How Social Media Can Save Lives, Part 2: Haiti
Amanda Cey | January 14, 2010By now, everyone’s heard about the devastating earthquake in Haiti: as we write this, over 100,000 are feared dead. We posted on Tuesday about how social media can save lives, and suddenly, we’re given the opportunity to witness it in action. According to CNN, a fundraising campaign done solely through text messages and networking sites like Twitter and Facebook has raised more than $3 million for the Red Cross’s relief work in Haiti. Mass text messages went out on various carriers last night, urging users to text “HAITI” to 90999 in order to donate $10 to the relief effort, to be added to their phone bill at the end of the month. IPhone developer Justin Williams jumpstarted the idea of Mac and IPhone developers decided to donate a day’s worth of sales to Haitian relief efforts. He tweeted his idea, blogged about it, and got a bunch of developers behind him. The result? IndieRelief, where companies and individual developers can choose an organization for a day’s worth of sales to go to.
The crisis in Haiti is heartbreaking, but it’s wonderful to see the tools we use to talk about our lives and promote our business to be used to spread widespread good in this way. With the types of social networks we have in place worldwide, it hardly takes any effort to mobilize millions of people, and that’s an amazing thing.
For more information and updates on Haiti, click here.
As more evidence of the reach of social media, we leave you with some TwitPics of Haiti, taken by @CarelPedre and @MarvinAdy. And if you have any more information on relief efforts through social media or otherwise, please share!
Thank you Amanda for posting this article. It is easy to feel compassion and pity for the people of Haiti, but truth be told, those sentiments do little to HELP. The power of Social Media has brought raw video, images and stories to us and we need to use that power to spread the news on what can be done to provide donations, prayers and resources in their time of need. This is not a Twitter trend of the day and we need to be spreading support, not just pictures and news, consistently as the people of Haiti grieve and begin the long road to rebuilding. I believe all of us, as Social Media beacons, are channels for these messages and bear some sort of responsibility to retweet and post to those who may not know what they can do to help.