As a counterpoint to last week’s post regarding vaguebooking and slacktivism, I wanted to take a look at another, more recent, social media cause awareness campaign, the #metoo campaign. If you’re unfamiliar with it, here’s one of the many explanations on it:
If everyone who has been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote “Me Too” as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.
Pretty simple, isn’t it? Let’s examine it in terms of the two questions I posited that one should ask when posting such memes:
- Is it understandable to your target audience?
- Is it understandable to the world at large?
Now, postings to this has taken a number of forms, from people simply writing out “me too” or the hashtag, to people writing long texts digging into the problem, their personal experiences, or some analysis or other. Due to the sheer amount of posts (as of October 17th, the count was 12 million posts and counting), even the most bare bones of these should be readily understandable to anyone, be they target audience or the world at large (though I’d say that in this case, the two are hard to distinguish.
The result is that awareness is raised, in a very real, and very visible, way. This is social media cause awareness done exactly right.
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