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At the risk of driving people crazy, I want to talk about social media and in particular: location based services.
STOP. Don’t delete this just yet. It really does relate to policing.
Location based services are the holy grail of social media (Remember – social media extends waaay beyond Twitter and facebook). The reason: if you know where people are and what they are doing, you can sell them things and target and influence their behaviour.
Consequently a lot of attention is being focused on location based services right now, with companies rushing to get you to ‘enable’ your location on their particular platform. You can show people where you are when you fire off your latest tweet on Twitter, and facebook will soon be launching its own location features. The sales pitch premise is pretty straightforward: show your friends where you are and what you’re doing, hook up and have fun.
One platform which has taken the premise even further is Foursquare.
If you’ve never heard of Foursquare (It now has over 40 Million check-ins and it appears to have doubled in the last five weeks alone). It’s a location-based social network that combines your friends, location and status, i.e. it allows you to tell people where you are and what you’re doing. What makes it different is that these updates take place within a ‘game’ environment based in the real world. When you visit places in the game you get points. And as Brucie says “Point’s make prizes” After a number of ‘check-ins’, you get badges and eventually can become the ‘Mayor’ of that place. You can also compare your badges and ‘achievements’ with your friends. Check out their ‘learn about us’ video.
Once you get over the ‘why?’ phase and actually start thinking about it, the potential benefits to organisations (and to marketers) are enormous.
Take a look at the way that Foursquare actively promotes it’s platform for businesses.
“Foursquare aims to encourage people to explore their neighborhoods and then reward people for doing so. We do this by combining our friend-finder and social city guide elements with game mechanics — our users earn points, win Mayorships and unlock badges for trying new places and revisiting old favorites.
As a business owner, you can use foursquare to engage your increasingly mobile customers with foursquare “Specials,” which are discounts and prizes you can offer your loyal customers when they check in on foursquare at your venue. Don’t forget to show extra love to your venue’s Mayor! Additionally, if you offer foursquare Specials to your customers, you will be able to track how your venue is performing over time thanks to our robust set of venue analytics”. These include number of most recent visitors, most frequent visitors, the time of day people check in, total number of unique visitors, histogram of check-ins per day and a gender breakdown of customers. Check out the pages here
OK. Fast mental page swap now to the concept of an ‘engagement ladder’ There are any number of these things around, but essentially they are about moving people from simple awareness to greater and greater levels of activity and engagement. So you may move from: general awareness, to provision of specific information, to consultation and opinion seeking, to involvement through action, to partnership. to decision making (pick your own ladder of needs as appropriate to your organisation)
In the commercial world you can already see businesses from coffee shops, through burger restaurants to hotels and pizza palaces ‘up selling’ – the more visits you make the greater the rewards.
Now start thinking about other uses, uses beyond mere commercialism.
According to a recent article on Mashable.com American Universities like Harvard and UNC Charlotte are using Foursquare as a way to introduce students to the campus. Students can check in at the bookstore, guidance office, etc. This has tremendous potential as a way of introducing employees to an organisation, helping them find out what’s where and interacting with key people and departments.
Perhaps the platform could be used to introduce new staff to the force? Help them understand the key locations and bits of the organisation in a way that’s fun, comprehensive (and very, very trackable). Could it be used to help new probationer officers visit and understand key locations and partners in their areas?
What got me thinking though, was not so much the internal uses, but the way in which the platform could be used to help build confidence by interacting with neighbourhood teams, road safety teams, crime prevention units and all the other public facing elements that contribute so much to visibility and confidence. This includes partner organisations, partner teams and locations.
This app really doesn’t have to be about one organisation, it lends itself to a partnership approach to public engagement and interaction. It lends itself to moving people up the engagement ladder.
So, let’s take a neighbourhood ‘policing’ team as an example. As a Foursquare user you collect, let’s say, badges of rank. The more visits you make and/or the greater progress up the engagement ladder, the more ‘rank’ you get.
An initial visit to find out where the office is = probationer constable
Who your team of staff are/how to contact them = constable
Requesting specific information about policing/crime prevention/ road safety in your area = sergeant
Contributing to PACT priorities = Inspector
Getting involved in local action and events = chief inspector
etc etc
If you don’t like the rank thing, choose helmets or anything else that takes your fancy.
Get creative. Run a junior version, run a version for local businesses, run a women only version….
Bottom line. Access and influence is central to Neighbourhood Policing, and. if the service is to truly engage with communities, it must look at new and creative methods of communication (Check out the great use of facebook by PSNI Ards, PSNI Hollywood and PSNI Ballymeena). Digital engagement is about more than finding new ways to broadcast old messages. The clue is in the title.
Some of these new location based services, have the potential to open up new access channels and provide new vehicles for effective influence and engagement. It’s a new ball in a new game. It will be interesting to see who runs with the ball…
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