Last week my fellow blogUT writer, Julia, wrote a great piece dispelling the alleged evils of social media. This week, I’m continuing that thought.

As Julia mentioned, social media has given us all the opportunity to keep in touch with our friends, reconnect with lost ones, and even share relevant (and well, sometimes not so relevant) information with each other with a simple 140 character tweet. More than anything else, Twitter and other social media tools lets us “learn about and interact with the world in real time, and in a way we never imagined”.

I’d like to take this one step further. Not only has social media given us this chance to connect with each other on a one-on-one basis, but it has also opened the way for a much more far-reaching and collective purpose. Case in point? Tweetsgiving. Never heard of it? Let me give you the low down.

Tweetsgiving was started in 2008 by the non-profit organization, Epic Change, as a campaign of gratitude. Using the power of social media, they were able to raise a whopping $10 000 in as little as 48 hours to build a classroom in Arusha, Tanzania. That’s ten thousand dollars in two days. And today, students there are interacting and engaging in the online conversation that’s happening all around the world…something that was once unheard of! This year, starting from November 24 to 26, they’re continuing that celebration of gratitude asking people to simply express their thanks using social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Such a simple concept. And yet, because of the far reach of the Internet and social media, the results are incredible.

Far from being evil then, social media is actually being used to harness social good in our community and beyond…and Tweetsgiving is but one example of the inspiring campaigns and movements that are all taking place online. So I guess like everything else, social media is not a matter of good or evil, but a matter of how you choose to use it.

** To find our more about Tweetsgiving, visit tweetsgiving.org

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Events, Philanthropy, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.