Social Media

Carleton’s Anniversary Hashtag Gets a Makeover

Launching a hashtag to promote your brand often provides great potential to expand your reach, connect with fans, and use the power of the masses to help build up reputation. But as Ottawa’s Carleton University found out today, it also provides rife opportunity for subversion.

The school launched a new public awareness campaign this morning to celebrate its 75th anniversary, that follows the theme “Distinctly Carleton.”

As part of the launch, Carleton revealed a new website (as well as a special campaign page) and unveiled massive portraits of famous alumni like former Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, writer Lynn Coady, journalist Nahlah Ayed, and Ravens basketball star Philip Scrubb, among others.

Part of the launch also included a hashtag campaign.

Save the Date for #DistinctlyCarleton! Oct. 15 at 10 a.m. River Building Atrium #ottnews pic.twitter.com/PLDMz5NwuJ

— Carleton U News (@CUnewsroom) October 8, 2014

It didn’t take long for students and faculty to give the hashtag an entirely different meaning.

Bullying students #DistinctlyCarleton

— Lauren Montgomery (@LO_montgomery) October 15, 2014

Destroying a community garden? That’s #DistinctlyCarleton

— Kelly B (@K_elly_B) October 15, 2014

Spending a gazillion dollars to restart a football team while cutting departmental budgets (not Sprott of course) #DistinctlyCarleton

— Christian Belisle (@Crizco91) October 15, 2014

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Toronto Sees Surge in Campaigning on Reddit

As Toronto’s municipal election heats up, candidates for mayor and council alike are experimenting with the potential of reddit to deliver their campaign platforms and messages to an engaged audience online. For the 48,000+ subscribers to the city’s subreddit, it’s been a busy month.

Flickr/Steven Severinghaus
Toronto’s City Hall illuminated at night. With the election campaign in full swing, many mayoral candidates have taken to reddit.

But what is the point of logging on to this specific community to take questions and deliver campaign lines? What benefits does it afford, and what are the risks associated? I’ve briefly talked about this before, and while this is still far from a complete discussion, it will hopefully offer an introduction to the political AMA on reddit.

Roberto Alvarez got the ball rolling on August 6, when the nominee for councillor of Ward 3 took to the site to answer questions. It wasn’t huge, garnering only 34 comments (which includes his responses) and 64 upvotes. That said, Alvarez spoke oienly and honestly, fielding questions about Rob Ford and the relationship between Homer and Flanders from The Simpsons with ease. More Importantly, he didn’t shy away from tough questions.

By all accounts, it was a good use of campaign time and efforts.

Paul Alves came next. And it was bad. Alves, running to become councillor for Ward 18, went off the rails and the AMA descended into a horrific train crash. After being confronted by one user for using Rob Ford-type tactics, and then being called a Ford apologist by another user, Alves went on the offensive. He accused a user of being a plant for another candidate’s campaign, before saying,

People think the internet is a free for all, it isn’t. I’ll gladly retain counsel and sue for slander anyone who claims I’m what i am not.

From there, things degenerated. Taking on his threat to identify users’ IP addresses and deal with them legally, users began coming up with far-fetched and obvious lies about the candidate (one calling him a Satanist) while others offered definitions and legal interpretations of slander and defamation laws in Canada.

As one user plainly stated: “Threatening to sue voters is an interesting campaign strategy.” Perhaps shockingly, Alves deleted his first account and came back to the site with another new name and has seemed to buy in to the community. He apologized for his outburst, and has since been an active commenter on the Toronto subreddit, as well as another dedicated to British television show Dr. Who.

And so, there are the two directions a political AMA like this can go. Depending on how well you connect with the users, and really how well you fit into reddit’s culture, can make or break it. A negative impression early on can bury you.

Making this case study of the Toronto election even more interesting is the active outreach that moderators of the subreddit undertook to reach out to all mayoral candidates. So far, Ari Goldkind, Mark Cidade, Olivia Chow, and Morgan Baskin have answered the call.

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#PartyWithCaution: Police Force Drops Some Education On University Froshers

With a fresh school year kicking off across the country this week for close to 2 million students in Canada, the promise of Frosh Week lingers in the air.

The annual tradition that celebrates the first week of university life for freshmen, and the return to school for older students, is often one of the best parties of the year at campuses from coast to coast.

Contentious and controversial, Frosh never fails to garner significant media coverage. Despite recent calls for Frosh Week traditions to “grow up” or for schools to crack down, the tradition will surely live on in dorm rooms, student houses, pubs, and clubs.

With that in mind, York Regional Police have come up with a brilliant and creative campaign to warn students about the potential costs they could face if they party too hard.

Courtesy of @YRP here is your complimentary frosh week expense list. #makewisedecisions and #partywithcaution pic.twitter.com/vPbfATOPtK

— York Regional Police (@YRP) September 3, 2014

The police force tweeted out the expense list earlier today, which covers the obvious like streaking, under-age drinking, and open container violations (cleverly referred to as “Popping bottles in the back of your friend’s Corolla), to the not so obvious, like putting cement mix in the laundry machine, illegal gambling, and, I quote, “forcing a pet to smoke marijuana.”

Educating students on the potential repercussions from not “Partying With Caution”, as the release says, is important. But too often it gets bogged down in an authoritative tone that’s easily glossed over.

Instead, the YRP have done an incredible job delivering this message to students in a more accessible voice. They’ve managed to introduce some humour to the situation (“Dropping excessive bass at 4 a.m.” and “Downing Jager-bombs in public”) while still reminding students to remain safe and responsible.

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Ice Bucket Challenges Around the World

In the streets of Hyderabad, a city in south India home to some six million people, journalist Manju Latha Kalanidhi pulled out his bucket.

Unlike hordes of Canadians, Americans, Brits, and others who have been filling their buckets with ice and water, Kalanidhi filled his with rice. After loading it up, he didn’t dump it over his head – instead, he donated it to the country’s poor and hungry population.

Dubbed the #RiceBucketChallenge, the spirit of giving is in the early stages of sweeping the nation. So far, the campaign’s Facebook page has received over 54,000 Likes.

These four steps make up the #RiceBucketChallenge. a campaign starting up in India.

The team behind Thrill, a start-up dating app, took to the streets to participate, and their video gives a good example of what this new campaign is all about:

As reported by Reuters, other companies institutions are also trying to get more people involved. The Indian Institute of Management has already participated, while AirAsia India said that its senior management will complete the challenge next week. As more companies join on board and send out nominations for others to join, the hope is the campaign will continue to snowball.

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Does 8tracks Provide a New Outlet for Savvy Marketers?

When planning a summer road trip, the first thoughts shuffling through your mind might consist of destinations, routes, and estimating how much your wallet will suffer in rising gas prices. Before too long, though, you inevitably wind up filling up the iPod or frantically burning and marking CDs – the relationship between road trips and music is one of those unbreakable bonds.

That connection led O’Reilly Auto Parts, a chain headquartered in Missouri with more than 4,000 stores across the U.S., to place their brand in relatively unexplored land.

The company launched their own ultimate road trip playlist on 8tracks, which so far has generated over 20,000 plays and about 500 “Likes.”

If you’re not familiar with 8tracks, it’s an Internet radio outlet that allows users to upload “mixes” of songs, which can be streamed online for free through a unique licensing agreement.

Remember that one friend from the 90’s who you’d ask to burn the latest Nelly single, and he’d turn it into an expression of art and spend countless hours creating the perfect mix? 8tracks is a site that draws all those people, as well as DJs and music producers, to one place. You get the added bonus of finding, and listening to, these playlists for free.

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Inanimate objects on Twitter is a new way to spread awareness.

Fence on Twitter Raises Awareness of Looming Globe & Mail Lockout

An ongoing labour dispute between Globe & Mail management and staff took a drastic turn this week when a chain-link fence was erected outside of the newspaper’s offices in Toronto.

The fence went up on the same day that a strike vote was held, and over 92% of Unifor (the union representing the Globe‘s staff) rejected the company’s contract offer.

Globe and Mail erecting fences. union strike vote today pic.twitter.com/p6XOneZNfc

— Eric Atkins (@ericatkins2) July 2, 2014

A key issue in the labour dispute stems from the fact that management will require editorial staff to produce custom content, that is content paid for by advertisers. The issue of custom content in Canadian newspapers is not new and has been covered well by Jonathan Sas over at The Tyee. As he succinctly describes the process,

A business agrees to buy pricey ads with the assurance those ads will be accompanied by stories that fit desired themes but which seem to have sprung straight from the publication’s newsroom. Indeed, custom content often runs under the bylines of staff reporters and without any disclaimer. Naturally, though, it’s understood those stories aren’t going to be muckraking extravaganzas targeting the ad buyer or their industry. “Custom” is inevitably a euphemism for “soft.”

Other issues leading to the dispute include reduced salaries to sales staff and lower job security, according to iPolitics. On Monday, many stories ran without a byline, as reporters carried out a “byline strike,” the second to hit a major Canadian daily in the last three months. Roy Greenslade writes that reporters seem prepared to launch an alternate publication, or at least take their writing to personal websites, in the case of a lockout.

As we’ve seen recently with an unfinished pedestrian bridge in Ottawa and a disgraced mayor’s luxury SUV, people are finding that one of the best ways to help spread awareness of an issue (while inserting your own opinions on the issue) is through a parody Twitter account.

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