Wall Street Journal covers Hetty Group’s COPTICS Program

The Hetty Group’s COPTICS program was recently discussed in an article in the Wall Street Journal by an editor/reporter that covers risk and compliance in the business world.  Reputational risk is something that companies pay serious attention to. Losing consumer or public confidence for a company impacts the bottom line and it matters on a variety of critical levels.  Teams of professionals are put in place to manage crisis, do crisis communications, and more importantly, prevent crisis and proactively build positive brand reputation and good will in the marketplace to win over the public’s trust and confidence in their company, product, or service.

The same needs to occur for law enforcement organizations.  On July 31, 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Citizen confidence in the police is at its lowest point in 20 years.  It has dropped among Americans of all ages, education levels, incomes and races.”

It’s time for law enforcement agencies to integrate practices likes PR, reputation management, digital marketing, brand development and social media engagement in day-to-day police operations in order to engage effectively with a digitally and social media savvy public.
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Our multi-disciplinary team of COPTICS experts came together to formulate a training workshop to help law enforcement across the country to meet the risks and challenges presented by the optics of policing in the digital age.  We welcome the opportunity to work with police agencies nationwide and aim to assist the law enforcement profession in telling their story and winning back the trust and confidence of the public they pledged to serve.

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Below is the the Wall Street Journal article that was published about our new initiative.

“Business Offers Blueprint to Improve Law Enforcement Optics,” 

By Ben DiPietro

"A group of reputation-management experts has banded together to create a program to help law enforcement agencies better manage their social media engagement and improve their perceptions with people and within communities. The so-called “Coptics” program developed by the Hetty Group draws from best practices employed by large companies that already have seen the value in being active members of social media to tell their stories and address issues that if not handled properly could blow up into big controversies, said Florence Chung, founder of the Hetty Group. “We believe that if you aren’t telling your story, the world will,” said Ms. Chung. “And the world often doesn’t know the facts.”

Shannon Wilkinson, chief executive of reputation-management firm Reputation Communications, said that although many people in law enforcement have stayed away from social media out of fear or because they prefer to stay out of the spotlight, doing so only cedes the conversation to their critics and others who aren’t representing their viewpoints. For law enforcement agencies or companies wanting to get more active in social media, Ms. Wilkinson said they need to ask themselves two questions: “How do we want to be perceived and by what audience? And how are we currently perceived and by whom?”

Bill Carmody, a digital marketing expert and chief executive of the firm Trepoint, said by teaching law enforcement how to be part of the digital conversation, and giving them tools to properly engage their audiences, will allow for departments to get involved in discussions before they go viral. Through better engagement, when incidents do occur, law enforcement will be in a better position to respond in real time because “that’s where the conversation is happening,” he said. “Your brand is being shaped by social media if you’re not shaping it yourself.”
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Matt Horace, a former law enforcement official who now serves as a law enforcement analyst on CNN, said whether it’s a law enforcement agency or a big corporation, an organization needs to know how to manage a crisis and the communications surrounding it. And a key part of that is engaging on social media, knowing what’s being said and interacting in a way that is authentic and not in a way that seems disingenuous or that will erode trust. “This can’t be a stunt,” he said.

To view on the Wall Street Journal website, visit:

http://blogs.wsj.com/riskandcompliance/2016/08/19/the-morning-risk-report-business-offers-blueprint-to-improve-law-enforcement-optics/