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:

Facebook

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

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.

iTunes has become the mother of all music managers, thanks to the success of the iPod and iPhone, yet there has always been something lacking about the way it handles the music that you import into your library.  Purchase your music from the iTunes store and it comes complete with song titles, artist names, genre, album covers, etc.  Import your own tunes from CDs or files and you’ll find yourself using Google to fill in those attributes yourself.  At least, that was until someone introduced you to TuneUp.

TuneUp for iTunes on PC

TuneUp is a plugin for iTunes that organizes and labels your music for you.  Simply drag and drop your music into the Clean area and TuneUp will compare the music against their database of 90 million tracks.  Song names and artists are presented, along with your option of album covers.  Pick the one you want and save.  You can walk away and TuneUp does the rest.

As if that were not enough, the folks at TuneUp have added some additional features for music lovers.  Analyze will take a look at your music collection and let you know how “clean or dirty” it is.  Tuniverse provides you with music videos (YouTube), artist bios from wikipedia, eBay listings for band merchandise and more.  The Concerts tab will show you upcoming concerts based on the artists in your library.

For more  information on TuneUp, including the features listed above, take a look at this 3 minute video:

Now, we often focus on FREE programs here at JumpstartMyPC.com, but there are times when programs are worth a few of your hard-earned dollars.  This is one of those times.  TuneUp does provide a FREE Version, which is limited to 100 song clean-ups and 50 cover art saves.  If you decide to purchase the full version, the pricing structure is:

• $29.95 for a lifetime subscription (this is the life of the machine, they do allow one transfer)
• $19.95 for a year subscription.

What is your time worth to you?  I can tell you that I spent about 10 hours cleaning up a library of 3000 songs.  If I had known about TuneUp at the time, I would have bought it in a heartbeat.  Go ahead and make the purchase of the lifetime subscription.  You will not regret it.  TuneUp is available at http://www.tuneupmedia.com.

The folks at TuneUp were nice enough to provide you, our readers, with:

• A coupon code for 10% off the purchase price. COUPON CODE = JUMPSTART
• One FREE copy of TuneUp for one of our readers.  Enter to win. Simply post a comment to this article below or on our Facebook Fan Page.  Details below