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.
Eventually, our task force decided on a video contest for this special event. We saw how popular YouTube videos could become and how easy it was to spread the video, the content and the message. Many great videos were submitted and are now displayed on our MS3Things.org web site. During this part of the process, we used many traditional means to meet, share, distribute information and collect submissions. Email, phone conferencing, simple web pages, online forms, of course YouTube and even Google Wave all played part in creating the MS3Things.org site.
Visit the MS3Things.org Site to Vote
What Next
The next step is voting and that is where the use of social media/networking will truly come into play. So, the question now becomes “how do we get people involved and spread the word?” How do we get people to visit the web site and vote on the video that best promotes awareness for MS? Here is what we have so far:
Using Facebook was a given. People spend more time on Facebook than any other web site in the world. The trick here was to catch people’s attention. How do compete against funny pictures, updates about a Farmville barn raising and Mafia wars?
- Profile Picture: I started by changing my standard profile picture. Using the MS logo (bright orange) makes my posts stand out and I guarantee people are looking, if at least for a second.
- Status Updates: This week I changed my focus and will be posting mostly about the MS Awareness week event.
- Photos: I haven’t done it yet, but I will be posting some photos from the MS Society web site to catch the eye.
- Videos: I could post some of the actual contest videos, but that would keep people from visiting the voting site. Maybe a screen shot of the videos will do the trick.
Using Facebook to Spread Awareness
Twitter will be a little more tricky. Frequency is the only real key I can think of. I can also change my profile picture there for the week. As far as message content, here were a few suggestions that we used when trying to get video submissions. I can change them up slightly for the voting portion.
- Musketeers, wise men and tenors: Good things come in threes. Check out www.MS3Things.org for your chance to raise awareness and win (and that’s a good thing).
- It takes just three little things to be the next video sensation. Have you got what it takes? Check out www.MS3Things.org and show us what you’ve got.
Blog
Of course, this blog will serve as a bit of advertising for our cause and the event. I plan on posting it on several blogging sites and asking for feedback and ideas.
Your Help
Have you got any ideas? We need to spread the word and you might have a unique idea that we didn’t think of. Of course, we don’t have unlimited resources or time, so we need quick and easy ways to promote MS Awareness week. Please comment below if you have any ideas at all. Thanks in advance for your help.
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Tags: awareness, Contest, Facebook, MS, technology, Twitter, video, vote, YouTube
