I'm an Activist I Swear

In mid-march #StopKony first started trending on twitter and one of the biggest social networking movements began. Millions of people were talking about the warlord who has been stealing children from poor African villages and turning them into child soldiers, and the half hour video about the matter posted on Youtube by Invisible Children has been viewed over 88 million times to date. There was a Cover the Night campaign started up across North America, where people would go and plaster the streets with wanted posters of the warlord. The campaign started out with huge numbers of supporters, getting word out through sites like twitter and facebook. Places where everyone goes on, and word is easily spread. The downside of those sites is that the word, no matter how important, is also quite easily forgotten on these social media sites. Many of my friends were full to bursting with information and excitement about the Kony campaign, but when April 20th came around (the night of the Cover the Night plan) an underwhelming amount of people participated in the event. This is tying right back to the information age, where people here about a cause, they want to help, but they want results immediately. If the Cover the Night campaign was organized for say 2 weeks after all the news broke, I feel like it would have been much more successful and much more effective. After a month of waiting, no one remembers the "commitment" they had made to bring down this monster. In the day and age where a school shooting can reach millions of ears in five minutes, it isn't advisable to allow these kids to wait around and immerse  themselves in the hundreds of other charities and causes they are subjected too each week. Business strategies need to become hard, fast, and viral, or else they are going nowhere.