You would have to be living in a cave during recent weeks if you hadn’t noticed the latest craze that swept around the globe and was publicised everywhere on Television, Radio the Internet and social media. This is the Ice Bucket Challenge where people are selected to throw buckets of ice water over their heads, in doing so, donating money to the charities and nominating others to take on the challenge, all in order to raise awareness and money for ALS.
There were some very important lessons to be learned from this phenomenon however. Lessons in social media, lessons in human behaviour and lessons in life.
There were some very practical messages that came across from the ALS challenge. Most of us now know what ALS is; we know that it is a form of Motor Neurone Disease, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease. For the people who actually looked into what ALS/MND is all about, they found what an awful and debilitating disease it is and perhaps now have a little more empathy, knowledge and compassion for sufferers and their families. It brought an otherwise little known subject into the public eye and that, after all was the main aim of the campaign.
Other practical lessons learned: If you want something to go viral, it’s not always all about the content. Videos are without doubt dominating the social media world, so that’s a plus already but the fact that it encouraged people to challenge others to follow suit (often within an allotted time period of 24 hours) gave the added pressure to do it. It also seems that if you want something to catch on, people follow the lead of influential personalities and celebrities with huge fan bases. Respected individuals like Mark Zuckerberg and Justin Timberlake were the earliest participants and that lead the way. Significant, powerful and famous people taking part made people think ‘well if they’re doing it…’ and the ball just started rolling from there.
We learned that whenever anything like this takes hold in the media, there is always going to be negativity along with it. The celebrities were criticised for doing it for their own self promotion and not for the charity awareness, the ALS charity itself was criticised for the research it does on animals and the salaries of its board of directors. Other charities got involved because people were donating to them and not ALS and were then accused of hijacking the ALS campaign. The argument however, is that a lot of people have their own chosen charities that are close to their hearts and that they support. Isn’t it better that they do it and donate to their own charity rather than to not do it at all? Another criticism was the fact that nearly 800million people worldwide don’t have access to clean drinking water and we’re watching and encouraging people to chuck it over their heads.
The time limit, ‘you have 24 hours to complete this challenge’ added real peer pressure and people felt pushed into doing something that they didn’t particularly want to do and donate money to a charity that they don’t necessarily support. There was talk that people who refused had to pay a ‘fine’ to the charity, which seemed even more ludicrous seeing as they didn’t want to donate to them in the first place! There was a real sense of bullying involved and the more people were bullied, the more frustrated others got and therefore started to resent the whole thing.
Also, it went on and on! People were staying away from Facebook because they were tired of the endless video posts, tired of the bullying and just generally a bit sick of hearing about the whole thing and unfortunately, this campaign, through its own success had become a bit of an irritant.
However, there were positive too. We all know a little bit more about what ALS/MND are and the amount of money raised for these charities was absolutely phenomenal. Because of the water shortage controversy, Water Aid became a chosen charity of a lot people. So although, Cancer Research, Water Aid etc weren’t the intended recipients of this campaign, the fact they significantly financially benefitted surely is a wonderful thing.
So what did we learn from all this? Initiating a viral campaign is not always going to go as smoothly as hoped. Millions of people are involved and thankfully, we don’t all think the same. You can’t please all the people all the time, even if the point behind it is a worthwhile cause. There will be negativity, criticism and rebellion even, but any PR is good PR right?