Social media isn’t used only by commercial companies to create more revenue or by individual users. Also non-profit organisations that want to raise awareness on several topics use social media. They generally try to make a good campaign that has the potential to go viral. A campaign going viral means that the campaign makes use of a kind of snowball-effect where in the end millions of people have seen or heard about the message. The goal of these organisations is to put pressure on a group other organisations of governments. For instance to operate more social responsible of make more environmental friendly legislation.
10 September last, there is a video about a renewable phone launched. The Dutch D. Hakkers made a concept of a phone in which you can renew out dated parts. Normally when a phone has become slow, out dated, broken or has any other lack the phone is thrown away. This causes lots of unnecessary electronic waste, because most of the parts in the device aren’t useless yet but still are thrown away with the rest of the phone. Because electronic waste is the fastest growing kind of waste, D. Hakkers tries to raise awareness for his concept. He does this through a YouTube video and an very simple clear website where he stimulates people to share his concept video. Within two days the video had over 5 million views and at the moment of writing this (5 days after launch) the views are over 10 million just on YouTube. The goal of this campaign is to make people exited about this concept and let the video go viral through their excitement. As a result D. Hakkers hopes that phone builders are kind of pressured by the will of millions of customers to make such a product. By all this he wants reduce the growth of electronic waste. This whole phenomenon of people putting pressure on big organisations is called crowdspeaking.
This example tells us that social media is very multifunctional and that there are other interest groups in social media than the obvious companies who place advertisements increase profit. Also it states that it isn’t always necessary to pay lots of money for advertisements when you make a creative interesting campaign that appeals to many people. So to all to all the companies out there who want to grow itself or want to raise awareness for certain topics through social media, be creative!
