A series of stories emerged a few weeks ago surrounding several police Twitter accounts being “closed”. First there was a PCSO in Exeter who claimed that she had been “instructed to cease tweeting” following a complaint by a student guild.  Devon & Cornwall Police explained that she had instead been offered training and the account is active again.  Around the same time, a West Midlands officer was demoted, apparently due to Twitter misuse, while five Twitter accounts in Northamptonshire were abandoned following a HMIC inspection.  This worries me: it feels like forces are attepting to shut the problem off at source, rather than considering the cultural role of social media.

Gordon Scobbie, who leads nationally on social media for the police, commented

“It comes down to the culture of an organisation and the degree of trust you have in your frontline officers. You have to allow them to make mistakes and deal with them as a mistake, rather than coming down heavily on them.”

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A look here at how Apple is winning not only on the high street, in the creative world, but also in the classroom. A new market that barely existed a decade ago. Now it is a huge market as tablet computers and smartphones change the perception of education.

Teachers and lecturers are finding innovative ways to supplement their classes with the latest technology and students are beginning to see these devices as essential parts of their education experience. Read More »

Recently, Facebook announced the launch of “global pages”, a much-anticipated and welcome new way for brand pages to structure themselves.  They allow a centralised page to be used as an international hub, whilst also localising a user’s experience for the country they are in.

Previously, there were only two brand page options: either a single page that used geo-targeted posts aimed at specific audiences or, secondly, a country-specific page.  A single page using geo-targeted posts misses out on localising other parts of the page such as its cover photos, profile pictures and specific milestones that a local market may have. The country-specific pages suffer from a problem too.  Users often get confused about which page to search for and ‘like’, and will instead find the page that pops up first, ultimately missing out on the content published from the correct country’s page. Read More »

Most branded community managers only perform a tiny function of their role. They ignore what community builders have been doing for centuries. They ignore decades of proven research into what makes communities tick.  We can change that by using a community management framework that’s based upon social sciences (not online marketing!).

The role of the community manager can be broken into eight distinct elements: the community management frame- work. It’s a template you can use for managing an online community. Read More »

Twitter has taken the wraps off several updates and new features overnight including improvements to its search that gives more prominence to images, video and the news that is shared. The other significant change it is introducing, that is likely to see a great deal of use, is the ability to share a Tweet from Twitter.com directly via email. Sharing to other social networks would also be a welcome addition.

The changes to search follow the recent introduction of autocomplete, related queries and spelling corrections. Starting today Twitter users will see search results that highlight photos, videos and news shared all wrapped up in a more tailored social context. Read More »