If you haven’t read or heard about it, the last few weeks have been filled with women updating their FaceBook status with a single word. That single word is a color. It started in December or perhaps earlier. Women were sent the following message:
Some fun is going on…. just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of breast cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before people wonder why all the girls have a color in their status… Haha
Each woman received this message in their inbox. More and more women passed the message to other women. This phenomena did not just suddenly appear out of nowhere. It started earlier than January 7, 2010. It started somewhere with some woman or group of women getting an idea. A joke or really a Breast Cancer movement? Who cares! It worked.
It’s based on the old rumor mill. She told someone who told two people who each told two people. It’s easy to see how quickly this type of thing can grow. This is the basis of viral campaigns. This story has even hit CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/08/facebook.bra.color/index.html who interviewed FaceBook spokeswoman, Malorie Lucich. Lucich said it best with her comment,
It's an ideal example of how an individual voice can be magnified to create awareness for a good cause and ignite action among millions by using a site like Facebook.
Individual voice magnified is the key lesson with this movement. Each voice on FaceBook can be heard and is heard. A joke like this caused millions of people to start talking. People now have Breast Cancer on their minds.
This campaign just happened to tie into recent work Inphotek did for the Itsy Bitsy Bra Bar. We setup a discount coupon code for the website directly tied to the campaign. We then plugged it back into FaceBook. We’ll see what the results are over the next week. It ties the website directly to the topic of discussion. It also gets the company unprecedented advertising. You can’t pay for this type of advertising. It just happens.