Today I got a message from one of my friends to post where you like to leave your purse as your Facebook status. It’s a follow-up to the bra color trend that overtook Facebook last year in honor of breast cancer awareness. I immediately sent it out to a horde of my female friends, then saw that one of my male buddies had posted a remark about how it doesn’t make sense and he’d rather people just donate to breast cancer research:
Why are girls playing another cryptic “game” to raise awareness about Breast Cancer? It worked last time because it actually had something to do with breasts (bra color), but this one (where you put your bookbag/purse) is just a ploy. You want to raise awareness? Donate and tell a friend to donate at www.komen.org and actually make a difference. I donated in honor of my Mom, the strongest woman and survivor I know.
To me, he completely missed the point of the potential that doing something as simple as this can have. You don’t raise awareness just by putting money towards a cause – that’s merely funding it. Raising awareness is to get dozens of others to think about the issue and get involved in their own way, whether through donating, volunteering, or otherwise. That is so much more powerful than just donating money yourself and asking your friends to do so too. To make something viral, it has to be more than just the usual message and this is something that gets people talking, whether they are baffled yet again at what is going on, or explaining what those “I like it” posts are about.
So here was the rest of our exchange:
Me: Hey, it got you to talk. And what else can be said about breasts after bras? The idea is just to make people think about it, which should in turn get them to act and/or donate.
Him: To think about it, it shouldn’t be some kind of secret game that men can’t play. That eliminates half the possible donating population. Instead of it just being a game, we should be encouraging each other to really make a difference.
Me: Only by making it a game does it catch a virus effect that can make it spread fast. Unfortunately traditional “hey you should donate to ____ cause” just doesn’t catch people’s attention. There are thousands of great causes and you gotta get creative with how you approach it. The secrecy lets women have some fun with it and men try to find out, which gets them involved too.
Maybe it shouldn’t be limited to something just women can participate in, but seeing as most cases of breast cancer are women, it makes sense that they are the ones who are allowed to lead this little campaign. Nothing wrong with a “ploy” if it’s meant to get people talking about an important issue like this. After all, every advertisement is just a ploy for your attention, much like this is.
I believe it’s a matter of taking this to the next step. Yes, it would be silly and foolish to just leave it at that, with no explanation. I was actually thinking of setting up a Facebook page to help explain, but getting enough people to it for it to be worthwhile would be difficult. I think the best thing would be for the Komen Foundation or another breast cancer awareness group to pick it up and each year come up with the theme, which is distributed virally. A week into Breast Cancer Awareness Month, all those in the know who had changed their statuses would then all change their status to something like “Join me in supporting breast cancer awareness by going to komen.org and donating to the cause!” The rest of the world, if they hadn’t caught on already, would then have a clear follow-up to the previously mysterious status messages.
And here was another person who wasn’t so sure about this whole thing:
I’m not saying this isn’t creative but will posting where you put your purse really cause people to think of breast cancer though? At least bras were directly connected to breasts but I know a lot of people who didn’t even know what the point of that was..
i think it would be better to be more “in your face” because people won’t know what this is about at all until waaay after the fact. i think it’d be better to maybe post a link to purse companies that give to breast cancer research or something like that.
i’m all for “out of the box” ways of spreading the message but as long as people can tell there is a message. it will just seem like any other facebook meme that has sexual innuendos..
sorry, i’m done ranting. don’t let me stop you from doing it though, if you really think it’ll put the message across.
And my response:
One of my friends wasn’t fond of it either and he said he’d rather people just go donate at komen.org, but I think that this is a good idea if after a few days of the status being up, everyone switches to something like “Support Breast Cancer Awareness Month! Donate at komen.org” And my thoughts on your friends points:
1. Other than bras, what is related to breasts? Not much else. By continuing this from last year, it builds a movement and each year more and more people can get involved, FEEL involved, and then donate money or volunteer or act in some way. So of course each year needs a new theme, so it’s fun for people to join in. It doesn’t have to be a “silly” Facebook fad that comes and goes – it can be something much more powerful. And seeing as how women get breast cancer something like 100:1 over men, obviously it makes sense to make it a female-centered thing to empower us to be the ones spreading the message. When guys see it and wonder what’s happening, it’s up to those participating to spread the message of awareness.
2. Posting a link to a purse company that supports breast cancer is so… YAWN. I’m sorry, but if I saw that, I would completely ignore it, like the 1000+ unread FB messages I’ve gotten from this group and that group. To create interest, you need to capture people’s attention and another “yay you should donate” message just gets lost in the hubbub of all the other junk we see. This movement is just like the NFL players wearing pink – what does that actually TELL you? Nothing. It’s up to people in the know to share the message and those curious to find out. And when things like that get noticed, news outlets cover it and they do a pretty good job of explaining.
3. Granted, it’s true that this trend needs a bit more clarification, but last year after the bra thing it got national coverage. How’s that for clarification? So that’s why I’d suggest a concerted effort to get people to actively get involved in supporting breast cancer research/awareness/prevention by changing the status right after this provoking one as a follow-up.
Traditional ways of putting the message across don’t get your attention like this kind of thing has the potential for. It is very viral, and therefore very powerful by putting the power in the hands of each participant to get involved and get others involved.
Let’s take sharing pictures, for example. There’s Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and many more that focus more on printing photos. Facebook is useful because you can tag your friends and use the existing social network to share your photos. Flickr is good to share your stuff with the world and make your pictures show up on image searches. Picasa has a fun face recognition algorithm that allows you to have people pre-tagged whenever you upload new pictures. Those people are also linked to your Google contacts, so if you already use one of the other Google services (Gmail, Voice, Wave), you can use existing contacts to tag, much like Facebook. So when you want to share pictures, where do you go?!
Finally, Baseloop caters to both events for your friends and more public events. What I like best about them is they allow you to suggest things to do and they show you a public calendar of events going on in your area. That way, if you’ve wanted to do something but could never seem to find the people to do it with, you can put it out there for all your friends (and even random people) to see. Much easier than e-mailing or messaging all my friends just to see if they’re interested in a particular activity. You can also quickly see what things there might be to do on a Saturday night when you’re bored and want to go have some fun. But of course, few people are on it now, so when I invite friends, they’d need to set up an account. So which of these is best for event-planning?
