The Social Media Beat

Black Friday in most communities is a pretty busy day for police agencies. It is especially busy if the community has a lot of retail establishments or a mall. Dunwoody has both. To chronicle this typically busy day, the Dunwoody Police Department decided to tweet all of their calls starting the morning of Black Friday at 6am for the next 24 hours. A campaign started on Monday using their social media channels and email lists promoting the upcoming tweetathon. Several local newspapers and a couple of television stations picked up the story as well. The Uniform Patrol Sergeants for each of the two shifts were responsible for tweeting each call, which included dispatched as well as self-initiated calls. The sergeants were also responsible for responding to any questions or comments if needed. Black Friday ended up being a pretty quiet day, very non-typical for even a regular Friday. A total of 145 calls were posted on Twitter. A lot of these calls included false alarms, residential checks, and business ch ...

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Social media is an ever-moving target with new sites springing up, old sites disappearing, and functionality constantly changing. Here are just a couple recent changes and updates from the social media sphere. Facebook added a share button to its mobile site and apps. Facebook sharing isn’t just for computer users anymore. The addition of the share button on these platforms makes it much easier for smartphone and tablet users to share content from their newsfeed directly to their own timeline. Pinterest released secret boards and business pages. If you were attempting to create a board, and weren’t ready to release it, or if you simply had a Pinterest board of pins that you wanted to keep private, there was really no way for you to do so. Until a couple of weeks ago. Pinterest now allows users to pin to “secret” boards. And while they were coming up with new things, Pinterest also created business pages. Pinterest business pages allow users to enter a business name instead of a ...

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Okay, not really stolen, but borrowed with the best of intentions. If you’re not using TrafficSafetyMarketing.gov, you’re missing out on a fantastic resource for free, relevant, timely social media content. Most importantly, the site gives us professionally done traffic safety information that complements our own enforcement and ties even a small local agency into current national traffic safety campaigns. NHTSA seems to be putting even more effort and resources into this site for the benefit of local law enforcement messaging. As NHTSA describes on their own site: Welcome to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration communications resource for States, partner organizations, and highway safety professionals. This is our one-stop-shop for the latest communications news, campaign materials, and marketing techniques. The site includes a variety of media, including Internet banner ads (that could also be Facebook cover photos), fact sheets, flyers, and pamphlets in both English ...

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How do you know if you are having an impact with your social media efforts? There are multiple ways to measure what you are doing from the simplistic to advanced means. The platforms you are using will provide some insight into your efforts and there are some excellent 3rd party applications that can help you understand your impact. One step that is often missing in the analytical equation is the most basic step of your social media strategy. Have you actually determined what your goals are? Many agencies have opted to use social media, but have never decided why. The simple reality is that if you have not defined your why, you will never have any idea whether you are meeting your goals or not. If all you want are page views, post impressions, ReTweets, likes, follows, or comments, then you have a very simple measurement. Count them and see if you are attaining growth on a regular basis. To me, that is a bit of a waste of time. It’s great to have thousands of followers or likes, but if your inform ...

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Last blog, I wrote about the presentation at IACP 2012 given by Tampa Police PIO Laura McElroy. Tampa hosted the 2012 RNC and social media played a huge role in the way the police department responded and reacted to incidents. Well, here in Boca Raton we had the same experience. We hosted the final Presidential Debate, which was held at Lynn University. As with any large scale event we planned out how we would cover it, how we would respond to media, where our command post would be for PIO’s. But it wasn’t the podium or the PIO soundbite that was center stage, it was again social media. We were able to utilize the Region 7, Regional Domestic Security Task Force (RDSTF) mobile Joint Information Center (JIC) to run the PIO section of the event. This is a trailer first used in Tampa that is designed to be a field office for PIO’s in mass incidents or events. The trailer is full of computers, TV’s, phones and Wi-Fi. From here we can communicate with the media from the field bu ...

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Today's guest blog post comes from Machelle Montgomery, Social Media Liaison for the Prince William County, Virginia, Police Department. This full-time position was developed in April of this year and is a part of the Public information Office. As a prior Intelligence Analyst for Prince William and Virginia State Police, she is also responsible for gathering Intel from social media sites and forwarding to the Department’s Intelligence Unit. Montgomery began her law enforcement career in 1989 and has an Associate’s degree in Criminal Justice. We all know a SHORT post goes a LONG way. However, there are times when it is necessary to have much more information. For this, the note feature of Facebook is fantastic. This feature allows you to edit or modify your post as frequently as necessary and you can add more than one photo to the same post. Currently, if you post on the timeline you are unable to go back and edit the post, should you find an error or perhaps want to update it with new inf ...

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Lately I’ve been wondering if police departments – or their governing jurisdictions – should be more like e-marketers in their quest to connect with and solicit feedback from citizens.  Think about it – every time you order something online, two things almost invariably happen: 1) you are added to that merchant’s e-mail list, and 2) you are asked to review the product you purchased. What if police did the same thing? What if every police-citizen contact, from citation to incident report, was added to the department e-newsletter distribution and given the opportunity to comment on and review that encounter with the police? Maybe, at first blush, we don’t want to open ourselves up to that, but on the other hand … surveying public perceptions of police service is not a new idea. Cities and individual police agencies do citizen surveys all the time, some with more regularity and rigor than others. But it’s often done in isolation. Maybe a link is posted ...

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Today's guest blog post comes from Corporal Frank Domizio. He has been with the Philadelphia Police Department for 16 years and is currently assigned to the Department's Office of Media Relations and Public Affairs where he is the Social Media Community Manager. Frank is also a regular lecturer at Drexel University's LeBow College of Business on the topics of social media and content strategy. He can be reached at Frank.Domizio@phillypolice.com or 215-686-3388. We receive two kinds of questions from the public via Twitter. The first are questions from those seeking quality information, from a trusted source, on how to navigate the highways and byways of policing. The second are questions from those seeking to bait us in to an extraneous and off-topic discussion not meant for the hallowed halls of  the Twitterverse. How do you tell difference? Here are a few tactics that we at the Philadelphia Police Department have found effective to quickly vet someone engaging us through Twitter. M ...

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Whether your department is a veteran user of social media or has just taken the plunge, the one aspect of using social media that many struggle with is content. This can be an especially difficult challenge when you are just starting out. One might think, rightly so, that the nature of law enforcement and what departments do should provide an endless supply of readymade content. While this can be true in many cases, departments should also be prepared to vary their content and include items of broad appeal to the general public based on seasonal events or monthly awareness observations. First, let’s consider seasonal events. There are many holidays, beginnings, and celebrations that your department can highlight and post information about that would be of interest to your community. Some are easy to identify such as Halloween, Christmas, July 4th, etc. Each of these provides an opportunity to share important safety tips or other information vital to the community. There are also beginning events and ...

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Who has the time for all this social media stuff? That’s one of the most frequently asked questions we get as law enforcement social media enthusiasts.  Though there are many ways and apps you can use to save time, there’s actually one social network that’s fairly easy to understand and takes only a minute or two at a time to use: Foursquare. I think it’s one of the most growing popular apps when it comes to law enforcement and social media because of how easy and fairly simple it is to use and the fact that the “check-ins” and posts aren’t all that complicated. For example, though you can use it on a desktop computer, it’s predominantly meant to be used as an app on your smartphone. After you’ve set up an account, it takes just a few seconds for you to open the app, which now automatically suggests the place you’re closest to, write a few words and click ‘check in.’ Done. It’s really that quick. Though it’s e ...

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