UK Police on Social Media June 2013: #WMPLIVE at YouTube with West Midlands Police

Photo Credit West Midlands Police

Here's the June 2013 UK Police on Social Media post.  We have three charts for twitter, facebook and YouTube.

In video, there have been some changes at YouTube which now allow anyone with over 1,000 subscribers to have a LIVE Events Channel. So far, three UK forces are eligible: Greater Manchester, Metropolitan and West Midlands Police.

Some feedback would be helpful on how often a

data post (like this one) is needed. The last survey was 15 April 2013. I've not had one message asking where May's post was (apologies, I skipped a month).

So, the charts this month show gains from 15 April to 22 June (68 days). For twitter, the main force accounts have increased. The Met have added 16,929 followers. Initially, I thought that may be the focus from Woolwich, but looking at data, cannot see an obvious spike.

The chart on YouTube has a dotted line marking the 1,000 threshold. This shows how the three main forces have well over the required amount with no other force closeby.  Essex has 705 subscribers with Avon and Somerset on 628.

To explain, anyone can open a Hangout On Air for free, allow up to ten people to join and broadcast LIVE at YouTube. Previously, LIVE Streaming Event Channels were very rare, usually on an invite only.

Examples of LIVE Channels are Wimbledon, The Young Turks or an #EagleCam.

I've posted before on how anyone can become their own media company - Google and YouTube are

making it remarkably easy to achieve.

For the main message this month, it's +West Midlands Police and +Kerry Blakeman again. The lead photo above shows a still from the #WMPLive studio broadcast from two days ago. We also have Solihull and Selly Oak Police holding LIVE Hangout sessions.

Before I come to that, let me make this very clear. Community Policing and meeting the public is easy when you do it right using these methods below.

On the 19 June, there was a Selly Oak, Birmingham Live Tasking Meeting. In the room in person were very few members of the public.

However, the broadcast lasted 53 minutes - astonishing as most of the questions were online. To date, that broadcast has 422 views.

On the 14 May, Solihull Police Chief Superintendent +Sally Bourner held a LIVE Speed Camera G+ Hangout from Solihull.

Broadcast was a modest twenty two minutes, however to date 1,538 views (the normal monthly video message gets around 343 views over last six months).

Then we had the showcase #WMPLive - Live Policing Hangout presented by +Kerry Blakeman and +llewela bailey on 25 June. This was ambitious broadcast using the force Studio and users from firearms, helicopter, dogs and traffic.

So far, this broadcast has received 2,088 views in just two days. there were over 250 comments made across twitter, facebook and youtube (g+ post with links).

In fairness, there were a few tech glitches, but when that was resolved, the broadcast settled to an enthusiastic pace including the odd live video feed from the helicopter over Coventry's Ricoh Arena (at 48:18 video below).

The next step On 6 June in London, I gave a talk called Realtime Communications - When will LIVE Video become Natural and Commonplace? In it, I highlighted the way some members of the police community are using live video. You can skip to 2:30 and watch..

I also received a data file of 10,000 recent policing tweets. On looking through them (with +Russell Webster), we could not really find any real themes or stories. What was needed, almost a hand sorting and reading of each one to see the story.

What I'm getting to, we have enormous amounts of data - for me, far too much is made of pseudo helpful online analysis tools. Another approach is needed. For example, mobile phones are now at a stage where video is commonplace.

That makes it even harder to analyse. You know what it's like, someone sends you a 2 minute video and you think, I don't have that long to watch - I'm busy. So how do you know what's in it? For YouTube, the title tags, description and audio transcript is searchable.

Without getting into much detail, I have a solution called #policetothepeople .. It works like this, I bring you video news from all the UK Forces and Specialist Units. I publish this at my youtube channel and on this blog. It's much easier to show than tell, so bear with me..

Ref: Data Set where the charts came from.

edit july 2015, the video below, marked as private, was the live West Mids Police live broadcast, will leave it here in case it's made public again..

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