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A social media strategy that has replaced the official names of some federal departments on their Facebook pages with slogans has an Ottawa public affairs digital strategist puzzled.

The changes are part of a move to consolidate the social media presence of several government departments under “thematic pages” on the social media site that combine posts under general, broad-based ideas.

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But when Environment Canada’s Facebook page last week was rebranded with the ambiguous Conserve, Restore, and Connect with Nature, it was met with near universal disapproval by commenters who had linked to the page.

“I cannot understand the theme-based shift, I really can’t,” Mark Blevis, a digital public affairs strategist with Full Duplex, said on the weekend.

“If you start to harmonize a whole whack of unrelated services or loosely connected services, you are only going to serve to confuse the public,” said Blevis. “One of the great strengths of social media is very specific niche communities. It’s not a big huge cluster of disconnected ideas.”