The Social Media Beat

Part I – The Internal Created Crisis “Bury the story.” “Put out a good news story.” “No comment.” “Wait until tomorrow, it will die all on its own.” Thirty years ago, these were simple ways to deal with a crisis in your organization.  Twenty years ago you still acted the same way. Ten years ago, you could maybe get away with it if you didn’t have a major media outlet in your area. Today? Try any of those techniques and you’ll be destroyed.  And, it might not even be the traditional media that is carrying the hangman’s noose…it could be your own community members. It’s generally accepted that crisis communications can kick in when negative things happen which can damage your reputation, bring into question your tactics, or challenge your procedures.  No matter what the cause is, the worst thing you can do in the digital era is to try to ignore, spin, or bury the crisis. With hundreds or even tho ...

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The law enforcement response to the Boston Marathon bombings has been the source of many hoorahs and kudos, and rightly so.  In the context of this blog and the Center for Social Media, I’ll focus on four elements (trends?) we haven’t quite seen before on this scale and magnitude. Think about how you can use, learn from, and apply them in your department.  For more insight into this event, please read Lynn Hightower’s blog post.        Rocking Social Media.  Like almost no agency before them, Boston capitalized on social media to manage the message and control the story.  The Boston Police effectively became its own news outlet, out-scooping the media as the go-to source for timely and accurate information.  It is reasonable to assume that your citizens are now looking to you to do the same.  Check out this recent @-mention for the Denver Police as proof:      @jmd9qs:  @DenverPolice Thank you for your conti ...

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This guest blog comes from Rebecca Rosenblatt of the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office. Deputy Rosenblatt has been in law enforcement for the past eight years. She previously worked in patrol as a K9 handler for the Millbrae Police Department until the department was consolidated by the sheriff's office in early 2012. Deputy Rosenblatt is currently assigned as the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office Public Information Officer, a full time position she tested for and was assigned to late last year. Though her job responsibilities are diverse, a key part of her daily routine is maintaining and updating the sheriff’s office website, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, the agency for which I work, is located in what is commonly known as the Silicon Valley region of California. Silicon Valley is also home to many of technology’s heavy hitters, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to name a few. At the onset, I couldn’t have told you the di ...

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We often find ourselves giving up something we love.  I find myself in that position right now, leaving a job I feel passionately about to the next step in my career.  As I write this, I just spent the first day training my replacement.  In thinking what I would say to him, I was reminded that when I began this journey I was a social media user versus being a social media professional.  How did I make the jump?  By building personal relationships. Knowing that I didn’t know what I was doing, I reached out to people that did.  In my case, Drexel University was offering a New Media Marketing class.  I contacted Dr. Larry Duke and he agreed to let me “sit in” on the class.  It was ten weeks of meeting various people that are kicking butt in the digital marketing space.  Each week there was a lecture from experts like Wil Reynolds of Seer Interactive, Eric Harbison of True Action, or Jed Singer of Stuzo.  The best part about it was all of the ...

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This guest blog comes from Laura McElroy of the Tampa, Florida, Police Department. During her nine years with the department, Laura has strengthened community relations by developing a proactive approach to the public information office.  Her team utilizes mainstream and social media to ensure citizens are up to date on how police are fighting crime in their neighborhoods.  In 2012, Laura led a multi-agency Joint Information Center for the Republican National Convention. In this role, she utilized social media to highlight the positive action of law enforcement during the convention that typically generates negative publicity for law enforcement. Laura is a University of Florida graduate who spent 16 years as a television reporter and anchor in Gainesville, Sarasota, West Palm Beach, and Tampa. Fourteen Tampa police officers are now members of our brand new social media team.  I keep telling them that they belong to a cutting edge specialty team just without the extra pay! The team was ...

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One of the most common questions we receive as social media gurus/nerds at police departments is: What applications do you use to manage it all? Just as we explain that there’s no one way for police agencies to use different social media sites, the same thing applies to apps. For those of you who aren’t sure what we mean by “apps,” I’m talking about third party applications that make it easier to use multiple social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Foursquare, both on a desktop computer, but also a mobile phone. A few examples include TweetDeck, Hootsuite, Tweetcaster and many others. Though there are several paid and free apps for “traditional” businesses to use, they don’t always work the same way for law enforcement, which has different needs and uses. And, after having a recent conversation with colleagues about our experiences using a variety of different apps, I’ve discovered there’s no one size fits all social media a ...

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Today’s guest post comes from Sergeant Dave Norris who has been with the San Mateo, California, Police Department since 1993. After serving in a variety of positions including Field Training Officer, Narcotics and Vice, and Investigations, he is currently assigned to Community and Media Relations. The position oversees SMPD’s Police Activities League, Civilian Volunteers, Neighborhood Watch, Plan Review for CPTED, School Resource Officer Programs, and “other projects as directed by the Chief.” He also handles Public Information and Social Media, having expanded SMPD’s Community Alert outreach from an email list of about 300 to over 13,000 direct subscribers across a number of social media platforms. The recent events in Boston have us all doing a “What worked? … What could we all do better?” evaluation of messaging and social media. Although Boston Police put out a great first message, news agencies provided fast and furious updates that were often inaccurat ...

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Lieutenant Zach Perron is the lead Public Information Officer for the Palo Alto (CA) Police Department, an agency of 85 sworn officers serving a community of about 65,000 residents.  The computer was invented in a garage three blocks from his office window, making Palo Alto the “Birthplace of Silicon Valley.”  Lieutenant Perron has worked with the command staffs of a number of local agencies to help their departments launch their social media outreach efforts.  You can reach him at zachary.perron@cityofpaloalto.org.   As Dionne Waugh pointed out last month in her blog post “Riding Along Via Twitter,” agencies all across the country are doing virtual ride-alongs.  We would like to share a unique spin we put on the idea recently. We launched our Twitter and Facebook accounts in March 2012 and have enjoyed remarkable success with them.  We’ve had two primary goals with the three Twitter virtual ride-alongs we’ve done: to increase transparenc ...

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The repeat use of the word “social” in the title is not a typo. Today, we are discussing a new resource to help social media managers connect with like-minded professionals for advice and mentorship. The IACP, under the auspices of its Discover Policing recruitment initiative and the New Police Chief Mentoring Project, has launched a new online mentoring center -- a place where current and future law enforcement professionals can connect.  This resource is not limited to sworn officers.  Civilian support personnel, including social media managers, are welcome and encouraged to take advantage of this exciting new resource. The use of social media in law enforcement is increasingly commonplace, but the technology is still new and the landscape is ever-evolving.  As a result, those responsible for managing a department’s social media presence, whether they are experienced Web 2.0 gurus or just fulfilling “other duties as assigned,” still have questions.  An ...

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The use of social media by law enforcement has grown exponentially over the last several years.  Overall, that growth has been beneficial for most agencies.  In fact, agencies have benefited by improving their interactions with the community, educating their citizens, promoting their positive achievements and disseminating real time information to the community.  However, not every aspect of this social media phenomenon has been positive.  One challenge facing most agencies is how to handle the posting of information about crimes in progress or reporting of crimes after the fact by citizens on the agencies social media outlets. It is impossible for most law enforcement agencies to monitor all of their social media channels 24/7 and respond to calls for service.  Therefore, it is important for all agencies that use any social media platform to post a notice in the description or information section which clearly states the site is not monitored 24/7 and any request for police servic ...

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