By Brigette Flood
In social media, we usually focus on how individuals, companies and marketers take advantage of social platforms to connect with friends or consumers. Social media community managers know how difficult it can be to get quality and quantity of engagement. Their job is to keep conversation going, increase engagement, ensure responsiveness to inquiries and issues and try to come up with new, innovative uses for social media that align with company goals.
Guess one area where community engagement is working extremely well. Hint: you’ll be glad to hear it. Law enforcement. Yep, that’s right. Police from New York to Philly to Cincinnati are having great success tracking down criminals and engaging the community in innovative ways. One of the most innovative and thriving is The Pottstown Mercury’s Pinterest page. The Pennsylvania newspaper created a “Wanted by Police” board, which features mug shots of alleged criminals along with descriptions of their alleged crimes.
They launched the board in June and within a few months were getting tips that helped lead to several arrests. By September, The Pottstown Mercury estimated there was a 58 percent increase in the number of arrests since the Pinterest board went up. Amazing stats! That’s quality and quantity of engagement that will make any community manager or police department jealous. The Pinterest page is a more visually and socially engaging version of our local Dekalb Mugs bulletin board (dekalbmugs.com), which if you’ve never perused, you’ll find extremely fascinating and a tad disheartening. Worth checking out.
In New York City, the police department took to Twitter and Facebook as a way of memorializing all officers killed in the line of duty. On Sept. 11, 2012, @NYPDnews tweeted the name and rank of each fallen officer along with a link to a Facebook page with photos and other details about each one, using the hashtag #neverforget. It was a thoughtful, sober way of connecting friends and family of the fallen to others who wanted to comment with gratitude, thanks and remembrance. The @NYPDnews feed is also an extremely fascinating and sometimes chilling reminder of ongoing criminal activity in the US’s most populous city.
Many other police departments are using social media to investigate and solve crimes using Facebook and other platforms. Talk about social innovation for social good! No space for it now, but I’ll get into more details in a column soon.
