The power of social media can be as simple as a color. In the first week of January Facebook users were inundated with woman posting colors as their status. At first it was confusing to some and to others rather amusing, but the purpose was to ultimately provide awareness. By noon on January 8th Google Trends reported the search string “color status on Facebook” had reached number 11. Eventually, as many of us have come to learn, the reporting of the color was to advocate for breast cancer awareness.
A unique tactic for getting many involved, but for what? Did everyone who participated really raise awareness or just eyebrows? Have foundations such as the Susan G. Komen seen increases in website hits, information downloads, and/or contributions to their foundation for research? All that was posted was a color, not any further information. In addition, there was no follow through a day or two later, but as the topic became newsworthy a few breast cancer awareness organizations jumped on board to take advantage of the rainbow report.
The viral approach lacked to do more, when it could – most found out why the color was posted but not what to do with their posting or how it was to translate into actionable and quantifiable gestures (for benefit or gain).
It’s like dying an egg to make it more aesthetically pleasing when a person doesn’t eat eggs. Making the egg a different color doesn’t give the person who dislikes eggs the desire to consume them. It might make them look at the egg in a different light, share the egg with someone else because the egg is interesting, or they may find it more appealing, but it doesn’t mean it will translate into the purchase of eggs, eating of eggs, or anything else egg-worthy.
Pantone Ponderings
Perhaps there are latent effects here that have not been accounted for and maybe continued recall after the fact from media coverage and other Facebook statuses poking fun at it was a catalyst to eventually getting folks to take action on their awareness. Again, how many people have and how much was gained – for research and the person who took action (or didn’t)?
Also, given how often we update our statuses, how many of us just “vaguely” recall doing that “color thing” and/or have mentally timestamped this as something that happened “quite a bit of time ago?”
