The following is a guest post by Alex A, Partner at one of Canada’s leading retail consulting firms, Interstratics Consultants Inc.
Alex helped found Our Community Speaks, a neighbourhood group opposed to a proposed development project in the east end of Toronto. On Sunday, April 23, 2010 Our Community Speaks organized a community rally. Alex explains here how he used social media to gather momentum for the cause.
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1,000 people came out yesterday to show their support against a proposed development near Toronto’s Beach neighborhood. Our group worked with an existing organization to get the word out through social media.
5 Things we did, using social media:
1) Message: We did not focus on changing minds (“spin”); we just provided the facts. Information is key and people will make up their own minds.
2) Frequency: Be quick, post any and all information as soon as it is available. Be concise, but have links for those who want to drill down. Readers will respect the currency and brevity of the posts and come back for more.
3) Visuals: A picture is worth a thousand words. Site plans were replaced with powerful renderings that we created using Google Earth. This rendering resonated with the community and was picked up by the media.
4) Facebook was key to boosting rally attendance, it was able to bring credibility to the friends of those who signed up to attend the rally and ultimately make it more likely for them to attend as well. A second facebook group, made up of younger people sprung up and had the same dynamic take place within their peer group. Overall – counts kept going up and up and organizers had an estimate as to how large an event to plan for.
5) A mailing list was also compiled for the non-facebook users (we used iContact). Periodically messaging with the identical posts from facebook helped to spread the consistent message to a wider group.
6) Docstoc is a great way to post pdf files. By showing the cover page, interest is heightened, there are more clicks and the community is better informed.
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Alex can be reached through his web site, or you can follow him on Twitter http://twitter.com/alex_ari.
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