What’s this Facebook status message craze about?
February 5th, 2010 by Wendy McAuliffe
Last 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 Awareness.
Since then, the Facebook status message craze has reached epidemic proportions.
If you’ve missed them, we’ve had:
- My fine is…. - a Facebook group that encouraged users to calculate a fine for their misspent youth (i.e. smoked weed £10), and enter the result in their status message. The group is less than a month old and already has 440,837 members, attracting an astonishing 79,181 members on the first day of opening.
- Celebrity doppelganger week (or month – it seems to have taken on a life of its own) - encourages Facebook users to change their profile picture to that of a celebrity who they’ve been told they look like.
- Urbandictionary.com - Facebook users have been changing their status message to the Urbandictionary.com definition of their name. Mine by the way is “intellectually attractive woman” which I completely agree with! The Urbandictionary.com Facebook group has almost 14,000 members.
Well at least those are the crazes that I’ve picked up on!
So what’s the point? There was a clear agenda to the Breast Cancer Awareness campaign, but not so for the others. So why are they are attracting thousands upon thousands of fans?
The answer, I believe, is a tribal one. As users’ lives become increasingly ingrained in social networks such as Facebook, they feel the need to align themselves with certain tribes. All of the above examples enable an individual to tell more about their personal narrative, be it how naughty they were in their teens, or who people have told them they look like. By participating in these status message crazes, they are managing their online tribal identity.
If this line of thinking interests you, it might be worth checking out the blog of Michael Bayler (who is a client), who has written a lot about consumer identity and the new tribalism.
I’m sure brands will be trying to cash in quick on the Facebook status message craze…so expect more of them…but I don’t suspect the trend will last if every brand jumps on the bandwaggon.
Tags: facebook, michael bayler, Social networking, status message, tribalism, urbandictionary.com