Unless you’ve been living in the Anderson Basement Rat Labs, haven’t had a drop of content that isn’t from an inverted hamster-bottle in weeks, and you’re a little mouse, chances are you’ve seen the Instagram account sweeping the platform: @livinglondon.ocs.w23
With a pitch-perfect follower-to-following ratio of 1.47 to 1, this account has everything: a consistent post schedule, pictures of Liz Truss, Pierre Hecker cameos, good-natured book club fodder, Oxford commas, and Melissa Clark’s Crispy Tofu with Spicy Greens.
As is evident from the bio, we owe this account (and subsequent English-department-publicity-spike) to none other than our own Peter Balaam—professor, Emersonian, instagrammer (influencer? We’ll get back to you on that one). Not to brag, but Peter actually approached us to talk about marketing future OCS trips on 2LM, and that gave us the idea to approach Peter to talk about the same thing. We wanted to discuss his upcoming London program, Greg Hewett’s up-upcoming London Program, and the possibilities of expanding the English Department’s marketing strategies through contemporary social media. We chose one of those high tables outside of the Great Hall, armed with a hot chai in a non-reusable cup, and an insatiable appetite for answers.
So, why Instagram, Peter?
Well, “I couldn’t deal with Snapchat,” he admits, “but Instagram struck me as really about the right balance for something visually driven.” He got into it right away. In the spirit of full transparency, the @livinglondon.ocs.w23 account is not his first, but “I think I curated more explicitly and consciously for the London program.” He admits this curation is perhaps intoxicating, as “it tempts us into representing our lives in ways that are not actually natural.” This is something Peter strives to stay ahead of, focusing on curating instead a style of spontaneity—an honesty. “I’ll have like three or four things to say every day,” and so he says them, and the people listen.
Marketing is far from unfamiliar to Peter, though, who’s been pushing for the English department to step up its branding game for some time. While the rest of the department, the institution, sleeps, “I was already Instagramming,” says Peter. Before that, he was trying to get “Tea and Sports” on the Laird lawn, though “it was like 32 degrees out and terrible,” so slightly disastrous. He even proposed the addition of a karaoke machine to the senior banquet one year: “Tim Raylor has never forgiven me.” This drive to prove that the English department hasn’t lost its shine is matched only by his technological know-how. While most of the department struggles to wrestle together an email communication, Peter is light-years ahead—of Instagram, he says that “it’s not hard to do. I could kind of do it in my sleep.”
He agrees that social media is an insidious presence in our lives, but he does retain some moral standards—if you’re looking for a brand partnership, look elsewhere. Selling out (or selling nutritional supplement brand codes) simply doesn’t fit into the @livinglondon.ocs.w23 posting plan.
With the @livinglondon.ocs.w23 Instagram, Peter has a clear intention for the style of the page, and for its purpose.
London isn’t all about Big Ben. To Peter, it’s a true metropolis, with a long and layered history. Rather than a bunch of polished royals, Peter emphasizes that London originated with “a bunch of Roman engineers that had no choice in the matter—they’re from Albania or further out in Africa, and they got sent to this unspeakably wild, weird place.” There wasn’t anything there, and they didn’t know what to do, so they built a temple to Mithras, “this mythological dude who’s slaying the bull, right? And these guys would take drugs and go into that dark temple and connect with this wild image of power, agency, and decisive action. It’s a religion.” According to Peter, we’re not that far from that idea now, and this is what @livinglondon.ocs.w23 is all about. It’s a religion (minus the mind-altering substances). We suckle at the wolf, slay the bull, and have the pics to prove it.
We don’t all get it right, though. We have a question for Peter that we’ve been slightly nervous to ask, one of us having run the Instagram account for last year’s Living London program. How do you think the last living london instagram handled their content? Sophia writes in the margins to pretend that the Living London Instagram 2022 is not in the room with us, and Peter obliges. He thought that, like many a hastily-written English paper, it lacked a clear thesis: “where’s the message, and who was the audience?” Sure, we admit “foto dumphs” and Becca Helmstetter birthday posts are far from social commentary, but we argue that our captions were mostly funny.
In terms of passing the account along to students once in London, he’s learned from Pierre’s mistakes. As far as a peaceful transition of power is concerned, Peter believes that “Smeagol got certain things right. He knows how it works.” And he isn’t interested in giving up the reins anytime soon, telling us, “I have no interest in cutting it off.”
Perhaps he’s right—if the content isn’t broken, why fix it?
Where should the English Department Strategic Marketing Team stop? YikYak? TikTok? BopIt? (Twist it!) No, for now, Peter Balaam isn’t interested. “I feel really content in my space.” But that doesn’t mean he’s finished ‘gramming. Even the transcendentalists could use a plug, and during his three-year term as Secretary Treasurer of the Emerson Society, Peter plans to do just that.
So, where does @livinglondon.ocs.w23 stop and Living London begin? Peter’s Instagram has obtained what perhaps no other Carleton OCS program ever has, but what all of them strive for: a brand. Advice? He can’t give it. How to go viral? He has no idea. It just happens. He’s not interested in analytics, or algorithms—just authenticity.
Here’s hoping we at 2LM can have what he’s having.
In the meantime, all the jealous little Anderson-Basement-Lab-Mice like us can simply watch the upcoming program flourish from afar (and yet so close, in our mouse-pockets) and run as fast as our little mice-legs will take us to Greg Hewett’s interest meetings. In an unsurprising turn of humility, Peter implores our readers and his greater number of followers to apply for Greg’s program. London is worth it.
We can almost see Greg’s future Instagram handle in our feeds: @livinglondon.ocs.w24.are.you.getting.this.email?
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