One Direction and Directioners Fuse Online Powers to Battle Bullying

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By Brian Anthony Hernandez2013-08-04 14:57:56 UTC

One Direction's Twitter account and the boy band members' five individual accounts have lured 75 million combined followers. Though those fans likely follow two or more of those six accounts, the number remains higher than the follower count for the reigning king and newly crowned queen of Twitter: Justin Bieber with 42.5 million and Katy Perry with 40.2 million.

With such a massive online fan base — both on Twitter and other social platforms — One Direction has the potential to spark substantial social change. And they're attempting to do just that. The band has tasked their social media-savvy fans to battle bullying as part of an interactive back-to-school anti-bullying campaign with retailer Office Depot.

"What we created was a collection of limited-edition products with imagery on products that you haven't seen on the market," Emery Skolfield, Office Depot's senior director of digital market and brand strategy, told Mashable.

Fans (a.k.a. Directioners) have rallied, tagging anti-bullying photos on Twitter and Instagram with "#Together." Some photos feature the school supplies. One million dollars raised from the products will be used to fund an educational campaign to inspire bully-free schools.

"The digital campaign is built around the hashtag #Together, as in, together against bullying," Skolfield emphasized. "It has been used more than 30,000 times [as of July 31]."

The #Together website lets Directioners see fellow fans' #Together photos, build a shoulder-to-shoulder Facebook cover photo and create a profile photo featuring a 1D member.

Office Depot — which is rewarding vocal Directioners with tickets to One Direction's summer tour, tickets to the guys' movie premiere of This Is Us and mystery swag — has seen impressive online engagement from the campaign and its rewards tactics.

Here's a quick glance at how the campaign is doing online and on mobile as of July 31:

On Twitter: An Office Depot-promoted tweet has seen more site referrals during the campaign than the amount of referrals Office Depot saw in the entirety of 2012.

On Facebook: Office Depot's Facebook fan base has grown more 67,000 — a 19% increase — bringing total followers to some 432,000.

On the #Together Website: It has been visited more than 600,000 times.

On Mobile: Office Depot launched a "Bring It To Life" experience on its app, which houses exclusive 1D content. "Bring It To Life" has doubled the daily usage of the app.

On OfficeDepot.com: Traffic driven from Twitter to OfficeDepot.com in July alone nearly equaled traffic from all of 2012. Traffic driven by all social sites (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest) in July was 346% more this July compared to July 2012.

On YouTube: PSA-style videos, including interview videos (seen above) with each 1D member discussing bullying, have been watched more than 3 million times.