How would you use technology to promote awareness? This week (March 8-14, 2010) is MS Awareness week! Over the remaining six days of this event, the MS Society hopes to spread information about multiple sclerosis to the general public. Educating the public about this chronic, often disabling disease will help bring in new volunteers, donations and eventually a cure for MS. Through this article, I hope to explore the ways I am using technology to send a message and I ask that you provide me with any feedback and/or ideas you have.
I was lucky enough to be part of a volunteer task force, created to implement a viral campaign for MS Awareness Week, and I found it both interesting and enlightening that the focus was on using social media to spread the word. Our discussions and meetings were filled with terms like social media, networking, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. The very things that the average computer user spends doing every day. For anyone interested in helping to find a cure for MS (or any other cause for that matter), these tools provide a valuable way of spreading information in a fun, engaging way.
Friday afternoon, around 3pm (CST), a simple 130 character message was sent out to the Twitter world. This simple tweet, one of millions sent out that hour, set in motion a series of events that would forever change a young girl’s life and made for a very entertaining weekend. The message (shown below) was sent out by none-other than Conan O’Brien, who recently began his own Twitter account (@ConanOBrien) and amassed over 500,000 followers in record time.
Conan's Tweet About His New Friend Sarah
What makes this tweet so unique is that it was Conan’s first follow. Until that point, Conan had only posted a handful of tweets, and had established a giant audience (580,000 followers) that was anxiously waiting to see what he would do next. What many of us did not realize is Conan had not followed a single person to that point. It is as if Conan had announced a new show, built a beautiful new set, filled the seats with thousands of fans and only done his opening monologue. It took several weeks for him to announce his first guest on this new stage…. LovelyButton.
FollowFriday : On any given Friday, thousands upon thousands (maybe even millions) of Twitter users enter the hashtag #FollowFriday (or #FF), followed by one or more “mentions.” The idea is for users to share the names of other “interesting people” that they follow and think you should too. These recommendations serve as positive comment cards for the digitally inclined.
JumpstartMyPC.com has decided to bring FollowFriday to our blog. Read on and, if you are so inclined, add these “interesting people” to your own list.
Social Networking is the heart of the internet right now. Scratch that, social networking is much, much bigger. Terms like Facebook, Twitter, share, social, follow, fan, etc. are hurled at us, at the speed of light, both online and offline. Every individual and company (including JumpstartMyPC.com) is trying to figure out the “best” way to [...]
Printing information from web pages has always been a hassle. You find a web page with some information you want to print out so you click on the printer icon in your browser. Instead of the page or two that you expected to come out of the printer, you get 14 pages of complete randomness [...]
“Sharing” has to be one of the biggest buzz words of the internet over the last few years. With the introduction of services like email, instant messaging, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and now Google Buzz, people have been provided with the tools for staying in contact with friends and family continuously. These services are used mostly [...]
Are you a parent? Are you a teacher? Are you concerned about the well-being and education of our children? Do you know what computer classes are being taught at your elementary, junior high and high schools? Many of us can answer yes to one of the first 3 questions, but that 4th one…. You might [...]
On any given Friday, thousands upon thousands (maybe even millions) of Twitter users enter the hashtag #FollowFriday (or #FF), followed by one or more “mentions.” While you don’t really need to know much about Twitter, hashtags or mentions (foreign terms to anyone unfamiliar with Tweeting), you might be interested in the concept of FollowFriday. The [...]
We’ve all seen this before. A desktop with dozens, maybe even hundreds, of icons and shortcuts. I’m sure that the owner (and maybe you are the culprit in question) of this desktop had great intentions when they first started adding these colorful little images to their workspace, but things just got out of hand. I [...]
Intro: This article might be a bit “out of the norm” compared to our typical computer-based blog-posts but serves as an example of what using your computer can do for you. I found out about this program, and the details, via Google Reader. Reader allows me to follow multiple blogs and pick out the articles [...]
How would you use technology to promote awareness? This week (March 8-14, 2010) is MS Awareness week! Over the remaining six days of this event, the MS Society hopes to spread information about multiple sclerosis to the general public. Educating the public about this chronic, often disabling disease will help bring in new volunteers, donations and eventually a cure for MS. Through this article, I hope to explore the ways I am using technology to send a message and I ask that you provide me with any feedback and/or ideas you have.
