On Facebook last week the power of social media as a collaboration and communication tool was more than demonstrated. A Facebook email was sent around with a variation of the following text:

Something fun is going on……write the color of your bra in your status.  Just the color, nothing else. Send this message to all 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 of the girls have a color in their status….LOL!

It didn’t take long for most of my Facebook friends to either post their bra color or send me a private message asking what the heck was going on.

Origins of this campaign don’t appear to be professional in nature, or even aimed at really getting people to think seriously about breast cancer awareness. So it’s not surprising that there’s been a slew of articles knocking the campaign as ‘pointless’ because it didn’t actually direct people to DO something for breast cancer.

And while that position may be true, I would also argue that the Facebook bra color campaign accomplished something worthy of note. It demonstrated the power of social media technologies to rally an unbelievable amount of people as well as getting millions beyond Facebook to debate the reasoning behind the bra color posting; if even in a justifying tone as it was for me.

The media buzz alone generated from both the status updates and subsequent discussions is more than the Susan G. Komen for a Cure could have hoped for with any traditional advertising campaign.  As this Washington Post article states, Whatever it is, its impact was immediate and dramatic:

As bra colors went flying around the net, something strange happened at the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. After two years of intensive efforts to boost its profile through social networking, hiring two full-time people to do solely that, within two hours Friday morning, their fan base on Facebook exploded from 135 to 700.

We at Wired Wisconsin will continue to advocate on behalf of technologies that enable world-wide collaboration, education, and economic growth!

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