• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, September 21, 2016

The United Nations has enlisted social media influencer platform Influential to help launch its #HugForPeace campaign which is timed to today’s “International Day Of Peace.”  The effort comes in the middle of the UN’s Global Leaders’ Summit taking place at its headquarters in New York this week.

The Influential platform is driven by IBM Watson technology. Using Watson’s Personality Insights service, the platform will identify influencers whose social media accounts rate highly for traits like altruism, self-transcendence, emotionality, and dutifulness. Watson can identify these traits by analyzing the last 22,000 pieces of written content that an influencer has publicly released on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Once identified, influencers will be encouraged to spread the #HugForPeace message across all of their social platforms and will drive their followers to visit www.HugForPeace.org, a microsite where supporters can create user-generated photos with a #HugForPeace design overlay that they can then share via Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

This is the second year that Influential is participating in the campaign. Last year’s campaign, using the hastag #ForgiveForPeace, garnered over 1.6 billion social media impressions on Twitter.

“We are excited to have Influential and some of its top social media stars back again this year to spread the message of the #HugForPeace campaign,” stated Ray Chambers, United Nations’ Assistant Secretary-General and Special Envoy for Health in Agenda 2030. “Last year, we were able to make some huge strides in raising the awareness of the International Day of Peace and we look forward to partnering with them again to make even greater progress.”