What is World Toilet Day? A day that creates awareness about the 2.5 billion people living without proper sanitation, which leads to diarrheal disease. Poor sanitation kills 4,000 kids per day. Matt Damon’s organization used #talkshit to raise awareness of this subject on Twitter.
#talkshit is a “hashtag”: Hashtags group comments on Twitter. You can search #talkshit through the site and see what everyone is tweeting related to that hashtag.
Here are some recent posts: (Notice how users are sharing more and more information about the cause. Not only is awareness being raised but some are engaging themselves in the subject and taking initiative to educate us further. Powerful. Knowing that we hold devices in our hands that enable us to absorb all of this content in an instant is even more powerful.)
Hashtags also allow us to count the tweets the #talkshit hashtag is in – check out hashtags.org to track impact.
Powerful Communication: Twitter is undoubtedly a powerful way to communicate. But it’s worth noting that TV media picked up this story and I learned about it on The Hour with George Strombolopoulous. Yes, I saw this on TV, but I forwarded it to my wife on Facebook – and surely someone else will see my post and the hashtag I told her about. And hopefully that cycle continues. Exactly what we want to happen is happening, and it is happening within minutes. Literally!
Literally… Within minutes of my Facebook post, my wife texted me from her iPhone to ask what that post was on her Facebook wall (I don’t always write “shit” on her wall, so she felt compelled to ask what I was up to). I replied. Now she knows. And you can consider awareness raised.
Multiply the “cycle” by the millions and millions of others that are “tweeting”, “liking”, Youtube’ing, or just watching plain old TV. Don’t roll your eyes yet. Think about how limited we were 10 years ago. We might have caught this message in a Newspaper if we missed the 30-second ad on TV, right? Talk about inefficient communication! Now we zap messages to each other with devices the size of credit cards.
Implications for marketers in Health Care: Read above. 🙂