The Town of Aurora’s Communications department has several full-time staff and an annual budget of over $700,000 for several years now yet with all these resources move in very snow motion. Back in 2016 I posted on how the town used inappropriate stock imagery that showed snow to advertise fun activities for a March break […]
Read more "Snow Green and the 7(00,000) dollar bills"Municipalities consider dog waste to be a dilema, not a lost cause. In 2018 Municipal World identified the risks and impacts and outlined solutions: As a result several municipalities have risen to meet the challenge. Here’s how Toronto “gets things done”: In 2018, the City audited Garbage and Blue Bins in a number of Toronto […]
Read more "Civic Doody"Recognizing that no one would be picking up their April print edition Snapd diverted their papers from being immediately turned to pulp by mailing them to residences, so that they could handle the last mile of placing them into blue boxes for being turned into pulp. When I opened up the poorly printed edition I […]
Read more "Snapd out of it"During Covid19 the Town of Aurora’s social media accounts have been used to direct residents to crosswords and virtual tours of Disneyland. But in one of their more recent posts this week they claim the pandemic is a “Great opportunity to explore our town”: Perhaps whoever created this post never got the memo from York […]
Read more "When opportunity knocks… you off"First it was links to Disneyland, now the Town of Aurora’s vapid social channels are shovelling crosswords at us: Work from home means actual work, the kind that adds value to the town not sad attempts at justifying the continuation of your job. Since when did citizens require the Town to disseminate BuzzFeed style content? […]
Read more "Adding value or adding noise"Back on March 17th the Yonge & St. Clair BIA released a post to alert citizens to head online and support local shops. That was also a month ago, a very fast reaction to the pandemic. They followed this up on March 23rd by announcing a $500 Digital Growth Grant. This initiative is to help […]
Read more "Downtown Aurora M.I.A."There’s a pandemic going on and it looks like certain staff members at town hall are desperately seeking escapism. Yesterday they shared this facebook post: In traditional fashion instead of using an authentic photo of Aurora citizens taken by their full time Digital Strategist, they have used a stock photo: But it’s the message I […]
Read more "Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow, and fantasy"Check out this “Community consultation notice” about a public open house that is occurring in less than 50 hours: And how did I learn about this? A town councillor posted it to social media. Surprised I went to verify the notice on any of the Town of Aurora’s mediocre media offerings and guess what. It’s […]
Read more "how not to get noticed"It’s hard to a day without getting confused by the Town of Aurora’s communication channels. Yesterday it was the status of outdoor ice-rinks, today it is what can and can’t be recycled. So here is social media post by the Town of Aurora stating that they are in no way confused about the matter: Yet […]
Read more "reduce, confuse, recycle"Here is a recent Town of Aurora facebook post: The post is banal as usual, but at least this one isn’t using cheesy stock imagery. The problem lies in the fact that it includes a link to the steaming turd that is the town of Aurora’s website, and if you click it you come to […]
Read more "from skating over thin ice to jumping into hot water"July 24th the Chair of the Activate Aurora Steering Committee of Sport Aurora, presented a report to council. One slide states that their Social Media Plan has been prepared to “fully engage the public and our target audiences” On August 7th targeting those interested in taking advantage of Aurora’s trails ActivateAurora tweeted this: Looks fine […]
Read more "trail mix-up"Earlier this year council received a report claiming the Town’s Communications department spends a whopping 685 hours a year on town events: That’s over 28 days expended. One area that certainly isn’t eating up any of that time is social media. From comments on the town’s facebook page it appears that noticiations of events haven’t […]
Read more "check out our events on facepalm!"Late last month Atlanta was pummeled by winter storm “Leon”. Michelle Sollicito noticed the lack of a resource to connect stranded motorists with those able to help out so she created one, on Facebook. By way of crowdsourcing “SnowedOutAtlanta” reached almost 50,000 followers. That’s without spending over $4,000 on ads like what was pissed away […]
Read more "snowcial media"At the last Sesquicentennial Ad-hoc committee meeting there were two items on the agenda that caught my interest. The first had to do with defining the scope of what the committee is capable of for handling promotions and cross promotional opportunities. The second had to do with web and social media. Both web and social media being seen as […]
Read more "“If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are … a different game you should play.”"
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