Put A Toque On It

One toque really can make a difference.

There are over 65,000 Canadian youth without a roof over their head. Raising the Roof is an organization that wants to but a cap (or a toque) on youth homelessness in Canada. In 2009, Raising the Roof partnered with Virgin Mobile and its Re*Generation initiative to create the Virgin Mobile Re*Generation Toque to warm your head, and do something good! All proceeds were donated to Raising the Roof's Youthworks Program.

Raising the Roof's partnership with Virgin Mobile has created many opportunities. Before Virgin got involved, the campaign was lacking PR and getting people involved, other than getting them to wear the toque. Solution?! Sir Richard Branson, the face of Virgin Mobile. With his influence, he got Glee star, Cory Monteith to sign up as a spokesperson and speak at events around Toronto.

In no time the toques were everywhere! There was a press conference held in Yonge/Dundas Square, Monteith was on MuchMusic's MOD promoting the campaige and it was over the news and American blogging sites.

Raising the Roof's decision to to partner with Virgin Mobile has created many opportunities for the toque campaign and there is much more to come. With the help of Sir Richard Branson and the raising popularity of the Glee star, more people are going to become aware and involved.

Here is the PSA Branson did for the campaign:



Want to find out more information? Take a look at what my friends are saying: Andrea, Anneta, Cindy, Jacque, Maram and Roshni.

Vancouver 2010 - The "Social Media" Olympics

Can social media be the unofficial sport of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics? Everyone from athletes, newscasters, bloggers and fans are furiously typing away. This makes the Olympics the hub of social media, with thousands of tweets being blasted out every hour.

The social media network, Twitter, has released a Verified Tweeting Olympians page where you can see what athletes are tweeting about on one page. They are following 104 athletes including American Johnny Weir to Canadian Joannie Rochette.

The Vancouver Organizing Committee, VANOC, has branched out to YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, recognizing the increasing role of social media.

In Alexandra Samuel describes it as “a living social media experiment”:

Social media was around for the Summer Games in Beijing, but this is the first time it will be deployed in a free and democratic regime. There’s good reason to expect that the Olympic experience will be transformed by the social media presence: it’s already changed the Olympic planning process for both the Games organizers and the media that’s now descending on the city.

Even sponsors like Molson are using social media for their Olympic campaigns. Their personalized Team Canada jerseys are part of their “Gear Up For Gold” campaign. Fans can pick up their personalized jersey on the brewer’s Facebook Fan Page, customize the gear, and make it your personal profile on Facebook and Twitter. In the spirit of the Games, and the need to show my Canadian pride, my current Facebook profile picture is my own personalized jersey.

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UPDATE

Now that the games are over ... and we obviously had an impact on the games (I know many people who had the same profile pic as I did), Hockey Canada sent out a thank you to all their supporters.

I think I just liked that it was personalized ... well electronically but that's ok!

Many people have also reviewed the overall success of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics in terms of their social media usage. Take a look at this article for a review of what they did well and what went wrong!