As part of a growing campaign, Meatless Monday has taken to social media to spread its cause. The movement which, as it says on the tin, encourages people not to eat meat on a Monday, can be traced back to the first world war, when civilians in America were encouraged to cut back on the amount of meat they ate by the government so it could be sent to feed soldiers and civilians in Europe, where supplies had been affected by the conflict.
But why is there a need for this now, in 2010? The campaign argues that eating less meat improves your health, will decrease the risk of chronic preventable illness and improve the health of the planet.
Would you go meatless on a Monday?
The campaign has a number of aspects which we like here at Social Media Library:
-The name. It sounds pretty catchy, probably deriving from the trend started by Twitter’s #FollowFriday. Alliterated titles like this have become more and more common since the Twitter explosion. It works well, in that it rolls off the tongue, encourages commentators to write about it and, of course, it can be slotted in to a Twitter hashtag just like that.
-On their blog, they have a section where businesses have pledged their allegiance to the idea, telling the public what they are doing to keep things meatless on a Monday. Within this, there are links to their blogs, which then host recipes or just blog posts that relate to meatless Monday. All great stuff for increasing the awareness of the campaign.
-On top of this, they are also on Facebook, with just under 7000 likes, allowing them to communicate to up to 13000 people in total.
-If we read between the lines of this campaign, the thinking could be that you are more likely to indulge on unhealthy products on the weekend. Whereas when you get back in to the weekly routine, you tend to think more healthily about what you are eating. It feels as though the start of a new week is a reset for your body. This ties in neatly with the name of the campaign.
These kind of causes are ripe for social media engagement, so long as campaigns utilise the technology correctly, alongside more traditional means of spreading the word. Meatless Monday are ticking a lot of the social media boxes. Whether you’ll ditch the bacon sarnie in their name though, is another thing entirely!
About The Author – Tom Clayton
Tom Clayton is an intern on the research at Social Media Library. He is a student from Nottingham and is going to college next year to study Economics, Physics, Computing and Mathematics.