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A lot of women on my Facebook have had a one word status for the past week or so: red, black, white. My curiousity led me to ask someone who had ’black’ on their status what it was all about. And they replied, explaining to me shortly that you had to put the colour of your bra to your status. Aah I thought, shortly after receiving a message from a friend, who sent a chain Facebook mail to a bunch of girls saying:
“Some fun is going on…. just write the colour of your bra in your status. Just the colour, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls no men …. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a colour in their status… Hahaha”
Yes, ha ha, how funny. Or not. The amazing thing about this was the amount of girls actually writing the colour of their bra on to their status line. The way women were motivated and engaged into changing their statuses was astonishing, but I ask myself why. Every week, it’s refugee week, UN week for this or that, or there is a ’I am Troy Davis’ campaign encouraging you to change your profile picture with Troy Davis’ picture and so on. So, there are tons of companies, causes and campaigns out there asking you to update your status, or change your profile picture to something else in support of their cause. In this case, Cancer Research was definitely succesful in activating a lot of users on Facebook, but does this mean that it is successful?
I think Cancer Research were definitely successful in activating and creating a movement in their target group, which is a huge deal. However, I do not think they hit their target. If the point was to ’spread the wings of cancer awareness’, all they were doing was confusing people, and discriminating in terms of who should spread that message. Social media and activating its users for some cause has the purpose of creating an effect. Effect in this case being awareness, but how can you clearly define your message when it is ”secret”?
To sum up, there was no clear message, no clear sender, and no clear expected outcome, and no encouragement to engage the other sex in also supporting cancer awareness. Men get cancer too! Moreover, I have not been able to find any information about Cancer Research launching this Facebook campaign or about them encouraging users to make updates about the colour of their bra.
Although social media is out there for people to use, it is crucial that there is a clear sender behind a message for it to have an effect. Sometimes things online go viral and rocket to the stars even though there is no clear sender, but in the majority of those cases, you can always get hints and find your way back to the original sender. When you can connect one thing to the other, and you can see a purpose behind the madness, that’s when things really become cool.
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