 Kim Charlton, thanks for joining us. What's your role within the Queensland Police Service? I'm Executive Director of Queensland Police Media, so I manage the 24-hour media response for the organisation. Can you tell me about how you've used social media as a communication tool? In May last year, Queensland Police Service started a Facebook page as a part of trying to engage our community directly in a two-way conversation. And since that time the page has grown really significantly. We've just hit 230,000 followers on the page. Every month we get around about 100 million interactions on the page with people leaving comments really engaging with police. That's an extraordinary response. What do you attribute that to? People really appreciate getting information directly from the source. And we have become known as an authoritative source of correct information on the internet. So people really appreciate not having to rely on the media to screen or to filter information. They really appreciate being able to get the entire story from us. So what benefits have you gained from having that sort of response? Many benefits. We actively use the page when we're seeking information from the public with assistance for investigations. We've found multiple missing people through using the Facebook page. We use it for child abduction alerts very successfully because it's just so immediate in getting information out. And it's actually getting information to people. They don't have to be listening to the radio. They don't have to be watching television. We actually go into their pocket and say, we need your help. So it's just an incredibly valuable way of accessing people immediately. What about in times of crisis and natural disaster? We found it incredibly valuable during the floods and the cyclones of last summer. We knew that social media would be a useful tool for us, but we had no idea just how valuable it was going to be. We received so much situational awareness from people who were posting in on our page. We would post information about a road closure or a flooding incident. And inevitably there would have been someone there who would then post and say, oh police have just found an alternate route by blah blah blah or the road's still closed or it's just opened up. They helped each other prepare for cyclone yasi on our page. Shared information on what to do when you're faced with a big cyclone. Things like fully wheelie bins up with water so they don't fly away. And then you've got a water source at the end of it to flush the toilet. So yeah, go figure. So it's people sharing information with each other as well as with us? Absolutely. There is a real engagement there. One of the other benefits that we found is we have this community which is basically the silent majority who now have a voice who love to come on and thank us for the good work that our officers do. So that's also really valuable as well. How do you go about controlling content and vetting out what might be inaccurate? In what context? I guess if people are posting information there's a risk that people post false information? Yeah there is a risk of misinformation. Social media is a really valuable tool for getting information out in a hurry. It's also good for spreading rumours in a hurry. So wherever possible we try to verify information rather than just leaving it on the page. That said in the floods and the cyclones we were so busy that we relied on people's goodwill. And people were of one mind. They wanted to help. They wanted to help each other. So we really didn't have any issues with misinformation during that time. The other step we took was using the mythbuster hashtag to quash rumours as they appeared in social media. It is the digital word of mouth of today and people were spreading the most amazing rumours during the floods and cyclones. So actually when we came across those pieces of information which are absolutely out and at wrong. The classic one was why haven't her dams going to collapse and that happened time after time after time. I think you could basically say every dam in Queensland was going to collapse at some point if you listened to the rumour mill. So we would myth bust those. We would establish that no there wasn't an issue with the dam. And then we would use the hashtag, the mythbuster hashtag to say why haven't her dam is not collapsing. So right and wrong. And very quickly people turned to us as the authoritative source. Early on in the floods we would post something and someone they would question us. They'd go oh but we just saw on Channel X that they said this so you must be wrong. About a week into the floods we would post information exactly the same situation. And now they'd be going oh silly Channel X they got it wrong again. So they really did decide that we were the authority. A couple of examples. One by live tweeting information as it became available. We were able to get out a lot of information that would never have made the mainstream media because it just wasn't significant enough. But if you were directly involved in that area it was really significant. But with so much going on the mainstream media could only cover so much information whereas we were able to pump out massive amounts of quite low level information but which was really valuable. The other example I would say was after Cyclone Niasi crossed the coast and the rescue efforts or the recovery efforts were in their very initial phases. There was a lot of issues with communities not having water, not having refrigeration. That sort of thing. And we had someone post from a community up in the really badly affected area and there's no water and there's no ice in my community. And we picked up on the comment and I rang the district officer and said I'm hearing there's no water and ice in this community. He goes no no no they can get it at this place, this place and this place. And within five minutes or 15 minutes I was able to go back and go you can get ice and water at these places. And they were incredibly thankful. They didn't know where to go. So that was potentially that dodged a media issue for us because that could have easily been reported that there's no ice and water in this community just because people didn't know where to go. And plus it helped reassure the community that yes we were thinking of them that yes the supplies were available and here's where they could go and get them. What do you think is the next step in the use of social media? Unlike last season where we were really the only authority in social media space so people very quickly gravitated to us knowing that they would get all the information. This year we're facing a different social media environment in that lots of government agencies are moving into social media lots of local government are moving into social media and doing little bits and pieces. That said everyone has different capabilities and resources to be able to manage that. So what we've developed for this storm season is Queensland Alert QLD Alert.com which is basically an aggregation page. It sits off our Facebook page and we can very quickly within minutes drop and drag all relevant information about an incident onto the one page. So it doesn't matter where that information sits on the internet all you have to do is go to that one page Queensland Alert.com and you'll find everything you need. It doesn't matter if you're on Twitter you'll see Twitter feeds it doesn't matter if you're on Facebook you'll see Facebook feeds wherever that information is it's going to be on that page for you to find. Kim Charlton thanks very much for your time today. You're welcome thank you very much.