Social Media Quick Tip: Know Who Your Friends Are

Fake cop profiles are proliferating on Facebook & other social networks

On Facebook and other social media networks, do you know who's a real cop and who's not? Photo iStock

An old (bad) joke: A citizen calls the police and says she saw a UFO. Police: “How do you know it was a UFO?” Citizen: “It said ‘UFO’ on the aircraft.”

Fake cop profiles are proliferating on Facebook and other social networks. It’s imperative that real law officers don’t friend them. But, like UFOs, the fakes are not labeled as such.

How do you know who’s real and who’s not?

There are tell-tale signs: There may be a real vagueness in where they work, except to say it’s “in law enforcement.” But there isn’t a secret formula for identifying them. We’ve even seen some who use the photo of a deceased cop as their profile photo.

Why should you care? These phonies aren’t there because they love cops. Observations suggest they want:

1. To get your information and that of your friends/family;
2. To identify real law officers for their databases;
3. To legitimize themselves with others; and
4. To legitimize the shady groups they join.

When I see a profile I suspect is a phony, inevitably when viewing my “mutual friends” on Facebook, there’s someone I know to be a law officer. Not once, when I contact one of those real officers about how they know the presumed phony, have they answered that they know them to be real. It’s always along the lines of “they post a lot on XYZ page and he seems like a ‘good guy’.” Of course he does. That’s part of the ruse.

It’s not a popularity contest. Every time you’re presented with a friend request from someone you don’t know, tell yourself it might really be a wacko up to no good, because it could be.

This Social Media Quicktip was previously published on LawOfficer.com.

5 Things Every Police Website Homepage Should Have

Emergency and non emergency numbers front and center
Most Wanted
Silent Hotline
Links to news like press releases and events
Integration of social media accounts

There are many things to consider when designing and administrating your department’s website. It must look professionally designed and well thought out with navigation designed for ease of use by your community. It must contain pertinent information for the public such as safety and crime information. Information you offer must be kept updated and relevant on a regular basis. Utilizing pictures of your officers on the job can on your pages can help put a face on your department. And of course, correct spelling and proper grammar go a long way towards cementing how professional your department appears to your community.

What they say about first impressions is true. Your community will judge the rest of your site and even your department based on your website’s homepage or front page. Therefore, it’s important to focus on things that will entice your visitors to look deeper into the site and keep them coming back. This is a list of some important things your website should provide not only within the site, but preferrably on the front page of your site.

1. Emergency and non-emergency contact information. This may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many departments fail to at least provide a non-emergency number on their front page so people don’t have to dig around on the site to give you a quick call about something that doesn’t require emergency attention.

2. Most Wanted or other ATL information. The front page of your website is a great place to showcase those people you may be looking for or to give more information to the public about cold cases, etc. Citizens find these topics interesting and are apt to at least take a peak if you have them on your front page. Make sure you include photos of some of your Most Wanted. This makes it visually more exciting than just a link.

3. To go along with your Most Wanted, its a good idea to have a number of online forms on your site for people to contact your department with. One form in particular belongs on the front page – the Silent Hotline. The Silent Hotline or whatever you want to call it, should be a link to a form that can be filled out online and submitted anonymously. Thats right, no IP addresses collected, no email addresses collected, etc. to trace back. This form should be similar to making an anonymous phone call. With anonymity you will get more people apt to fill out the form and submit more tips. Many of the best tips have come in over the Internet and Email or Social Media so don’t brush this one off. In addition, some forms you have on your site may need to be secure. This means you must have a secure server or SSL – secure sockets link for these forms to be transmitted through, just like when you are purchasing something online. This is particularly important if you are going to allow citizens to send you requests like Vacation Watch requests. A Vacation Watch request might contain a citizen’s address, times and dates their home will be empty, etc. You don’t want some bad guy intercepting this data off of an unsecured transmission to your website. And with a plethora of free tools available on the Internet it’s very easy for someone to snag this information during transmission. To have an SSL or secure socket layer you will need a web server that supports SSL encryption, a unique IP address and an SSL Certificate provided by an SSL certificate provider. If you host your site with an outside host they may be able to help you set this up or there are also services on the web you can host just forms on to serve them securely. If you have an internal site you will have to rely on your internal IT to help you out.

4. The front page of your website is also a great place to post links to press releases, upcoming programs, events and links to good news stories too. Posting this information on your front page where it’s easily seen can garner your department more community participation in programs and show your citizens how proactive your department is.

5. Last but not least, I hope your department has begun using Social Media to interact more with your community. Right now, this is the single most cost effective thing you can do to connect with your citizens. This does not however, overshadow your website. As a matter of fact, your website can be an integral part of your Social Media plan. Your website draws a number of citizens looking for information on your department. So why not introduce them to your social media accounts while they are there so they can follow you there as well. Try to integrate the icons and invites to Facebook, Twitter, etc. into your front page design. These icons usually are placed towards the top of the page. Remember, many people really do want to hear from their police departments. They do like knowing what is going on and can help you spread the word you need to get out regarding safety, missing persons, wanted persons, etc.

Your website is a good resource to use to keep in touch with your community. Spend the time to optimize your front page to get that good first impression.

Pam Armstrong

Pam is an Information Specialist with the City of Chandler, Arizona. She was the webmaster and designer for the Chandler Police Department with the PIO office for 10 years. During this time she built many police and police related websites to serve both the public and sworn communities. She currently manages and assists with many social media accounts with various divisions in the city. She is also a professional FBI trained Forensic Artist and has done over 150 sketches in the last four years. Before joining Chandler, Pam worked at Cox Interactive Media, a subsidiary of Cox Enterprises as a senior web designer. Before that Pam did work in 3-dimensional web design and served as an animator, artist and video production specialist. She can be found at: @pjarmstrongaz on Twitter and tumblr: le-tek.tumblr.com

May, 20
3925
SM Use
More

Social Media Handbook for Police: Part 9

Welcome to the the next installment in my series of social media tips. These are aimed primarily at a police audience, but hopefully applicable to a wider group of people too, especially those in the public sector. This series of posts will aim to identify some good practice and useful hints and tips for police officers and staff to consider when using social media.

Part 9: Talk to local people

One of the best uses of social media in policing is to engage in and facilitate a two way communication with local people. One complaint I often hear however is the difficulties of finding local people – studies of Twitter use for example have shown that often the majority of followers are other professionals in the same field as the tweeter. There is nothing wrong in this of course, but if engagement with local people is the aim, then obviously you need another approach to find local people across social media sites, local websites and online communities.

Below are seven tactics you can use to find local people online.

1. Google it you moron!

The obvious place to start – entering a place name (town, village or area) into Google will often yield local websites, many of which have online discussion boards, and often links to Twitter and Facebook accounts. If your town name is a common one (‘London’ for example would bring up way too many matches), narrow the search down, or add the words “forum”, “discussion”, “notice board” etc to the search. Interestingly searches for ‘NAME forum’ will often bring up different results to ‘NAME “forum”‘, so try both.

Google also has an option to search for places – usually on the left hand side of the search results (it might be hidden under ‘more’).

2. Hyperlocal directories

Look at sites that promote local websites (often called hyperlocal sites). Have a look at http://www.hyperlocal.co.uk/ or http://openlylocal.com/hyperlocal_sites for lists of local websites in your area, or try the beta of http://www.groupsnearyou.com/. There are also specicfic interest sites such as http://www.transitionnetwork.org/ that often have local sites connected with them.

3. National Discussion boards

Have a look at national sites as well – big sites with national coverage such as MumsNet, BikeRadar, MoneySavingExpert etc often have threads on local areas. The BBC splits its coverage down fairly locally, so you may be able to find news stories about local communities and then find links to any web sites etc.

4. Facebook and Twitter search

The most likley place a local website or community will start with is Facebook. Personally I don’t like the Facebook search function – it is clunky at best – but it should reveal some useful local communities if you persevere. Twitter only retains tweets for a short while, but searching for a local name should reveal some users from the locality, and they may well be able to point you towards other sites and users.

5. Ask!

Ask other people for local site recommendations, either online or offline. Any decent site will probably be reasonably well known, and posting the same question on a couple of local sites will probably reveal several more as well. I have found Twitter to be especially good for this sort of thing. The other group of people who may well have contacts would be local web designers – they may not have designed all the local sites, but they will probably have a good idea of what local sites exist in their marketplace.

6. Think like a local

Use local names for places and locations – not many people even know the name of the electoral ward they live in, so local sites are more likely to be called after local names that people use. These may be as local as street names, rather than town or village names.

7. Local Councils etc

Finally have a look at local public sector providers – council, health, police etc. They may well have links to other local organisations and sites on their website. Also look at local newspapers who may also provide links to other sites.

This post was previously published on Partrdigej’s blog.

Previous posts from the Social Media Handbook Series:

Part 1: What Social Media networks should I use?

Part 2: How do I get followers / friends ???

Part 3: Policies / Strategies / Guidance??

Part 4: Ten things to have on your page to drive up interest??

Part 5: What to do when things go wrong

Part 6: We don’t do that here

Part 7: Basic Guides – Twitter and Flick’r

Part 8: Connect it all together

Justin Partridge

Justin Partridge is a senior manager for Lincolnshire Police in England. He also works on Local Policing and Partnerships for the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).

Justin Partridge has worked in the public sector since leaving university, and for the police since 2003. After being one of only three non-sworn staff selected for the prestigious Police Strategic Command Course (for those who aspire to the most senior posts in UK policing), he started working on the national Local Policing and Partnerships area with chief officers from across the UK, and with partners from the Home Office, NPIA, APA and elsewhere.

Justin is passionate about making a difference to people, and see social media and new technologies having a major role in this – especially in policing and the wider public sector. He blogs on a variety of issues, predominantly around police and technology, and can be found on Twitter talking about much the same.

May, 18
2692
SM Use
More

Social Media Quick Tip: Make Your URL Memorable

Your Facebook page’s URL can be customized once you have 25 fans

Make your Facebook URL (Web address) more memorable and short enough to fit on a website or business card by creating a custom URL. Your department’s Facebook page can have it’s own URL once you get 25 fans.

Once you’re logged in as the page administrator, type into the Web address bar “facebook.com/username” and hit enter. You will be presented with a dialog box where you select the page for which you’re creating the URL and type in your desired URL. Facebook checks to see if it’s available. If it is, confirm your choice.

The “gotcha” here is that if you type incorrectly and misspell the desired URL, you’re stuck with it–unless you’re tight with someone at Facebook.

Don’t call me; I’m not!

This Social Media Quicktip was previously published on LawOfficer.com.

May, 17
3825
Facebook, QuickTips, SM Use
More

Social Media Handbook for Police: Part 8

Welcome to the the next installment in my series of social media tips. These are aimed primarily at a police audience, but hopefully applicable to a wider group of people too, especially those in the public sector. This series of posts will aim to identify some good practice and useful hints and tips for police officers and staff to consider when using social media.

Part 8: Connect it all together

Link all your accounts

If you are not careful, you can spend a lot of time updating profiles accounts and pages on a variety of different sites, and duplicating updates etc. Whilst different social media sites have different uses and audiences, there are easier ways of cross promoting your updates from site to site.

At the simplest end of the spectrum, post up a video to YouTube or Vimeo, a picture to Flick’r, a Powerpoint presentation to Slideshare, or a blog entry etc, and then just link to that content from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. You may want to use a link shortener (I use Bit.ly) to make a very long link such as http://partridgej.wordpress.com/2011/04/25/social-media-handbook-for-policepart-6/ appear as something more useable like http://bit.ly/gdDcGJ. Simply post the shortened link to your other comment with a post explaining what it is.

If however you want to make sharing your updates a bit easier, you may want to look at various ways of automatically linking your updates.

Many of the social media sites have the ability to cross post automatically from one site to another. For example if you first link your Twitter account to Facebook (just go to http://apps.facebook.com/selectivetwitter/ and install the add on), any tweet on Twitter that ends in #fb will also appear in Facebook as a status update. To link the accounts the other way round (s0 Facebook updates appear on Twitter) go to http://www.facebook.com/twitter/ and install the app. (NOTE – this will only work with Facebook pages not personal profiles).

There are similar functions in most social media tools – for example LinkedIn can display all your tweets on your profile (http://www.linkedin.com/opensocialInstallation/preview?applicationId=2700). If you use Yammer to communicate within your organisation, then there are ways to post your tweets to Yammer as well. You can’t post the other way (from Yammer to Twitter) as Yammer is intended as a secure network, not a public one.

A quick Google search will reveal many ways to link your accounts together and save on duplciation.

A word of warning

There are a few pitfalls in all this linking – firstly be very sure that all your different networks want and value all the updates you cross post – a valid update to your Twitter follwers may be irritating spam to those you have connected with on LinkedIn for example.

Also be aware that the 140 character limit still applies when cross posting to Twitter. Most apps just shorten the update to the first 140 characters…but this can render it meaningless!

Image from bbum on Flick’r