I first encountered the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Twitter account when it popped up on my feed, already uncommon for a government agency profile. Even more uncommon: it featured punchy language and unhinged graphics characteristic of Gen Z and Millennial humor. I had barely thought about the DNR before, but their account pulled me in.
The DNR’s humorous posts started around April 2021, coinciding with the hire of Rachel Terlep, their Senior Social Media Manager. It’s no coincidence that those are the posts with the most engagement in the form of likes, replies, and retweets. Terlep knew from the beginning that she planned on “bringing kind of a cheeky conversational tone with me” because of her experiences working in her university’s communications office and using that tone to connect with the student body.
Over the spring and summer of 2022, after the hire of Mary Watkins as another Social Media Manager, DNR posts began to go more and more viral. Terlep thinks they hit their stride after a tweet reminding people to “run up that hill” during a tsunami like the Kate Bush song. “It was like a moment clicked where it was like, ‘Wait a minute. Is this, is this our voice now?’”
Other viral DNR posts include a screenshot of an empty playlist titled “Songs people on the trail want to hear from your Bluetooth speaker,” a post reading “I’m begging you all to remember that a venti PSL isn’t adequate hydration on the trail,” and a rainbow graphic that says “don’t set the state on fire.” (That last one has sadly become very ironic.)
