The Social Media Beat

Today's post comes from Chris Hsiung, a lieutenant with the Mountain View Police Department and the social media manager in charge of community engagement and growth through the police department's social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest). You can reach him at @chMtnViewPD. Chris holds a Bachelor's degree in Behavior Science & Sociology from San Jose State University and a Master's degree in eBusiness Management from Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, CA. The Mountain View Police Department has 97 sworn officers and serves a diverse and technology driven community located in the heart of Silicon Valley. There’s no question that social media is an effective tool for communicating with and engaging the communities that we all serve. The ability to engage in two-way communication with the public or instantly disseminate accurate information to the media and public has arguably been a “game changer” for law enforcement. As a law enforcement government enti ...

Read the rest of entry »

With over a billion users, Facebook reaches one out of every seven people in the world.  Those of us trying to reach every single one of those billion plus are always looking for ways to optimize our posts. One way to draw more attention to our content is to make sure it gets prominently displayed in our followers' news feeds.  An easy way to accomplish that is by posting a picture with a link instead of a link with a picture.  Here is what I mean. When you copy and paste a link in to your status update, Facebook generates a post that looks like this:   When you upload a picture and then put the title and a link in the description it looks like this: It is much easier to scroll right past the little picture with the text preview that Facebook generates (the screenshots are actual size).  The picture with the link attached takes up more space in the news feed and consequently garners more attention (smile).  In a quite unscientific study we did with the Phill ...

Read the rest of entry »

Richmond Police Sector Lt. David Naoroz has been using social media in his personal life for a while now so it was only a matter of time before he began using professionally. Richmond Police PIO and fellow social media nerd Dionne Waugh quizzed him about the details to find out what he hopes to accomplish; what he’s learned so far; and the advice he would give to other sworn officers. View Part I of the conversation here.   What has surprised you about the experience? My biggest surprise came a few weeks ago at a community meeting. The attendance at this particular meeting was low, maybe six people. The folks attending were my regulars and had heard my communication pitch before but it wasn’t going to stop me. So, I did a quick smartphone Twitter demo and showed them some other neighborhood groups in and around the city, some with 2,000 plus followers and their eyes lit up! About 10 minutes later the group president looked at me and asked me how much Twitter cost. Suffice to say, ...

Read the rest of entry »

Richmond Police Sector Lt. David Naoroz has been using social media in his personal life for a while now so it was only a matter of time before he began using professionally. Richmond Police PIO and fellow social media nerd Dionne Waugh quizzed him about the details to find out what he hopes to accomplish; what he’s learned so far; and the advice he would give to other sworn officers. Why did you want to communicate with your community via Twitter and Foursquare? After the department moved to sector policing, I was assigned to the police academy and started attending community meetings that were held at the academy. I have been a resident of the City of Richmond longer than I had worked for the department so I have been attending community meetings that impacted the area where I both worked and lived for years. Much of the information given out at these meetings was relevant, but I thought there must be a better way to get the ever changing and developing “word” out to the peo ...

Read the rest of entry »

As law enforcements use of social media grows, the public’s thirst for more information continues to rise exponentially. Not only does the public want more information, they also want it right now. When should police departments provide information about ongoing, in progress incidents and when should they not provide this information? This question is not easily answered since no two communities are alike and no two incidents are the same. However, some basic guidelines can be helpful to understand the overall concept of publishing real time incident information and the value to the organization and potential pitfalls as well. How law enforcement agencies handle posting in progress incident information varies greatly across the country. Some departments are quick to post information while others rarely post information about in progress incidents. Some departments, like @SeattlePD has even created a program titled Tweets by Beat where incidents are tweeted to different beat Twitter accounts directly ...

Read the rest of entry »

The latest craze to descend upon the social media scene is an iPhone/iPod touch app called Vine.  Launched just a few weeks ago, Vine brings new meaning to the notion of short attention span theater.  The app allows users to shoot six-second video clips (yes, 6 seconds) and share them via social media. You can either record six straight seconds of continuous video, or stitch six seconds worth of footage together for a stop motion montage effect.   Essentially, Vine is like Twitter and Instagram, but for video. Six seconds doesn’t sound long, but neither did 140 characters a few years ago.  To get a sense of what “vines” look like, search Twitter for the hashtags #vine or #vining.  Or, check out Vinepeek to see a running, real-time view of Vines as they’re posted.   Already, Vine is generating a lot of buzz, and law enforcement agencies should be aware of the app and its videos, and its potential pitfalls and opportunities.  Standby for more citiz ...

Read the rest of entry »

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. In Part One of this blog, we discussed the Research and Direction Phase – subscribing to other agencies and evaluating their content for reference; and the Policy, Procedure, and Scope Phase, about how to take your time preparing and starting your venture in public mess ...

Read the rest of entry »

Did you ever press the enter key with the hopes of entering an empty line, only to have it not render? Have you tried to arrange things on your blog post and it just doesn’t fall in to the right place? These are annoying problems that take up valuable time in our busy day. Our blogging platforms translate our text and commands to HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Every once in a while, the platform gets flummoxed (technical term) and it does not translate in to code properly. Knowing a little bit of HTML can help you easily overcome this minor setback. One of the first things to understand is that empty or white space in HTML is meaningless. So in the HTML view of your blog, you can press enter all day long and it will not mean a thing. The spaces you see are put in for human readability and your computer, browser, and the Internet could not care less. One error that I encounter often is the blank line not show up on your webpage after pressing enter. To fix ...

Read the rest of entry »

2013 is now in full swing and our bloggers are hard at work generating quality, meaningful content. But, now we turn to you, our faithful readers. We know you are dealing with challenges, you have questions, you have concerns, you wonder just how does an agency (fill in the blank). So, this is your opportunity to tell us what you want to hear this year. What topics would you like our bloggers to cover? Respond in the comments or send an email to socialmedia@theiacp.org.

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. At the recent IACP Conference, I noticed some amazing things being done by very talented folks all across the nation and (very effectively, I might add) by our Canadian "neighbours". There was also a popular curiosity about how to start a social media strategy for your law en ...

Read the rest of entry »