Social media acts as megaphone and sword in CTU strike
September 14, 2012
As the Chicago Teachers Union strike drags closer to the one-week mark, it's clear the CPS and CTU have more differences than just at the negotiating table. Take, for instance, how each organization has utilized social media throughout this process. For the CTU Facebook and Twitter are wielded like a battleax, for CPS its more like a billboard.
The guy behind the union's social media efforts is Kenzo Shibata. To say he's had a good week is an understatement. Take a look at the activity on CTU's Facebook page over the past week:
The union picked up 16,000 new Facebook fans since the strike began. As an administrator of a Facebook page, I can attest that is a very enviable traffic graph. For the CTU, this activity didn't come by accident. Shibata says he's been training union members for months. "We have focused a lot of attention on social media through this strike. We knew that we could not rely completely o