Expanded Reach

Here's something I found interesting today which reinforces my reasoning that embracing the Internet as a communications tools breaks the normal societal boundaries and expands the communications reach potential (beyond that offered by traditional media such national and local TV news). It's a different approach than that offered by traditional such as the CNN Headline News interview I did pictured in this blog post.

My police writings certainly have reached different populations within the law enforcement community, but the Internet has pushed those missives onto the reading eyeballs of people from other walks of life that find a commonality within the message.

The example I sumbled on to day concerns a section reprint of "The absence of a police marketing mentality,"one of my "Police and the Press" columns for PoliceOne.com, on the "Out of Site: Other Web Resources Recommended by our Staff" Blog section of Advertising Age (http://adage.com (http://adage.com/outofsite/index.php?start=65§ion_id=310). Advertising Age is a well-known marketing and advertising publication for Madison Avenue and beyond...

"Police Academy Needs Marketing 101

I didn't know it should be part of the "to serve and protect" policy, but police
just don't market themselves very well. PoliceOne.com has an essay all about it
under "Police and The Press."

Word-of-mouth may be a hard concept to
worry about when you carry a gun, but Richard B. Weinblatt thinks it should be
hard-wired into cops' brains: "With a police marketing mentality, the positive
stories on policing and those hardworking men and women who serve should vastly
outnumber the crime driven and negative, department scandal driven items. We
would finally keep pace with and perhaps surpass the fictionalized version of
policing embedded in society's psyche. Only then would the true nature of law
enforcement's service to the community be known and believed by the public."

Suddenly the war on drugs seems much more win-able by comparison.

Posted by Brooke Capps on 11.20.06 @ 04:31 PM 0 comments"

So now we have advertising gurus contemplating the marketing of the police. The power of the Internet...it's amazing.