Why are women changing their Facebook status to a colour?
January 8th, 2010 by Wendy McAuliffe
If you’re a Facebook user, you may have noticed that women have been changing their Facebook status to a colour over the past day or so. Mine currently reads as ‘black’. It’s been driving men mad, including my husband! So what is it all about?
Well I hope I won’t get shot down for revealing that the colour corresponds to the bra that we’re wearing. It’s all in aid of Breast Cancer Awareness, and has been a beautiful demonstration of how the most simple social media marketing idea can reach epidemic proportions within a matter of hours.
Last night I received the following Facebook message from a female friend of mine:
“Some fun is going on…. just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls no men …. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status… Haha!”
The tone of the message was perfectly executed - it had the desired affect of making me giggle, change my status message, and pass onto my female friends as instructed. I’m not the sort of person to usually participate in chain messages and so this demonstrates how important language remains in social media PR communications. Within minutes of forwarding the message I could see friends of mine getting excited and updating their status messages - I received a number of texts from recipients expressing their enthusiasm for the idea. If it’s possible to sense a ‘buzz’ across Facebook, there was definitely one last night among female users. This morning when I logged into my Facebook Newsfeed, I was greeted with a long list of colour themed status messages.
The Breast Cancer Awareness raising exercise was free and quick to implement, but has been highly effective in terms of reminding people about the cause. It just goes to show that social media PR doesn’t have to be about big budgets, but just a neat idea.
Tags: breast cancer awareness, charity, facebook, Social media, Social networking
January 8th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Well said. I totally agree with you, and all the ridiculousness of those against it, just don’t appreciate the impact that such a little reminder can have globally.
My FB status today is…”My name wonders if it’s possible that yesterday’s color fad, maybe, just maybe… reminded one lady (at least) to do her monthly exam and found something early enough to save her life… if so, it was worth it.”
January 9th, 2010 at 7:12 am
[...] Why Are Women Changing Their Facebook Status To A Colour? | Online An insight into how Breast Cancer Awareness encouraged women to change their Facebook status message to the colour of their bra. [...]
January 9th, 2010 at 6:11 pm
I’m a man and I was wondering what it was. I asked a girl friend of mine about it and she just said ‘girl stuff’. I think breast cancer is way less spoken about than it should be. And taking men into talking about it would surely help meny women in several ways. But now I just disslike the ‘girl stuff’ -stuff a tiny bit more.
January 14th, 2010 at 11:58 pm
It’s bra colours.
January 15th, 2010 at 8:49 pm
I don’t know if this will have the desired effect. I mean, is the goal not to have support from everyone, including men? Is “driving men mad” increasing support?
February 5th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
[...] month I blogged about why women on Facebook were changing their status messages to a colour, which as you now know, was related to a guerilla campaign promoting Breast Cancer [...]