Pig Sty Avenue
I’m not sure what it is about late April, but it seems to be the time of year to get excited about making the world a better place. This week commemorates Earth Day (April 22), World Malaria Day (April 25), and Global Youth Service Day (April 24-26). With all of the “days” this week there are plenty of opportunities to help your planet, your neighborhood, and your fellow man.
Whether you want to give back to your community, go green for mother Earth, or help save lives by fighting malaria, there are lots of opportunities to see how social media can make it easier for people to give, get involved and organize. A few interesting examples:
Earth Day: If there was any doubt about it, Earth lovers are on the web. If Mother Earth were on twitter I think she could give Ashton Kutcher a run for his money.
The SocialButterfly blog points out that there were 88,000 blog posts on Earth Day, 10 percent of which were from Bloggersunite.org, which tries to coordinate bloggers to raise awareness about various causes. YouTube, Sun Chips and others created a new YouTube channel, Live Green, with a plethora of videos from different outlets and partners, which range from the strictly instructional to the entertaining, showing people how to make small changes to live more green lifestyle. Brighter Planet created an earthtweet tweet-a-thon to help build buzz around Earth Day by having individuals share how they are doing their part to save the planet – in 140 characters or less.
World Malaria Day: Besides the obvious attention around Ashton Kutcher, his race to a million followers, and (oh yeah) his pledge to donate 10,000 bed nets, other individuals are using social media to promote awareness and raise funds to eradicate malaria, with even Ted Turner getting in on the action. The World Malaria Day website includes interactive features that allow users to add events, news items, and success stories or send postcards to friends and family to spread the word. And Malaria No More is using a text to give campaign to make it easy for anyone to contribute $5 for life-saving bed nets. (just text NET to 90999).
Global Youth Service Day: With millions of young people participating in local community service projects in 100 countries, Youth Service America had a lot of coordinating to do. Fortunately, they are benefitting from the passion and social media savvyness of millenials. Global Youth Service Day has an active Ning site championed by Miley Cyrus with video and photo sharing, blog posts, and 100 Ways to get involved. Usher, not to be outdone, sent a text to 21,000 fans to encourage them to register for a service event.
What creative ways are you leveraging technology and social networks to organize during one of this week's "days" dedicated to giving back? And by next April, how will we be even better at organizing online?