Comment accademically on the post below and How does this contribute to engagement, the idea of community, and branding efforts?

Social media trends spread like wildfire. While some make an effort to go viral others simply happen upon it and find themselves in the midst of a storm of likes, shares, and retweets. It gets people talking, brings new brands into the conversation, and moves people to action.

I believe that the Facebook breast cancer awareness meme was incredibly viral because it was easy to partake in. No one had to sacrifice a great amount of time, or read through a long set of rules to participate. Since it was marketed to women, it also made people feel like they were a part of a club or had insider knowledge.

Knowing that it started as a way to spread awareness for a good cause helped to lift it off the ground, and when women started seeing their friends posting status updates, it was an easy turn around for them to join in the fun. Overall, it was an image boost, in feeling like they were a part of a secret group, and a moral boost, knowing that the root cause was supporting research to cure a disease and spread awareness.

This particular social media meme led users to mobilization, but did not create lasting impact, and the action was menial. There was no follow-up beyond the initial post, and the push to get others to join in on the status update craze. From there, there was no next-step, or easy layout of opportunities for further involvement, beyond someones personal research.

Going forward, I think its important for the next social media meme to include everyone. This is a cause that all of society can come together on. It can include direct links back to the webpage where people can either donate, volunteer, or take further steps to promote awareness or help fund research. At this point in the game, there is a great amount of awareness. What we need now is the support of funds and time. This could include group volunteering activities and events to help facilitate friends coming together to fight this as a team.

The Active Audience Theory explains that audiences are active and goal-directed, and they make a rational choice to use media content to satisfy their personal needs and desires (Mahoney & Tang, 2017, p. 82).

With this in mind, cyberactivism and prosocial movements are natural social media mobilizers because people want to passionately stand behind causes they believe in. They also want to appear as caring, altruistic, and authentic. Posting this on social media allows their friends and followers to see how theyre personally taking part to change something for the better.

At the end of the day, the goal of most mass media campaigns is to get audiences offline and mobilize them towards real-life behavior change (Mahoney & Tang, 2017, p. 61). Real life behavior change in this case should go well beyond people secretly laughing over messages and sharing status updates, and should promote education and affirmative action towards helping the organization raise funds or supporting victims already suffering with the disease.

Hopefully, the next campaign will set up a platform that encourages people to come together and support one another, and the public online posts will entice others to join in and participate as well. I believe it would strike home with people if they knew their efforts were creating change and were able to partake in the were all in this together feeling

AC