Ask for Fairtrade
Make sure your choice of coffee makes a differenceArchive for December, 2008
Should we Twollo/auto-follow people talking about coffee on Twitter?
To help get @askforfairtrade started I’ve done a few manual searches on Twitter and have started following people talking about Fairtrade.
But part of the goal of @askforfairtrade (alongside checking who is and who isn’t sticking to their promises to offer Fairtrade coffee) is to encourage people who may not have instinctively thought about choosing a Fairtrade option to ask for it.
So seeing Zarah’s mention of Twollo, a Twitter service which will auto-follow people with particular interests on Twitter, I’m wondering whether @askforfairtrade should be set up to auto-follow people talking about tea or coffee? Or is auto-following by the @askforfairtrade campaigning twitter account too invasive?
If we were to use auto-following, then what key phrases or interests should we auto-follow? A search for Coffee on twitter turns up far to many results… so we might want to narrow down to phrases that might indicate someone is heading out to buy coffee.
So:
- Do you think auto-following has a place in the @askforfairtrade campaigning experiment?
- If so, what phrases could we / should we use to determine who gets auto-followed?
I’ll look at any responses here in the next week or so and will look at whether or not to try an auto-follow…
Fairtrade Flock Up
Zarah Patriana, who has already blogged about the @askforfairtrade experiment, has just set up a Fairtrade ‘Flock Up’ for Twitter.
Flock Up provides a way to find other twitter users with shared interests, in this case, Fairtrade. Take a look and perhaps if you’ve been tweeting about Fairtrade you might add yourself…
Ask for Fairtrade
I set up the @askforfairtrade Twitter account a couple of weeks ago, and after some positive feedback about the idea – I thought it was time to develop it a little further and explore more how Twitter can be used in creative campaigning.
So, I’ve set up the @askforfairtrade blog here, and over the coming weeks I’ll be exploring different ways that the campaign might develop.
I also realized that whilst I could see all the messages that might get tweeted @askforfairtrade, these weren’t visible outside Twitter search, so – over on the right-hand side of this site you can keep track of a regularly updated feed of the latest reports of coffee shops serving, or not serving, their Fairtrade options. If you tweet a report starting with ‘@askforfairtrade’ it should turn up here within a few minutes.
(Check out the about page for more background to this project…)
