Can Facebook Connect the Irish on St Patrick’s Day

One of things I love about Social Media is the way the community looks to rapidly fill gaps.  With two days to go to St Patricks day there is a lot of busy chatter about the parades and other activities taking place over the holiday period.  Most of the chatter online are discussions of real life events although there is some really nice work on the St Patricks Festival site and its mobile app and photo sharing competition.

On Facebook there are a host of pages dedicated to the festival  including a cheeky infographic by Mashable on how social networkers celebrate St Patricks Day.   However there was a gap in easily allowing people to express their pride in being  Irish.  Enter the arena ‘Shamrock Urself’ a voluntary social media initiative aiming to restore pride and positivity in Ireland by giving Facebook profiles a St Patricks Day make over. The initiative allows Facebook users to add a Shamrock stamp to their profile pictures through a specially developed application but people can interact at different levels from just liking through to sharing videos of them shamrocking themselves (think Facepainting etc).

The organisers have also approached businesses to get them to shamrock their pages and some nice tips on how to change a page profile by the DMI.  The campaign is mainly being run on Facebook but there is a supporting twitter account also.

I was asked to give a hand, along with many other people, so it will be interesting to see the take up (mainly social media outreach and word of mouth) and what impact it can have on Irish pride and solidarity.  It a big ask but why not?