Secret women's business
If, like me, you have been rather perplexed at the proliferation of Facebook status updates from your female friends containing just a colour in the last few days, the mystery is solved.My initial thought (before knowing the reason) was, “this has to be the lamest Facebook meme yet”. Now that I know it’s apparently some breast cancer awareness campaign, I’m still not quite sure of it’s effectiveness. Firstly, ok, yes, I’m now aware of the campaign. But I had to Google it, and found details over at Yahoo Answers. However, is it actually a campaign or just a meme? I haven’t been able to work out which (if any) charities/foundations are behind this. If it were a campaign, surely it would be better executed if people stated the reason behind making a cryptic Facebook status update, rather than just stating “black”.If there is a charity behind it, what ROI are they are trying to achieve? Number of perplexed males? Number of people blogging about how confused/annoyed they are about the campaign? Despite being female, I’m not really moved to action (well, apart from blogging about it). I’m not surprised at how fast the meme has spread, but I’m highly skeptical of how effective this campaign is in spreading breast cancer awareness. We’re exposed to more pink products that are directly connected to breast cancer awareness just walking through the supermarket than seeing our friends spread the “I’m so naughty posting my bra colour on Facebook for a laugh” meme. The jury in my head is still out over this. What say you?
Certainly it "raised awareness" if getting a lot of people confused and trying to find out what's going on counts as raising awareness (and I suppose, from a marketing perspective, it does), but from what I see, a lot of people are almost feeling duped and "out of the loop" on this, and reacting negatively as a result - and that doesn't even include the men who, thinking they were just playing some dumb Facebook game, updated their status with a colour and opened themselves to ridicule. And don't even get me started on some of the cleavage pics posted on the "official" Facebook Page for this meme!
It seems to me there are several #fail points here - the big hush-hush "don't tell the the boys" bit, which is incomprehensible if the goal is raising awareness; making the audience feel uninformed and foolish; alienating what appears to be a considerable segment of the audience who found the meme distasteful or inappropriate; failing to provide a landing page of some sort to serve as a definitive source of information on the campaign; and failing to connect the meme with a clear message and concrete action.
What is heartening is to see that so many women have taken it upon themselves to move it on and seek out ways to take that concrete action. Less heartening is the sophomoric sexism and/or ageism of many of the comments brought out by this meme, and that so much of the "awareness" seems to be centered on breasts rather than breast cancer!
At least, there are lessons that other nonprofits and charities can pick up from all this, to help in crafting their own "viral" campaigns.
One method that could have performed better would have perhaps been a survey app, where it could have had asked how aware women really were about breast cancer - with the takeaway being how to check for abnormalities, what tests were needed, and yes, maybe even the bra colour (eergh). The app could be linked to a donation page or clinic numbers so people could actually make a difference.