Reality TV the new frontline for police

On the NSW Police Force’s active Facebook page, the posting that has attracted the most ”likes” in recent weeks – 1107 so far – is a picture of Grace the police dog and her seven puppies. More than 140 felt compelled to leave comments, few of which added more to the sum of human knowledge than this one: ”nawwww so cute”.

A ”puppy cam” was set up to show the septuplets’ fans what they were doing, which was not much most of the time.

By contrast, in surrounding posts, five people saw fit to ”like” a post calling for information about the death of a pedestrian at Emu Plains – presumably, liking the fact of the investigation rather than the death.

Nine people liked the call for witnesses to a bus driver bashing at Maroubra. Two people liked police praising good behaviour at the Moon Festival in Cabramatta. Conclusion? Good behaviour is duller than bad but puppies beat all-comers.

Social media is presenting a double-edged advance for law enforcement. While the recent BlackBerry Messenger-assisted riots in England starkly illustrated the problem posed by new forms of communication, they also demonstrated the opportunities for collecting information and talking to citizens – in other words, bypassing traditional media and telling its story directly.

The director of public affairs for the NSW Police Force, Strath Gordon, says it is examining the lessons from England for police but mainly in trying to give people information and bust myths. The experience north of the Tweed earlier this year was also instructive.

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Many people went to social media for answers during the Queensland floods.

”They moved in the circles [in which] they were already active,” Gordon says.

For Queensland police, Facebook and Twitter became a form of disaster management, and Gordon says they offer police a powerful way to communicate ”effectively, and cost effectively”.

Social media was becoming more important in emergency management but also in more routine crime. The police launched a Neighbourhood Watch foray into Facebook last month with a pilot ”Eyewatch” project in 10 places around the state.

After reclaiming its Twitter name, @nswpolice, from a marketing company in 2009, it now uses it to appeal for information about crime and to tell people outside mainstream media about developments in its investigations.

When a man was arrested in the US over the Madeleine Pulver case, the press conference was streamed live and linked from Twitter, Facebook and its website. It had a YouTube channel, film crews and photographers.

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Direct communication is not replacing the traditional media for police, Gordon says, but it is helpful. ”We can bypass media to talk directly to people, but we will always need to talk to the media,” he says.

On Twitter this week, NSW Police referred to another of its communication strategies, reality TV. The effectiveness of co-operating with TV programs is being reviewed by a University of NSW survey as part of a project called Cops on the Box. (On Facebook, 51 people liked the same request). The research aims to assess the impact of programs like The Force, RBT, The Recruits, Crash InvestigationUnit and Missing Persons Unit and ”what messages are conveyed” by them.

The survey asks how people’s concern about crime changes after watching the programs, whether they changed viewers’ behaviour or their assessment of police, and whether they represented everyday police activities.

Police co-operation does not appear to be about money. Documents released in 2009 to The Daily Telegraph under freedom of information laws showed that the NSW Police Force received $692,397 in revenue during the 2007-08 financial year from TV producers. Yet in the context of its $2.8 billion budget any money it does receive is small and pales in comparison with the PR such co-operation generates.

Gordon says reality TV is a critical part of a wider strategy to buttress public confidence in policing and the willingness to report crime. ”It’s not about feelgood PR in that sense. There’s a strong public desire to see police doing their job,” he says.

Focus group research has shown people like to see police on the street and being a calming influence. Gordon says the possibility of a perverse effect – increasing concern about crime by showing crime on television, even if police are demonstrated to be fighting it – was not borne out.

Yet a warning comes from Professor David Dixon, dean of law at the University of NSW and an expert in policing, who says: ”It might make people feel safer … but that’s having already raised their concerns about crime.”

Dixon says the fear of crime is generally overstated and overall crime rates have been dropping for some time, and reality TV shows can be good for the business of policing.

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Social Marketing Hub Announces Social Reach of Over 200 Million

BURLINGTON, MA, Sep 08, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) –
Awareness, Inc., provider of on-demand social marketing management
software (SMMS), announces a social reach milestone of over 200
million social profiles.

Awareness, Inc., creators of the Social Marketing Hub, a SaaS tool
that allows businesses to publish, manage, and measure across social
media channels, said the 200 million social profiles represent the
social reach of all active channels of their clients. Social reach is
defined by Awareness, Inc. as the total number of subscribers across
all applicable channels — Facebook fans, Twitter followers, YouTube
and Flickr subscribers, etc. — for all of their customers.

With each individual of this large audience able to interact with
Awareness, Inc. clients, the Social Marketing Hub continues to make
management and reporting of this engagement easy for clients by
centralizing all activities and offering a straightforward reporting
process that allows individual clients to drill down on their
cross-channel reach by channel, page or even individual comment.

This large and continuously growing measurement also points to
increased opportunities for clients to engage with new or potential
fans. Awareness, Inc. also reports that 1 out of every 2 responses
measured between clients and their constituents were with new
visitors or fans. Both of these growth areas indicate the Hub’s
ability to create meaningful interactions between client companies
and their networks.

“This large reach further supports the fact that our social marketing
tools are not only allowing our clients to create more and more
valuable connections with their audience, but also that they make
that process effortless,” comments Mike Lewis, Vice President of
Marketing and Sales at Awareness, Inc. “Our clients are seeing
expansive growth in their social media programs, and the success of
these programs is directly related to use of the Awareness platform
to monitor, measure and improve campaign processes, something we are
very proud to support.”

The Social Marketing Hub enables the posting of content to a wide
array of major social media platforms, including WordPress, Twitter,
Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Slideshare and foursquare. The platform
allows clients to measure comments and engagement with users across
all platforms, gather public information about their users and
centralize this body of data within the Social Marketing Hub, where
it can be further analyzed and applied to social marketing programs.

Interested in learning more or seeing the Hub in action?

Information and Demos

        
        --  Register to attend one of our live demos of the Awareness Social
            Marketing Hub
        --  Request your own demo of the Awareness Social Marketing Hub
        --  More information about the Awareness Social Marketing Hub
        
        

Connect with Awareness

        
        --  Twitter: Follow us on Twitter
        --  Facebook: Please "Like" our Awareness, Inc., Social Media Marketing
            Best Practices and Social Media Marketing Mavens pages
        --  LinkedIn: Join our Social Media Marketing Mavens Group
        
        

About Awareness
Awareness is the leading provider of enterprise-class,
on-demand social marketing management software (SMMS) for marketers
to publish and manage social content, engage with their audience and
measure the effectiveness their social media activities across
multiple social media channels. The Awareness Social Marketing Hub is
built upon Awareness’ expertise with some of the world’s leading
brands and marketing agencies including MLB, Sony Pictures, Comcast,
Likeable Media, Associated Press, Cox Communications, Mindjumpers and
American Cancer Society.

Backed by NorthBridge Venture Partners, Awareness is headquartered in
Burlington, Massachusetts.

About The Awareness Social Marketing Hub
The Awareness Social
Marketing Hub is built to address the challenges marketers face
managing multiple social channels. The Social Marketing Hub is the
first enterprise-class application for serious marketers who want to
plan, implement and measure meaningful social media strategies across
the organization.

        
        Media Contact
        
        Mike Lewis
        Phone: 781-270-2400
        mike.lewis(at)awarenessnetworks(dot)com
        Twitter: @bostonmike and @awarenessinc
        
        
        

SOURCE: Awareness, Inc.

Copyright 2011 Marketwire, Inc., All rights reserved.

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