I’d like to occasionally highlight recent blog posts that illustrate some key aspects of my upcoming book. They’ll likely take the form of email feedback that I’ve given to the blog authors. Eden Praire, MN Police Chief Dan Carlson had a post this week titled More Unsung Heroes about some of his administrative employees. In that post, he wrote:
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the Eden Prairie Police Reserve Unit as some unsung heros of the EPPD. Well, there’s lots of folks around here who don’t get the recognition they deserve and I’m going to try and give them some exposure. Today I want you to meet the EPPD Records Unit. I caught up with them this morning at their AM briefing and caught them working on a group project.
I wrote to him:
Dan, An often overlooked key ingredient to a post like this is it’s currency. It’s a compelling blog post because it’s almost real-time. You could do this sort of employee affirmation in a monthly newsletter and it would be fine. You could do even blog this a month later, minus the sentence “I caught up with them this morning at their AM briefing and caught them working on a group project.” But the fact that you posted this to your blog shortly after noon and you’d just visited them earlier that day makes it a more compelling story for the reader. [Cool. This just happened! The chief's blog is almost a window to his world.] So your quick blog post, with the photo, was right on target. You also did more than just affirm these people. You educated the public on the importance of their work re: accuracy. People are more receptive to absorbing little educational lessons like this when there are real people in the story. You might want to consider adding to the storytelling a bit next time… tell about a time when the accuracy or lack of it in the records dept of your dept (or another dept) was the decisive factor in a criminal case, eg, “Two years ago we had a case here in EP where a guy was charged… ” etc.
