O’Conall Street

 

The tragic death of you Rhys Jones has left these islands numb and wondering how teenagers turned into child killers.

Nothing will ever bring back this happy eleven year old. No words or actions will put his cheeky face back in his bed or life in his football jersey. But for all our sakes his killers must be caught. Police forces across Britain and Ireland are very good at using the media to help solve crimes and more often then not their PR efforts pay off with quality leads and convictions. Indeed they have expressed satisfaction at the response to appeals for information about the young Everton fan’s death. 

This killing has lifted the lid on gang culture in Liverpool complete with their own channels of communication, making full use of new media to spread their messages of control and fear. You Tube is their ‘newspaper’ and the video phone their ‘pen’. We could debate the ins and outs of whether it is right for a video sharing site like You Tube to be hosting gang propaganda and my view is that it is not. But right here, right now, there is an opportunity in the fact these gangs are networked online.

We know these kids watch each others videos. We know they like to post an online record of their bravado so why would the police not communicate back to them through their own media. The people who know who killed young Rhys are unlikely to open a paper this morning, but they will surf the net for savagery and underground info. PR is evolving and to reach certain audiences, PR professionals need to evolve too. The old days of process driven communications are ending and in their place, social and other networks are emerging to influence our lives and shape our thinking. This is something we have worked a lot on at Weber Shandwick and is why we are now defining our services in terms of advocacy.

You Tube could do the right thing and give British police online advertising space to hit back at the gangs. What about a pop up about young Rhys every-time a gang video was clicked, and every press conferences, every appeal should be on there too.  

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 8:03 am and is filed under Current Affairs, Public Relations, The Media, Weber Shandwick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.