I caught this video of a BART police officer slamming a drunk man’s face into a window from Marshall Kirkpatrick’s Twitter feed:
While I understand that police work is extremely stressful and often requires officers to make life and death situations that I will rarely make in my lifetime, this looks like a scene from a bad action flick. I’m glad BART officials have decided to investigate.
This video was shot on a cell phone video camera. It goes to show you that you are never in control of your message unless you decide to operate in a complete vacuum, which will never happen.
There are so many blogs about how to use social media to promote your business. There seem to be more experts everyday. If it were up to me, there wouldn’t be social media experts. There would be “here’s how to make your customers rock with your product” experts. A social media expert isn’t going to teach your organization to care about what they do everyday.
This video is an example of someone caught in a rough situation who did the wrong thing. The BART officials could have put everyone on Twitter, taught them best practices, and this still could have happened.
Care about the people you deal with every day. Sympathize with what they are going through. Nothing will weather the storm of social media better than understanding the human condition.