Rob Reed at
MaxGladwell.com recently pointed me toward the
Stand Up to Cancer (SU2C) movement, a "first-of-its-kind 'Blog Challenge' that harnesses the power of social media" to raise funding and awareness for SU2Cs campaign to end cancer as the leading cause of death.
From now until SU2C's nationally televised event on September 5, 2008, is a major concerted effort leveraging social media, from blogs and
FriendFeed to
Facebook and
Twitter, to affect real change.
SU2C and SocialVibe.com have teamed up to offer tools that will help supporters easily post related information, and hopefully make the movement viral—an important aspect of generating the kind of traffic needed to make this a success.
MaxGladwell.com effectively uses the provided tools to spread awareness of the movement. For example, Reed uses a custom, co-branded badge (pictured at right) specifically created for his website, which can also be placed on MySpace and Facebook. Other options include using the SU2C blog post template, an incredibly easy approach to spreading the message while improving the movement's search ranking.
Supporters can also sign up—or write a post asking others to sign up—to show their support for SU2C at
SocialVibe.com/SU2C. With an account on SocialVibe.com, supporters will be able to host code on their websites and social networks to generate donations to SU2C. SocialVibe.com provides a simple how-to for supporters interested in offering support.
It will be interesting to see the kind of buzz and the sort of funding this movement generates over the next two months. If SU2C sees the kind of exposures it's aiming for, we'll be very likely to see large concerted efforts of this kind in the future. It will also be a testament to the power of social media as force for good in the world.
This entry is by Scott S., our Experience Analyst.
