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You are here: Home / Archives for social responsibility

social responsibility

Managing the Social Networking Feed for an Event? Check Your Ego at the Door.

October 30, 2012 by Erica Hargreave Leave a Comment

Effectively managing social media for another (whether individual, brand, traditional media or conference) means checking your ego and personal biases at the door, and being true to the client’s community, voice and needs.  It’s about them and their community, not about you.  If you do things untoward or disrespectful to their community when representing them, it reflects poorly on them, and ultimately on you.  This is never more true then in the case of a conference or festival, as conferences and festivals are all about community. As such you want to use an event’s social feeds to be supportive of that community, especially if you want the community to support the event in return, through sharing and using the event’s hashtag.

A twitterfall from a past conference, where all tweets with the event hashtag showed up in the stream.

I was recently reminded of this at a recent conference.  The conference had a hashtag, and tweets using the hashtag were shared in a live twitter stream or were they?  Tweeting from 3 different handles, it didn’t take me long to realize that only my own personal tweets were being shared in the live twitter stream, while those of my company and one of our characters were not.  Since these tweets were live I looked to see if either the company or the character had said something that could be construed as offensive.  They had not.  In fact, typically at a conference, our company tweets most of the ideas being shared from the company feed, our personal opinions from our personal feeds, and items of a lighter nature from our storytelling characters.  I could understand our one characters’ tweets being edited out of the feed, as she has a reputation for being racy, but our company’s tweets that were the tamest of the lot?  Our company, I might add, that had been supportive of the particular conference for a number of years.

In pondering this oddity, I discovered we were not alone. Others were discovering that the twitter stream was selective about what was being shared too.  Given a good reason for this, like keeping the tweets focused on the business side of the conference, this would have been understandable, but then why were our company’s tweets not being included?  As best as anybody could tell, it came down to reducing exposure to a potential competitor for those managing the feed. Their company’s tweets showed in the live twitter stream, but not those of any company that potentially competed with them in the market.  The result?  Many at the conference that noticed this were left with a bad taste in their mouth.  A Social Networking FAIL for sure, at a conference that was suppose to be helping people to move forward in the transmedia space and demonstrate positive examples for them.

Filed Under: Blog, EdTech, Opinions Tagged With: building community, social media, social responsibility

Snow Etiquette for Vancouverites

January 27, 2009 by Erica Hargreave 8 Comments


 

Like a respectable Canadian gal, I love the snow!  It’s my version of winter magic. I love writing away and hearing the little girl next door as she steps out for the first time in the morning and exclaims in awe, ‘Oh look Daddy!!!  Isn’t it beautiful!!!’  I still feel like that little girl. So I am in a state of delight and awe this morning as I look outside and see the beautiful white stuff falling.

 

 

What I do not like about the snow, however, is Vancouverites in it and their incessant whining about it.  Vancouver – the rest of the country complains about our citizens being cold and about us being unneighbourly.  Well I have a theory on this.  My theory is that in Vancouver our climate is very mild and unlike the rest of the country, we rarely get snow.  As such we have missed out on the snow bonding experience that the rest of the country gets.  We’ve missed out on meeting our neighbours as we shovel the walks and teaching our young people to help out the elderly neighbour across the street.  Well nows our chance.  Rather than grumbling – lets embrace the true beauty of the snow – the beauty of being neighbourly and building community.

 

He Might be Ancient .. by you.

 

Snow Etiquette for Vancouverites (inspired by a snowy afternoon tweets on twitter and encouragement of @hummingbird604 to make this a blog post):

1) Buy a snow shovel and don’t leave home without it.

2) Dress for the weather! Honestly people, this isn’t your first snow day of the year, you think you would have learnt by now.

3) Dress your kids for the weather – boots, hats, coats & mitts.

4) If you live in a townhouse or condo and there is only one caretaker, would it kill you to help a little with the shoveling.

5) Just because they’re calling for rain doesn’t mean you shouldn’t shovel. If the temperature drops the snow or slush will turn to ice.

6) Courtesy of @yoyomama_van If your tires slip day 1 in the snow, they will slip on day 10 too. Get all weather tires or leave your car at home

7) Courtesy of @kulpreetsingh If you can’t get sand or gravel, keep a bag of cat litter in your trunk in case of ice.

8) Courtesy of @WinnieYeo If you don’t have salt, gravel or kitty litter and are stuck, you can use the car’s floor mats. Just be careful they don’t shoot out from under your tires and hit someone.

9) Courtesy of @petequily If your wheels are spinning on ice, flooring it = more ice.

10) Courtesy of @CrunchyCarpets Leave early, look around, slow down and chillax!!

11) Courtesy of @CrunchyCarpets Please pick up dog poop..snow or no snow. It doesn’t disappear under the snow. It just becomes a poohsicle and when the snow disappears, a smelly, slimy mess for someone to step in.

12) If you’re going to open schools on a snowy day, then plow the staff parking lot. First school day of 2009, I just spent an hour digging cars out of an unplowed, iced over school parking lot.

13) Parents: Your precious little deers can walk a few feet through the snow. They are children, not witches and will not melt from touching ice crystals. Don’t drive your car into an iced school lot where cars are already stuck.  Thinking this should be common sense, but based on the number of parents I’ve seen do this, I feel it is worth noting.

14) If you see someone in need of help and you can help, then do help. And teach your children to do the same.  Teens kept walking by their teachers digging and pushing cars in the aforementioned lot and not one stopped to help.  Huge failure on societies part in my mind.

15) One of the joys of the snow is in building a sense of community by helping others. Don’t deprive your kids of that joy. Take them out (yes – even the little ones) and get them helping you to shovel the walks. Have them help an elderly neighbour. The small ones don’t need to be all that useful, but this will build a sense of social responsibility in them.

 

img_0405 by you.

 

Off to help the caretaker at my place by doing a bit more shovelling today.  Loving the fresh air and exercise!

Filed Under: Blog, Opinions, Random Thoughts Tagged With: building community, community, social responsibility, Vancouver

Thanks for Creating New Dreams Obama!

November 6, 2008 by Erica Hargreave 2 Comments

Absolutely love this Martin Luther King / Barack Obama mash up.  Well done John Masecar and Buzz Bishop!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Frk7kbS3lBY&eurl=http://www.buzzbishop.com/blog/2008/11/05/mlk-v-obama-yes-we-can-dream/]

Congratulations President Obama!  Enjoy your day!  I look forward to seeing a new generation unfold in the United States under your leadership.

Filed Under: Blog, News Tagged With: social responsibility

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