Beyond Twitter and Facebook: Leveraging Other Social Media Tools at Your Department

Social media in law enforcement is a hot topic right now and a growing trend across all modern police agencies in the US, Canada, and Europe. More and more departments are setting up Facebook pages, creating Twitter accounts, and designing their own MySpace profiles. But, often, the discussion stops there: start sending Tweets, get Facebook friends, and your good, right? You have now reached out to the public and they are listening, right?

In some cases, yes. There are a number of law enforcement agencies who really “get” social media and the power it has to engage citizens. They use their department’s social networks to their fullest advantage. There are others who send a few tweets and then give up. But no matter how or what you use, the top three most robust tools for citizen interaction—Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace—are not the only sites that offer citizen interaction online.

Two thought leaders in the world of law enforcement and social media, Christa Miller and Lauri Stevens, both recently published articles about other, often-overlooked, tools that can add value to your department’s social media strategy.

LinkedIn

Lauri’s article (at ConnectedCOPS.net) focuses on the professional networking site LinkedIn. Think about LinkedIn as a type of Facebook for professional networking—cutting out all the riff-raff, if you will. As Lauri points out in her article:

All the reasons cops think of to avoid social media really don’t apply with LinkedIn. Like the privacy issues you all worry about. You set your profile up so no one can see it unless you’re linked. And you link with other professionals, not citizens or former high-school chums. The facebook issues where a “friend-of-a-friend” can see your stuff without you knowing are just not there.

Although you can set up public groups, LinkedIn is more about connecting with other professionals in your field or, in your case, connecting with other cops, command staff, and chiefs. Lauri explains that she has set up a networking group for chiefs, managed by chiefs. It’s a place where chiefs can interact, ask questions, and share ideas without worrying about other officers or the public tampering and commenting.

Even simply using LinkedIn among members of a single department might give officers a chance to take their discussions outside the squad room, engage problems, and share ideas.

Social Bookmarking

Christa’s article (at Cops 2.0) focuses on social bookmarking tools like Delicious, StumbleUpon and others. Virtually every web browser allows individual users to “bookmark” certain web pages. But for a while now, websites devoted to tracking and sorting your bookmarks have been helping individuals sort and share the content they think is important.

Not only do these services allow you to save and track your bookmarks in a place that won’t die if you computer gets thrown over a bridge, but they can open up your bookmarks to others. For example, your PIO could track and bookmark local and national coverage of an event, like a child abduction. When citizens come looking for information on the case, you can point them to the bookmarks you save over the internet. As Christa points out, bookmarking

Promotes transparency, [and] shows your agency is organized about paying attention to what’s going on in the community.

See Christa’s article for more ideas and other bookmarking sites.

FriendFeed

One of my favorite “bookmarking” sites is FriendFeed. In FriendFeed you can set up a personal or public feed of a number of RSS feeds from blogs and websites. This can be very useful if you have a number of blogs or media sites that you need to keep up on. Instead of checking every single one for new stories, simply plug them into your FriendFeed and you can see all of the latest stories—from the sites that you specify—all in one feed. It’s much more convenient and easier if you have a number of media sources you want to keep track.

In addition, you can open your feed up to the public, so that citizens can follow the same media sources you are following. This might be useful if you want to offer citizens a one-stop-shop for information from multiple sources like press releases, local media crime reports, and updates to your department’s blog.

Beyond

Not every department or officer is going to want to use all or all of these tools, but they are useful for different departments and at different times, according to the social media strategy your agency has have outlined. What’s important is that you know what tools exist and how to use them, so when you need or want to use them they’ll be at your fingertips.

James Gunter is the editor of The Crime Map and the director of social media for CrimeReports.com.

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