A Durban media company has come under fire after the blogging community revealed it had created fake social media accounts to boost its followers for an international campaign.
The eThekwini Municipality was one of the 32 cities in 14 other countries that was chosen to take part in the We Love Cities Challenge, hosted by the World Wildlife Fund For Nature (WWF). Durbanites were encouraged to interact with the We Love Cities website and tasked with uploading pictures to social media sites Instagram and Twitter using the hashtag #welovedurban.
The Durban-based company, which also owns the I Love Durban brand, was reportedly hired by the eThekwini Municipality to run the #welovedurban campaign for R500 000 for 10 days of work.
The work Carver Media had to do for the R500 000, according to media reports, included:
Two Facebook status updates a week
Upload three pictures to Facebook a week
Send a bulk e-mail
Tweet with the hashtag #weloveDurban
Upload YouTube videos
Upload 20 images to Instagram
Advertise on its website
According to Ward 10 councillor Rick Crouch, the contract did not go through the normal tender process and was awarded under the controversial section 36 of the Municipal Finance Management Act.
This allowed the department to skirt normal tender processes. “The explanation given by Head of Communications, Tozi Mthethwa, was that Carver Media is the only company that can do this work. Which is obviously not true,” said Crouch.
“Communications Department head Tozi Mthethwa insisted the city was relying on the ‘I love Durban’ brand, which Carver Media owns. The brand is intended to leverage votes for the #weloveDurban campaign. And he maintains that this can only be done by Carver Media. My analysis of the ILVDBN twitter page using a utility to detect fake followers is that of the 11400 total followers, 2052 are fake, 4560 are inactive and only 4788 are classified by the utility as good. We could have used any of the many brand slogans that the city uses on a regular basis, and no one owns the rights to a hashtag,” concluded Crouch.
Numerous attempts to contact Carver Media for comment were unsuccessful.
