons to phone home and say it had successfully passed by Pluto. With less than two minutes until the message was scheduled to arrive, the cameras cut to...(drumroll)...a NASA social media representative, who proceeded to tell the world how high New Horizons was trending on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The Pluto Press Corps was not too amused. The camera cut to New Horizons Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman in the nick of time, seemingly the moment she received the I'm-OK signal from New Horizons. For a moment, it seemed, NASA's ace team of publicists had forgotten that the cameras were supposed to be on Pluto.

¹ Correction 3:24pm ET July 23 2015: Typo.