Hashtags can be dangerous. The NYPD found itself in a spot of bother when the #MyNYPD was turned against it. It became the hashtag of choice to criticize the department’s approach to fighting crime. And aimless connectivity can rebound horribly, as the New York Police Department discovered when they wandered up an irrelevant alley through the #MyNYPD hashtag. No wonder the audience fought back: it had to. For self-preservation people contracted their social graphs, retreating into smaller private networks, looking for walls with which to surround their gardens. The burgeoning growth of “walled gardens” – the more closed and intimate social platforms such as WhatsApp, WeChat or Facebook Messenger – has been the response. Meanwhile, the social platforms themselves started to tighten their filtering algorithms. By 2014, we started to notice a drop in engagement levels on our clients’ pages and launched a global analysis of more than 100 social programs. What we discovered was the decline of organic reach, in advance of this being recognized or admitted by vendors such as Facebook.