Thanks to the more than 50 people who came out last week to Super Third Thursday, this year’s first meeting of the Isle of Man Social media club.  Our speaker was CI Mark Payne of the West Midlands Police who is the driving force behind the use of social media in Britain’s police services.

“My top tip in terms of organisations engaging in social media is that it’s much better to ask forgiveness that to seek permission,” said CI Payne. “Social media are very intuitive and you’ve got to let go some of the control. Let your people talk. Trust them. And let people talk back to them.”

The West Midlands Police service is established on several social networks including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. In addition, CI Payne is a regular blogger.

The idea behind this is very simple.  CI Payne explained, “Police are often criticised for being difficult to get hold of, or not listening to what local people are saying. We try all kinds of ways to communicate with the public, meetings, newsletters, traditional media, talking to people we meet and anything else we can think of. There is clearly a huge amount of conversation taking place online and, where people are talking about policing or crime issues, we want to be part of the conversation.”

Super Third Thursday was sponsored by PDMS (disclosure) and the West Midlands police are a client of the web development company. Managing Director Chris Gledhill said, “Super Third Thursday was really fantastic. It showed the West Midlands police can engage with the public in a totally different way. ”

Here CI Payne fields questions from the crowd:

Related articles by Zemanta

• Defence staff leak information on Facebook (iwr.co.uk)