@fakemayorkelly
The Challenge
In September 2010, with an increasing number of swarmings and other violent crimes being reported around Halifax and downtown development stalled or non-existent, we saw no reason to abandon our long held belief that the HRM city council bears little resemblance to something that’s either effective or competent. Further, the council’s myopia and lack of any real, meaningful vision or leadership for our city was doing little to fuel hope amongst the young people and entrepreneurs who are critically important to getting our city back on track.
Our challenge was to create a campaign that would demonstrate how HRM’s city council often fails to focus on the important issues that our city is facing.
But we didn’t want to spend any cash.
The Solution
One part civic engagement and one part marketing experiment, we decided to start @fakemayorkelly – a satirical twitter account dedicated to the Halifax Regional Municipality’s mayor and most notable floatable.
After months of focus group testing, with an extensive planning framework and media strategy in place, we launched@fakemayorkelly to see if we could shine a light on the ridiculousness that is HRM’s municipal government.
The Result
Launching on September 22, 2010 [sometime after lunch at Saege – lovely lunch, nice spot, a few too many wasps on the patio that day (the insect kind), but that’s okay… we saw @laurenoostveen there too, so we’re certain it’s a see-and-be-seen kind of place], @fakemayorkelly sent his first tweet: “No problem too small…”.
Within hours, fake twitter accounts started popping up for other HRM councillors and notable Nova Scotian politicians. When Halifax city councillor Sue Uteck alerted the HRM Police over the @fakesueuteck account (btw, if the real @fakesueuteck would drop us a note, we’d love to buy you a pint), the campaign got the break it needed.
Beginning with a report on the Global TV evening news, word of the campaign spread across Nova Scotia including a variety of radio and print news coverage as well as considerable online chatter. All of this came less than 48 hours after launch, with a total of 21 tweets containing 337 words.
And every news story served to point out just how misguided our municipal politicians really are, with one online commenter summing it up beautifully:
“Another Haligonian was swarmed two blocks from my family’s apartment. Would it be okay with you if the cops focus on that instead of following fake Twitter accounts?”