Before Christmas, I heard this story on WBEZ, the local NPR station in Chicago. The images of pain and injustice haunted me over the holidays; I couldn’t believe something so outrageous and inhumane could happen so near to me. {I advise listening to the story, but here’s a brief summary: A temporary worker (who worked at Raani Corp for 10 years) was terribly burned by chemicals, denied immediate help by his supervisor, and a month later died of his wounds.}
In January, I heard a follow-up news piece saying that Raani Corp denied any wrongdoing and blamed the temporary worker. A righteous fire lit up inside of me. I wanted to make sure I didn’t buy any products made by Raani Corp so I looked up their website http://www.raani.com/ . In the story of the growing business I learned about the CEO Rashid Chaudary. I learned that K-mart and Jet Magazine and Ebony Magazine, among other companies that are not named, have hair and/or other self care products made at this factory located just outside of Chicago’s southside.
I learned the name and email addresses of some of the officers of the company.
| Dr. Eugene Frank Sr. Vice President, Sales & Marketing |
genef@raanicorp.com |
| Denise Swiecicki General Administrative/Customer Service Manager |
denises@raanicorp.com |
| Pervaiz Jafri Director, Quality Assurance |
pervaizj@raanicorp.com |
I found a picture of the CEO’s 12-bedroom house. And I tweeted it, and I tweeted all of my other findings. I tweeted all of my outrage. I tweeted @KMart, I tweeted @EbonyMagazine and @JetMag. I tweeted and I tweeted, and no one seemed to noticed. No replies, no re-tweets.
So I wanted to think about what I did wrong with my twitter revolution. Here are some ideas:
- Perhaps, I tweeted too late at night. I was tweeting between 8-10 pm. However, according to this study that is the best time to tweet. However, many of my followers are in different time zones?
- Perhaps my tweets weren’t catchy or strongly worded enough: I wanted to be accurate and my tweets got lengthy. Perhaps, I needed to rely on a hook and link my fellow tweeters to the accurate information.
- Maybe its harder to start a twitter revolution than I thought. I need to get @NickKristoff to follow me and re-tweet me.
Do you have any advice on how to start a twitter revolution? I hope you will listen to the WBEZ story and share my outrage with me.
alessandra simmons 