When it comes to social media, are you waiting for something more?

I’ve had something on my mind for awhile: the shiny object has lost its luster, and I’m getting bored.

A year ago Amber Naslund was blogging about this: stop talking about how great it is, she wrote (I’m paraphrasing), and get to work figuring out how to use these tools. Lately I’ve read Tamar Weinberg and Sean Moffitt blog frustrations similar to mine, and so I need to speak up too.

I’ve been feeling stuck in a rut for some time, because there’s only so many times you can point to a police department or task force that is totally rocking social media and say, “They’re doing it right.” First of all, “right” is defined by so many different variables: resources, staffing levels, staff willingness to socialize, public willingness to socialize back.

Second, I’m finding that the police departments “doing it right” are generally the same ones who are doing policing right. They already know how to work with the press, interact with their publics. If they feel they need that little bit of extra online impact, they hire a PR agency… but it was because they had the underlying pieces in place, first.

As so many PR and marketing people have pointed out, social media/Web 2.0/the Internet is just the latest in a set of tools meant to help us all connect more easily with the people we serve. With regard to police departments, these tools facilitate information sharing. If an agency doesn’t want to share information, no blog or Twitter page in the world can help change that.

There are, to be sure, different rules. The Web is still relatively anonymous, or if it isn’t, people are used to thinking of it that way (and thus posting whatever is on their minds). Officers walking down the street off duty don’t identify themselves, so if they’re drunk and puke on the sidewalk, it’s not the same as drunk tweeting that you just puked… with your badge or blue twibbon or whatever identifying yourself as a cop.

Still, as I wrote a command officer on the LinkedIn group Law Enforcement 2.0, if you expect your officers to abide by professional conduct policy offline, if you trust and respect them to be responsible and they trust and respect you right back, you probably won’t have a problem online either – and if you do, it will be easier taken care of than rampant reputation-management problems.

A few months ago I interviewed a longtime source/collaborator about his “secret sauce” when it came to relationship-building. He’s the kind of guy who, when I tell other sources that Kipp said they should jump, they ask “How high?”

And yet he’s not using social media — other than his LE-only listserv, the only online tool he needs for what he IS doing: building relationships with other investigators, with the media, with pretty much anyone who might be able to help him down the road and vice versa.

Not to mention the public. He goes out and gives presentations to seniors and other high-risk victim groups. Just as with the investigators, when they need someone they can trust for advice, who are they going to call?

Folks, that should be your focus. Never mind about how often to tweet or how many people to follow or fans to attract or who should be doing the blogging. The questions are, how do you and your officers interact with people — each other and the public — offline, and how do you want to translate that online? What will make a Twitter or Facebook or blog presence able to continue your offline work?

Hint: it’s a force multiplier, but I don’t mean in terms of “spreading your message.” One cop in a coffee shop can reach maybe a dozen people, but put him on Twitter in the coffee shop, tweeting about who he just talked to and what public safety problem they want him to solve, and you’ve got a couple hundred or more followers who might just be able to offer their take on how you can best serve them.

Sure, it’s scary. It demands humility: what 30-year professional wants to be told by non-cops how to police them? But if relationships are all about compromise, then you’re not just there to deal with “the customer is always right”; you’re there to help them understand when they can and can’t have what they want, what you can and can’t do, and why.

Open communication leads to respect, and that’s been true of police departments since the beginning. In the recent past, chiefs who had good strong relationships with media could count on positive as well as more critical press, and as long as officers were on the streets interacting with everyday people, they could count on public trust as well.

Still, cops are fundamentally cynical about relationships and trust, and sometimes they’re right to be. Social media changes nothing about that. It takes as much hard work as any other form of communication, and it won’t solve problems overnight. And I guess that’s the biggest reason why in coming months, I’ll be focusing less on social media and more on what makes it tick:

I’m afraid that the way police understand and use it right now, it won’t make as much difference to law enforcement as so many of us believe it can.

Thoughts?

Image: Jayel Aheram via Flickr

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Tags: communication, Content, Law Enforcement, public relations, Social media

This entry was posted on April 20, 2010 at 11:24 am and is filed under Community relations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.