On Friday, Digital Forensics Magazine published a blog post of mine: 5 Reasons for Digital Forensic Examiners to use Content Marketing. It was an expansion of a short piece I’d done for their monthly newsletter.
It’s not just for private companies
Weighted toward the private side? OK, yes, it is, in that in my examples I talked about selling products and services to customers. I wrote most of it not long after the great discussions I had with some vendors at Techno Security about content and social strategies.
But I used some law enforcement-specific examples too, especially with regard to victims of high-tech crimes, because ultimately, everyone is “selling” – they’re working to earn trust. Just as companies want to earn customers’ trust that their products will solve the problems they’re built to solve, law enforcement task forces want to earn citizens’ trust that their investigations will solve community problems.
Building on examiners’ content
The more digital forensics catches on, the more examiners from both public and private sectors seem to appear on blogs and in forums, hoping to learn from as well as educate each other. The community is perhaps one of the strongest on the Internet… yet it’s all about the individuals. Their agencies and companies hardly join in.
It does say something that these professionals are allowed to blog, podcast, tweet and join websites like LinkedIn, identifying themselves as employees of a particular company (though law enforcement agencies are less amenable to this). But what if their organizations tapped into their content?
Educating other examiners is, of course, different from educating members of the public, or less technically inclined employees. For an organization to point to its employees as proof of their collective expertise may not backfire, but it would be hard for the general public to understand the relevance to themselves.
Still, to link to a body of professionals all contributing research and opinion to the community would indicate at the very least an organization that hires original thinkers who care about cybercrime investigations. It would make those individuals more accessible to bloggers and journalists who could assist with public education. And it would signal to the investigative community that the organization values its employees.
Christa M. Miller specializes in public relations, writing and editing for the law enforcement and digital forensics communities.
