There is a generation of communicators that has only known the unchallenged dominance of Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and Twitter for social media supremacy.
But for the rest of us, we remember when social media was a seemingly fly-by-night operation. GeoCities. Myspace. Google+. “Sites” like these used to come and go, but for most of the 21st century, it’s been Facebook and Twitter/X.
However, for far too long, some police public information officers have relied on developing their brand on Facebook or Twitter, and they have forgotten how to – or in some cases never bothered learning how to – diversify and own their messaging.
During that same period, the local weekly community newspaper has all but disappeared in America. The “weekly” as many PIOs call it, was their savior for a long time, because it would almost always print stories based on police news releases. (That is a separate conversation…)
With uncertainty at Facebook/Meta and unpredictability at Twitter/X, police departments need to get back to basics. They need to “put in the work” by focusing on what we call “owned media” in corporate public relations.
When you post information on social media, a large corporation owns the data. Algorithms aggregate the content or hide it from the public, and you have virtually no control.
Recently, the Twitter/X platform made some technical changes to its application programming interface, or API, that stripped much of its functionality for content producers – PIOs. Upping the ante, Twitter/X then instituted rate limiting for users, possibly testing the waters toward making Twitter/X a pay-to-use platform. This would end its relevance as a public safety communications platform.
The API move puts a spotlight on the over-reliance of communicators, especially government and public safety public relations professionals (PIO’s) on single, privately-owned sources of communications. My company preaches “website first” for our clients, meaning that social media, email marketing and traditional press, or “earned media” are all vitally important but should never be taken for granted. First, the virtual disappearance of the American weekly community newspaper called earned media into question for smaller public safety agencies who overnight have no journalist covering their community. Second, the chaos at the two largest social media companies demonstrates an important truth: You don’t own your social media. They do.
But you own your website. You own your newsletters. You own your videos and photos.
Some of the biggest pushback I receive in some of the PIO training classes I host – and sales calls I go on with prospective clients – is from police public information officers who are particularly good at Twitter or Facebook. Some of them scoff at updating their agency website (or even having a website “in this day and age”) because of the engagement they get on social media.
I’m here to tell you, it can all be gone tomorrow. Today, police departments can develop robust news website platforms and can deploy mobile apps with news and mobile push notifications. These services have a low initial/design cost and an even lower recurring cost. The biggest investments are time and philosophy. We need to be willing to write feature stories, produce infographics, create videos (it’s not as hard as it sounds) and take pictures. We need to produce, not simply “news releases” but “news stories” complete with photo galleries. We can even podcast!
At FEMA we learn the 95/5 rule. That means that 19 out of 20 news items that we put out in government should not be related to an incident. It should be everyday news. Practice makes better. The more a government communicates with the public on a day-to-day basis the better they will be when there is a major emergency. If you are doing it all and only on Twitter or Facebook, you’re doing it wrong.