New Zealand Police: Best use of Social Media Award - June 2011
Our guest judge for June is The Common Room, a comms agency on a mission to change the way the industry works. They partner with experts from other disciplines to tailor a suite of services for each of their clients - from refining brand architecture to cross platform social media campaigns. Currently, they're unashamedly fundraising for the BigSleepOut.org.nz event on July 7, 2011. The TCR team will be sleeping rough for a night on the mean streets of Auckland to help end homelessness by 2020. Donate here if your social conscience compels you.The companies that get the most attention and glory in the digital marketing sphere are generally the ones with big marketing budgets or exciting target audiences like “Gen Y” or “Mums who like bacon”. You don’t often see government organisations in the “what’s hot” list or, for that matter, leading the charge in new marketing practices. It’s why we’re particularly stoked to award this month’s “Best Use” award to the NZ Police. We’ve got a couple of good mates in the SCU so we’ve had a bit of an inside view of how those guys are using SoMe platform searches and profiles to act as “eyes on the ground” and gather info around everything from the ever-evolving boy-racer culture to a hot offender. Beyond that fairly standard listening approach though, we’ve been watching some truly progressive activity from different parts of the NZ Police.Queenstown Police have been running a kind of online version of “Police 10/7” on their Facebook page for a while now. They post live cases and ask for help from the public to identify people or report any suspicious behavior connected with the crimes. These include anything from an armed robbery at a dairy or people wanted for arrest, to an attempted car break-in. In many cases, the admins include cctv footage or photographs. You know that community-building thing we all talk about doing with our clients? This is one of the best examples out there. This Facebook page has an online community that almost perfectly mirrors their offline one, where every member feels invested, responsible, and protective of the community they’re a part of.Bay of Plenty Police is right at the forefront as well, with a thriving twitter presence that offers safety tips and public notice type info (alerts and news, weather reports, road safety updates), a little bit of the same “Police 10/7” style request for help from the public, as well as keeping us up with the play on certain police activities like this tweet, sent out earlier this month:
Can you help? Police want to identify two men in connection with aggravated robbery of liquor store in Rotorua last night http://ow.ly/547y3— Bay of Plenty Police (@BOPPolice) May 27, 2011
On their Facebook page they offer a similar thing to our friends down in Queenstown, albeit slightly more focused on information sharing at this stage. One of the really great things about the way our police are using these tools though is that they’ve recognised what a great source of intelligence they are. Major events or local meet-ups are often organized or discussed online and, in certain circumstances our cops are guided by these communities as to how much policing resource they need to allow for that area – making sure there are enough officers around to keep everyone safe. They use clients like Hootsuite to monitor regular searches for mentions of district-based police , tracking public sentiment, spread of media coverage and raising the occasional red flag if an issue is spotted. In some cases, like the recent Christchurch quake, they followed hashtags to make sure correct information was being circulated and to help confirm the intelligence they were receiving from other sources.It’s an impressive, thorough use of the tools and displays both a willingness to try new methods and a real desire to open the lines of communication as wide as is possible (and safe) with their public. It’s coming very close to putting community policing at least partly back in the hands of the actual community. And for that, we think they should be applauded.