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.
If you have ever managed your own digital music collection, you know what a time-consuming, frustrating process it ends up being. It seems simple enough. You put the music in and the program applies the right titles, album covers, etc. HA! That is where the dream ends and reality begins. Anyone who has been down this yellow brick road knows that something is lurking behind the curtain and you are in for a serious wake up call.
