3 Tips to Increase Your Online Presence

Dear Police Departments all over the world (and everyone else who wants to be respected online),

Do you want to be like your peers in Scottsdale, Arizona who are using Twitter to communicate messages to the citizenry?

How about police in Richmond, Virginia and other locations who deter crime with MySpace?

Or Manchester cops in the United Kingdom who fight crime with Facebook?

Maybe you’ve heard of online tools to help catch would-be pedophiles, sexual deviants, and disturbers of the peace.

Do you want to show your uniform and display the pride of law enforcement among online places where school children congregate?

I’d like you to do all of the above, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

Before you do anything to increase your online presence, it is imperative to identify your existing online presence, which in the case of one PD I investigated, you do not want to imitate.

By means of case example, let’s travel 11 miles north of Boston to the suburban city of Woburn, Massachusetts and visit their online police department.

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By way of background, I’d previously written about the Newburyport police fleet lacking green vehicles and indicated the Woburn police chief doesn’t drive a Ford Crown Victoria, but a Toyota Camry.

Hungry for more information, I wanted to ask the chief to tell me more about the Camry and how he feels about the stereotype that American police can only drive certain Ford models.

Discovery #1: The police website is not optimized for search engines

By search engine optimization, I refer to the fact that the city’s website directs me to this home page for the Woburn police with cityofwoburn.com showing in the browser location bar but a Google search for the keywords ‘woburn’ and ‘police’ yields a different URL as the first result: ma-woburn.civicplus.com.

I can hardly blame the police, for either the city lacks an information technology officer to know about search engine optimization or, more likely, CivicPlus didn’t tell the city to change any code.

Turning to a domain registry, I see that cityofwoburn.com was bought in April 2004 and Andy Creen is the administrative contact. The city’s online staff directory indicates Creen is the director of the assessing department and pays the bills.

I assume that CivicPlus created a cookie cutter template that the city plugged its data into, and then forwarded the civicplus.com subdomain to cityofwoburn.com.

Apparently, nobody thought to tell the search engines not to index the alias.

Discovery #2: The police chief doesn’t reply to emails

I emailed the chief on August 13, and presumed I’d get a response within a week. (Why I would wait that long, who knows, but I wanted to give the guy a break, not knowing how busy an inbox he has.)

By September 2, I hadn’t received a response and wondered whether he even received my email.

Discovery #3: The Woburn police own a lot of websites but zero content

I donned my Google detective hat and went sleuthing…

1. The Woburn police email address, linked off their website, is police@woburnpd.com.

2. [woburnpd.com] points me to a dummy page with a logo and link to Wilmington, MA-based Delphi Technology Systems (which must be the web hosting company) and the sentence, “Visit http://www.woburnpolice.org for Woburn Police Department’s website.”
3. Visiting [www.woburnpolice.org], however, shows what the web industry calls a parked domain with the following screen shot:

   

4. Going back to the domain registry, I noticed that [woburnpd.com] is registered to David Lozzi of Wilmington, who I presume to be associated with Delphi; and [woburnpolice.org] is registered to a Greg Silvius, whose email address is affiliated with gregsilvius.com which is linked to his MySpace profile indicating he’s an account executive at GoDaddy.

There are a few lessons to be learned so you don’t repeat the mistakes of the Woburn police:

• First, while it’s OK to buy multiple domains for your organization, I suggest you don’t launch anything unless you have content on it you want to share with the world or if it points to another website.

  If it points to another website, make sure the search engine robots can’t find it. (Robots are a collective term for the machines that crawl and index every web page to allow their appearance in a search engine result list, such as the Google link above.)

• Second, if you used to have content on a website (which woburnpd.com or woburnpolice.org may have had), delete the content and you can redirect that page to a page on another domain. If confused, let me know and I can provide more information.
• Third, if you can’t respond to electronic mail in a timely manner (presume this means 3-4 business days maximum, unless otherwise noted on your website), then don’t provide an email address!

  Or, the more preferable route is to display numerous email addresses, e.g. one for the chief’s office, one for the deputy, one for the vice squad, one for narcotics, etc.

If you want to know how the story ends, when I realized I wouldn’t receive an email response, I called the chief’s office and left a voicemail message to be called back.

That was two days ago. I still haven’t received a call back!

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