CorpComms Magazine

It is a long journey from PC Plod and Dixon of Dock Green to your friendly chief constable Tweeter but it is now becoming a reality as police forces try to move with the times.

Greater Manchester Police's Facebook application has more than 10,700 active users; Lancashire Police has a Twitter page to communicate instantly with younger generations and Herefordshire Police is investing in Bluetooth communication over mobile phones as well as on sites on Facebook, Bebo and Twitter to send out messages on speeding drivers and drinking sensibly.

Elsewhere, charity Crimestoppers reported a surge in tip-offs on suspects including alleged murderers, after turning to social media, while in Leicester PC Harvey Watson has signed up more than 130 Facebook friends to a site campaigning to keep the city's Victoria Park crime-free.

Connecting with communities in these ways is a fillip for forces used to criticism that they are out of touch with what is happening on the country's streets.

Indeed, the National Policing Improvement Agency, an organisation formed in 2007 to make a 'unique contribution to improving public safety', fostered debate on the trend last month by staging the first national police conference looking at its impact.

The event included sessions on web 2.0 governance, social media strategies and the risks and reputational issues involved. There was even a session called Policing 2.0.

Limited resources

The risks are certainly real. An obvious one, says Amanda Coleman, acting director of corporate communications at Greater Manchester Police, is the matter of resources.

GMP's Facebook application seeks to raise awareness of local incidents and operations and appeal for information, allowing Facebook members to install it onto their profiles for regular updates.

The force is also an active user of YouTube, where it posts videos and links to its Facebook site, and puts its press releases onto RSS feeds that appear on social networks, including Twitter.

However, running the site and other Internet communications means that the GMP has a full-time team of five staff working on its online communications alongside 27 press officers working with traditional media.

Coleman adds: 'Our chief constable does both internal and external blogs and is very keen to go on Twitter, but I'm saying no at the moment because if you're going to tweet you have to do it regularly and he doesn't have enough resources to do it at the moment.

'You see officers setting up sites but then, after a period of time, they move on and the initiative gets left. With Twitter, you also need to be able to get a succinct message across in just 140 characters and police officers are not known for their brevity.'

Coleman also says police social networking needs to be tailored to the communities it is aimed at. In Stockport, she says there are strong online communities and GMP's social media sites work well. 'In some other areas,' she adds, 'this may not be the first thing that we do.'

Some other forces are adopting a piecemeal approach. 'We're piloting using social media,' says Vanessa Boyd, senior public relations officer at the Police Service of Northern Ireland.

'At the moment we're not using it very much but we're using Twitter and we will see what we can do with it.'

Asked how the department's 32 staff are being involved in the project, she says: 'It has not been determined how we do this.'

Engaging with specific audiences

In London, The Metropolitan Police has appointed digital agency 6Consulting to search social media for public comment and crime alerts with a brief understood to include the monitoring of Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

The Met also used Twitter to communicate with environmentalists before the recent G20 demonstrations and attracted 650 followers.

Jo Randell, press officer in human resources, press and communications at the Met, says the force also uses YouTube and Flickr. But she adds: 'We don't use Twitter regularly. We would just use it to communicate directly with people for a particular event. I know a lot of forces are using social networks such as Facebook but the Met is not doing it at the moment.'

However, the Met's G20 Twitter project attracted criticism from a SpyBlog.org.uk posting entitled Climate Camp Twits.

'This is a typical NuLabour centralised control freak model: ie propaganda broadcast only,' it complained. 'There's no way for the public to transparently feed back comments or suggestions. Can none of the vast army of Metropolitan Police Service press office media spokesmen be spared to moderate some online discussion forums in real time, 24/7?'

Ged Carroll, director of digital strategies at communications agency Ruder Finn, says one issue is that the most effective blogs and tweets tend to come from frontline officers addressing clearly defined groups such as teenagers or gay and lesbian communities, and not through police press offices.

'They're two very different disciplines and there's a lot of politics involved in the police,' he says. 'The police report to local police authorities and the councillors who sit on them might like the police to be more visible than they are when they're engaging through social networks.'

Ethical complications

There are also ethical issues, which Dick Fedorcio, the Met's director of public affairs and corporate communications, cited earlier this year as a reason for the force not interacting with bloggers.

Carroll says an example could be the police's blog-monitoring operations picking up a Facebook post by an underage boy stating that he's sitting at home and about to smoke a joint.

Do officers break down his door and arrest him, he asks. Or might it simply be teenage bravado? Then there are issues about a surveillance society and social media, providing a written record of what is said, could prove an uncomfortable media through which real-time police decisions might be analysed later.

'These are wider issues and I don't have the answers,' says Carroll. 'This is something that our society is going to have to make decisions on.'

Nonetheless, David Cushman, managing director of London-based social technologies consultancy 90:10, believes the possibilities for police use of social media in their two-way communications can go a lot wider.

He says: 'Forces could develop and support the use of tools with which communities can join, in the better protection of themselves, such as networked Neighbourhood Watch that could be updated with a text from any mobile phone.

'It would lower the effort to make a report, so police could gather information more rapidly and prioritise accordingly. And could the police also contribute by developing something bespoke for all our safety? Making it open source could engage a world of developers to work on something they can believe in.

'We could move away from watching the police to catch out their wrong-doing and instead think how the police could make it easier for people to share their reports of wrong-doings captured on video and camera phones. It would all help the police work more effectively with an enabled and networked community.'

Two way communication

Chief Inspector Mark Payne, head of the press office at West Midlands Police, believes social media interaction by police forces has to be a two-way street and says the 3,000 members of the West Midlands' Facebook page, and a similar number of followers of its Twitter site, can and do tell the force what they think of it.

'People buzz us with their views,' he says. 'It can't be just about us talking to people. It should be about engaging with people. What's interesting is that when we get negative comments and we don't respond immediately, other people tend to advocate on our behalf. Most people like the police. There are always some elements that don't and we do get some negative comments but I don't think we need to be afraid of that because if they weren't saying it on Facebook, they might be saying it down the pub where we wouldn't have the opportunity to respond.'

Engaging in this way, of course, is what corporate communications is supposed to be about but the next stage of police use of social media, says Coleman, has to move away from its novelty value and towards genuine integration with other communications channels.

'All the excitement about doing this as a PR stunt will go away,' she says. 'It has to be part of an integrated approach in corporate communications. We're not there yet but this is what we have to do.' 

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