The daily flood of social content

On the other hand, we've seen a handful of social causes reach the masses and drive collective action, without corporate advertising budgets. Instead, they had legions of people sharing the message with everyone else, thus cutting through the digital ad clutter. These social causes succeeded, not in spite of social media, but because of it.

However, not many social causes get there. Many still struggle for more awareness. With all the advances in social technology, shouldn't there be new solutions to help these rest of these important causes too?

In the month of September, a few social causes, agencies and my team at SAYS.my came together to try something new.

We imagined, if enough people started sharing social causes via socialmedia, it would get the ball rolling for them, and help them reach more people, and drive more action.

We did 3 things:

• We selected social causes which already have digital campaigns set up for them, many of which were the result of pro-bono work done for them by advertising agencies.
• We recruited social media users from SAYS.my's core business: A community of over 360,000 social media users who work with brands to share their advertising campaigns.
  
• We invited these social media users to select social causes they cared about, and share their content across social media. Incentives to share came from RM100,000 worth of cash and prizes donated by SAYS.my

We launched this platform under the name, "Social Good 2.0". http://says.my/social-good

In the first 6 weeks, we drove 42,500 social media users to volunteer to spread the word for these social causes, driving over 183,000 unique visitors to over 30 participating NGOs and grassroot movements, including WWF, Unicef, SPCA, UndiLah!, GreenLung, and more. Many of them had their web traffic more than double. The press picked up on the movement, with NTV7, Bernama, the Malay Mail, 8TV, and BFM chipping in valuable coverage to the "Social Good 2.0" platform.

This experiment successful for all of us involved, and we're already in the process of integrating it into a sustainable, reliable platform for social causes to get volunteers to help them share their cause across social media.

However, this is just a small step towards the future of CSR in a social media world. There can be more. As the consumer behavior and media trends evolve more quickly, marketers can help social causes embrace new ways of reaching out. This is an opportunity for marketers and brands to even rally together as an industry, and innovate on how we do CSR, to ensure our efforts deliver even more impact in the age of social media.