Nowadays our world is in constant changing
trying to adapt to the new technologies and to all the possibilities that they contribute.
Things have changed; now it is not necessary go to a kiosk to buy the
newspaper, all the information is in Internet; buy whatever thing from the desk
of your house it's possible; even you can prepare a trip without going to a
agency travel. Within this possibilities contributed by Internet it's necessary
speak about the viralization capacity of the contents. With a simple click you
can share some content with your community in the social networks. This quality
of the Internet is being used by ONGs to spread their contents and to reach
more audience.
It is very easy find a lot of solidarity
campaigns in Internet. All the time people is sharing some texts, videos,
photos or asking for a firm in a petition. The web site https://www.change.org/is one of the most popular sites in
the World Wide Web thank to all the people who enter to sign a petition or to
create a petition. There you can find requests for a government, request to
save some animal which is in danger or to collect money for an illness.
However, the most successful solidarity campaigns are those that involve
citizens. Here we have the case of "Ice Bucket Challenge", a campaign
that started in 2014 and circled the world.
"Ice Bucket Challenge" campaign was
started the 7th august 2014 by Pete Frates family, that meet two hundred people
in Copley square of Boston. The objective was collect money to investigate ALS
(Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) an illness that affects Pete Frates (https://petefrates.com ). This progressive degenerative
disease is very strange and only affects one person out of ten thousand.
Campaign was presented as a challenge; people had to throw a bucket of cold
water over them. The objective was to fell stiffening of muscles like the
patients of ALS. People had to rec the challenge and to posted in Facebook or
Instagram. Then they had to mention other people to do it and donate money to
the ONG.
People of all parts of the World contributed to
the cause recording their videos and donating money. Only in 2014, the ALS
Association (http://www.alsa.org/) collected $115 million. Why this
campaign has so success? All people who recorded a video and posted it in
Facebook donated money? People really wanted to help to collect money or simply
they wanted to create their own virtual identity? These are some of the
questions with which we find when we study this case.
There are several factors that can help us to
understand the success of "Ice Bucket Challenge". The main
explication alludes to the viral character of Internet. The creators of the
campaign saw that viral marketing could function very well with their
objective. Viral marketing allows the message to be transmitted to a group of
people who, because of certain factors, will be in charge of disseminating the
information that has been offered to them. This is very far away from mass
marketing, where an advertiser throws a message to the whole audience. In the
viral marketing, the advertiser, in this case the ONG, achieve that people
internalize the message and transmit it as your own. That is why people put
more effort in communication with other people. Also, it is known as "Word
of Mouth Marketing", because it works when one person tell to another
something about the campaign and so on.
Once we speak about WOM and viralness
communication, it is the moment to mention the "Sneezers". This term,
coined by Godin, refers to all the people who "sneeze" all
information they have above other people, infecting them with the message. But
how these "sneezer" have knowledge about campaign? The answer to this
question is another of factors that helped to success of campaign. Lazarsfeld,
one of the most important researchers in the communication world, talked in
1995 about the "opinion leadership"; this is when one person has authority
in a media and a lot of people want to know his opinion about different topics
to build your own opinion. "Ice Bucket Challenge" used famous actors,
politicians, youtubers or instagramers to reach to the people. All of them are
opinion leaders and when its followers saw that they did the "Ice Bucket
Challenge", they decide to do the same.
It is possible to find one more factor that
influenced the campaign. Characteristics of the message are very important for
their transmission. People not share all content that find in Internet, but it
has to have some attributes. Within the different viral messages that it is
possible to find in the net, stand out those who entertain and are original,
those who invite the interaction of the audience and those who transmit a
positive message. "Ice Bucket Challenge" campaign shared all of this
attributes.
It is true that lot of people contributed to
collect money for ALS, but not all was good in this campaign. "Ice Bucket
Challenge" served to show, one more time, the existence of "click
activism". That type of activism, if we can call it that, consist in think
that someone help to some cause only sharing information with a click. People
want to appear altruistic, worried about the world and willful to combat
injustices; but they only share some post in Facebook or sign in an electronic
petition. This is related with the objective of build a digital personality,
different from what they are actually. These people did not donate money, they
just wanted the rest of the world seen how altruistic they are.
Solidarity campaigns are triumphing nowadays in
Internet, and every single week we heard about a new challenge or a new
original and surprising video to protest or to reclaim more rights, money for
investigation or more equality. With all the tools that we have to share them
is our duty to extend message against injustice and help people. But we have to
remember that make a click to post something in Facebook is not the only thing
that we can do or we'll be fooling ourselves.
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