#CopChat August 27 – Topic

Wednesday August 27, 2014

It's baaaaaaaack

Tonight’s Topic

“Following your local police – agency and officers”

Tonight we are going to take a look at your local police and it’s officers that are using social media. Questions will center around their use of platforms and how they impact you.

Officers tuning in will benefit from the perspective of how they are viewed by their community and agencies can learn what their community wants from them?

For the community, what a great opportunity to hear from officers and agencies on how and why they do things.

It’s always about learning from each other.

If you don’t know who your local officers are or an agency from your town, google/bing/yahoo them to see if they have a presence.

What are the #CopChat “rules”? LOL, there are no rules but we want this to be a good experience for everyone so here are some ideas to help.

1. The first rule of #CopChat is we talk about #CopChat. This isn’t FightClub, we have nothing to hide.

2. If you have a blog, website or social channel that you want to share, please do so at the beginning…but we’ll ask that you don’t do any selling of products or services.  This chat is for discussion not sales. If you would like to sponsor a chat or promote your product, email me. ( timburrows1266@gmail.com )

3. There is no insulting, bullying or swearing.  If someone says something that you don’t agree with, respectfully say so and have a discussion.  That is what this is all about…learning and sharing.

4. If a subject presents itself that you may have written a piece for feel free to share at the end of the chat using the hashtag. Depending on the speed of the chat it could get lost in the stream during the middle of it and you’re less likely to get clicks during the chat.

5. If someone tweets something that you feel compelled to RT, do it! But, make it even better by adding your own flavour to it, or conversely, if you disagree, say so and provide the reason why.

6. If someone disagrees with your position take the criticism professionally…no twitter fights.  It won’t serve anyone with any value.  Take it out of the chat and have your fight without the hashtag.  No one wants to see children fight…we want to see adults chat.

7. Finally…no tweet longer apps.  Keep it under 140, no one wants to be clicking links to see the rest of your tweet. It will take people out of the conversation and probably get ignored anyways.

8. Abuse – if you choose to abuse the forum you will be blocked / muted and really what will that accomplish. We are all here to learn from each other. If you don’t like the police then say so respectfully…who knows, you might have a valid point but if it’s expressed poorly, no one will ever learn from it.

How to follow along.

Naturally, the easiest way is by using the hashtag… #CopChat

Using a dashboard platform like You will want to use TweetDeck / Hootsuite / TweetChat / Twubs etc, to follow the #CopChat.  You may also want create streams to follow @t_burrows and who ever may be co-hosting. Make sure you watch your own mentions stream so you don’t miss anything someone says to you.

About Tim Burrows

Tim Burrows was a sworn police officer for 25 years with experience in front line operations, primary response, traffic, detective operations and supervision. He has training in a broad spectrum of policing responsibilities including, IMS, Emergency Management, computer assisted technology investigations, leadership, community policing and crisis communications. Tim is available to assist you with your social media program and communication. Click here to contact him http://bit.ly/ContactTimBurrows
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2 Responses to #CopChat August 27 – Topic

  1. Gunther says:

    I agreed with your guidelines wholeheartily; however, from my own experience with cops on other websites, they don’t want to listen to you and will not treated your comments with respect (even though they are suppose to have excellent communication skills such as the ability to listen and understand what the other person has to say. Instead, they throw the same accusations that you don’t understand police work, that you were a wannbee cop but couln’t pass the academy or meet the police standards before going to the academy, or they challenge you to join the police force even though they failed to realizes that many people can’t join the police for various reasons (some of which is beyond their control). Furthermore, they have this attitude that if you are not a cop, you are automatically disqualified from analyzing police work. Finally, if they can’t find anything to refute your facts, comments, and opinions, they start nitpicking your grammar, punctuation, and spelling and then tell you to go back to school to learn how to write a sentence.

    • Tim Burrows says:

      Thanks for your comment Gunther.
      Sadly, I have to agree with you in part. I have also seen that behaviour occur. Thankfully, it’s the exceptions that are like that nowadays and not the norm like it was years ago. Our hopes with CopChat is to change that, or at the very least, give the public a much better view of what today’s modern and accessible police are all about.

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