A recent article in Marketing Week profiles Coca Cola’s new advertising strategy (emphasis ours):

Speaking at the Guardian Changing Advertising Summit, [Coke's Jonathan] Mildenhall says Coca Cola’s Content 2020 strategy aims to help its portfolio of brands gain a “disproportional share of popular culture”.

He says: “All advertisers need a lot more content so that they can keep the engagement with consumers fresh and relevant, because of the 24/7 connectivity. If you’re going to be successful around the world, you have to have fat and fertile ideas at the core.”

Coca-Cola wants consumer feedback to shape the creativity of the business and no longer relies on traditional agencies for ideas.

Instead, it is adopting a more collaborative approach through crowdsourcing, fans on Facebook and Twitter, and working directly with artists and the music and film industry to create content through storytelling.

We’ve written about Coke’s innovative and viral Happiness Machine in the past. Now, it appears that Coke is taking this one step further and declaring that content will be at the core of their advertising strategy, and no longer an experimental sideline.

Check out the video below where the narrator explains the change, “The purpose of content excellence is the create ideas so contagious, they cannot be controlled.” He later continues, “The conversation model we have developed begins with brand stories. These brand stories create liquid and linked conversations. These liquid and linked ideas provoke conversations. Then, we need to act and react to those conversations 365 days a year.”

What Coke is outlining here is a sophisticated social media plan. Notice that it doesn’t emphasize tactics or simply measures of activity and say “we shall tweet 5.5 times per day with the intention of driving traffic to our website.” It’s takes a higher, humanistic road, harnessing the power of storytelling, connecting with real people and hearing their stories.

Of course, Coke is still doing traditional advertising to compliment this effort. The 35 short videos made for the 2012 Superbowl prove it. They are, however, entirely re-thinking their marketing strategies in light of social technology-driven attention shifts. It’s fascinating to observe the world’s biggest brands recognize that social media presents them a huge opportunity, and one that they must approach in an entirely different manner than traditional advertising.

Follow The Guardian Changing Advertising Summit.

Follow Coke’s Doc Pemberton, the inventor of Coca-Cola

Chipotle provides an excellent example of how a brand can stand for something. We know that consumers want you to stand for something. It doesn’t have to be breast cancer, poverty, or hunger. It can be as simple as food with integrity.

What other brands do you see effectively incorporating causes into their social marketing efforts?

As Part of Ad Age’s American Consumer Project, they most recently looked at cause marketing and charitable giving trends in different county segments. An incredible stat included in their data:

We cited a figure that 83% of Americans say they wish brands would support causes, and 41% have bought a product because it was associated with a cause.

Do we need any more proof than this that brands should start harnessing the power of meaningful causes to reach consumers? Think of it this way: do people love Google and Wikipedia more or less for participating in a black out to protest SOPA? Aside from the amusing responses coming from the less clued-in crowd, the vast majority of people respect these companies for taking a stand and are supportive of their efforts to stop Internet censorship.

What is your brand’s cause?

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In other amazing news, our friend Amit Gupta has found a match. We are so grateful for all that the Dragonfly community and beyond has done to spread the word about the need for more South Asian bone marrow donors. We’ve done so much, and there’s still so much left to do. Onward!

The following is adapted from a speech given by Vineet Singal, leader and advocate for 100KCheeks, at the 2011 INK Conference.

The 100KCheeks Team

Many of you know the story of Amit Gupta, a 32 year old entrepreneur that was recently diagnosed with Leukemia.  Under the guidance of Stanford Professor Jennifer Aaker (co-author of The Dragonfly Effect), I have had the privilege of heading an organization aimed at helping people like Amit; people in need of a bone marrow transplantation. We are a team of 12 inexperienced but infectiously enthusiastic and passionate college students at Stanford. Our goal: bank 100,000 people into the bone marrow registry in one year.  We call ourselves One Hundred Thousand Cheeks (100KCheeks).

About two months ago,100K Cheeks began helping Amit to register more South Asians in the United States and India.  This was not only a call to arms to uncover a match for Amit, but also to help increase the odds of other South Asians in need of a bone marrow transplant.  The current odds for people of South Asian descent of finding a compatible bone marrow donor are 1 in 20,000.

Through almost a year of trying to make headway on increasing these odds, we discovered something really critical: the immense power of a personal story.  We realized that people were not as motivated by the need of thousands, but rather the story of one.  Our logic was simple.  In focusing on helping to amplify the efforts of individual patients looking for a match, we would in turn be helping others.

As a group, 100KCheeks was able to help add tens of thousands of new donors to the US national registry by working with individual patients and their families. Retrospectively, we questioned: what separated campaigns that were successful? What truly distinguished them? What made people look and what made them take action? From our work, we learned three important lessons.

ONE: Cultivate Optimism

Cancer is a word that elicits so many emotions and thoughts; most of them negative. Yet we know it is hope that truly motivates people to act.  This is a problem that many campaigns face: how to move people into action when the issue at hand can be so depressing?  We decided to build a campaign that revolved around fun, hopefulness, and humor.  For Amit’s campaign, that wasn’t hard because those attributes are a part of who Amit is (here is a picture to prove it). Emphasizing humor over tragedy, empathy over pity, hope over guilt was extremely important in creating a successful campaign.

TWO: Design to Enable Action

As a group, we realized that it was important to spell out to people how they can help, while also making it easy for them to do so. While signing up to be a donor was simple, running a drive was a little more complicated. We got so many requests from people who wanted to run a bone marrow drive but simply didn’t know how or where to start. Nicole and Siddhanth, two members of the 100KCheeks team, created a website called Drive in a Box.  This platform was essentially a simple instructional manual for running an Amit-specific bone marrow drive, involving 6 easy steps: Step 1 Find a place; Step 2 Recruit some volunteers; Step 3 Advertise and so on. For each step it provided resources, cut and paste letters to send out to potential donors, and tips on how to run an effective drive. We wanted to make it is as easy as possible for people to run a drive, to make a difference. We launched the site in a week, and within a day over 30 people around the country were using it to run bone marrow drives.  Simplicity was key in moving people to act.

THREE: Harness Networks

After implementing the first two steps, we focused on harnessing social networks and media outlets to spread the word. By pushing Amit’s story through the Social Media stratosphere, hashtags #ISwabbedforAmit and #4Amit achieved 100,000,000 impressions on Twitter, and a video describing Amit’s story had over 200,000 views on YouTube.

Through perseverance and the power of the individual story, we were also able to connect with Traditional Media outlets; Amit’s story was covered by Sanjay Gupta, NBC, The Huffington Post, just to name a few.

Through persistent optimism, designing for others, and harnessing networks, over 1200 people signed up to conduct drives. Be the Match, the largest bone marrow registry in the US, told us “they had never seen anything like it”, and had to hire extra staff in order to accommodate the flux of incoming registrants.  Online registrations for marrow donors in the US tripled; over 20,000 people requested a cheek swab kit for Amit, and over 40,000 people worldwide were registered.  Through this effort, we completed our goal of swabbing 100,000 cheeks…it was incredible.

And what is Amit’s status? The truth is that as of today Amit is still searching for a match.  But, those 40,000+ people who registered for him are already helping others.  Furthermore, Amit still has a chance, and he needs your help.  I ask you to be a part of his search and register as a donor by visiting the Be the Match website.

There are patients who need a match that contact 100KCheeks every week.  As a group, we have therefore asked ourselves how could we revolutionize the process of finding a bone marrow donor?  We wanted to make everything we did for Amit possible for any patient.  Using the three design principles mentioned earlier, we are on our way to achieving this goal in the form of a website, The Marrow Tree, that will launch on New Years Day 2012. We also invite you to visit the site and sign up on our mailing list.

This year, our goal for 100KCheeks is to register a million people, and we need your help to accomplish this.  Help us recruit them. Let Amit’s story be our guiding light.  Let his story be our call to action.  Let his story be a strong affirmation of our belief that we, on our own, can truly save lives and change the world.

All it takes is a simple cheek swab.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Stories like Kmart’s Secret Santa have been popping up all over local and national news networks, spreading rapidly across Facebook and Twitter. When it feels like the only thing we hear on the news anymore is that our economy is tanking, it’s not surprising that an uplifting story is well received and shared. But why has this particular story won the hearts and minds of so many?

One thing is for sure: it’s not about the amount of money donated. Kmart conducts contests all the time, such as this one, that give away much larger sums than the anonymous Kmart donors. We don’t, however see these contests or their winners covered on the evening news.

The difference between a corporate contest and these random acts of kindness can be summed up in one word: authenticity. Being authentic is as simple as being genuine, open, and clear. When a stranger goes into a Kmart to anonymously pay for someone else’s Christmas presents, we sense that this act of giving comes from a place of authentic generosity. And just like The 93 Dollar Club, one small act of kindness can inspire people and lead to positive ripple effects which allow people to do a little more giving from the heart this year.

What acts of authenticity have inspired you this holiday season?

We’ve posted about Amit Gupta before. Twice, actually.

Just like Sameer and Vinay, Amit Gupta is young, South Asian, and in need of a bone marrow transplant.

In these posts, we’ve written about the fact that South Asians are underrepresented in the bone marrow registry. What we’ve never explored is why South Asians are underrepresented in the bone marrow registry.

Earlier this week, Sadia Latifi over at GOOD wrote an excellent article on her own experience trying to get people in the South Asian community (including her family) to enter themselves into the bone marrow registry. She writes:

 I joined the national registry more than a year ago after hearing another one of those sad stories: That of Maya Chamberlain, a 4-year-old girl with a rare blood disease. I sent for my free registration kit from the National Bone Marrow Program, swabbed my cheek, mailed it back, and forgot all about it. (I was not a match.) Over the phone a few weeks later, I casually mentioned my registration to my mom. She freaked out, telling me (incorrectly) that the process was dangerous and (troublingly) that I first needed to look out for myself. Her reaction bothered me, but I chalked it up to anxious mothering.

Was this anxious mothering? As Latifi later found, this attitude is common in the South Asian community. When her brother and parents refused to register as bone marrow donors, she contacted recruiters at bone marrow donor organizations to ask why this might be. These recruiters noted that resistance to entering the bone marrow registry is oftentimes the result of ignorance–people think that it is painful or puts the donor at risk, when in reality it is akin to donating blood.

But this does not get to the heart of the problem. There is no evidence that South Asians, as as group, know less about bone marrow donation than the general population. So ignorance cannot explain why South Asians, as a group, are underrepresented in the bone marrow registry. The article continues with insight from Ali Khan, co-founder of South Asian Marrow Association of Recruiters:

“Diversity can be divisive,” says Khan, who’s heard from North Indians who don’t want to donate to South Indians, Muslims who don’t want to help non-Muslims, and vice versa. “Our drives in the beginning used to be so divided regionally,” Khan says. “The response was always, ‘Why should I help somebody who doesn’t come from my own region?’”

That attitude speaks to lingering effects of the Indian subcontinent’s long, complicated history. When India was a group of kingdoms, “they were always warring and fighting with each other,” Khan says. “India has never been a nation until now, and the old prejudices have persisted.

Furthermore, Latifi reports that a large portion of South Asian who are called on to donate once they are identified as a match refuse to go through with the process. Usually because the individual registered for a particular friend or family member and is not interested in donating to someone else down the line.

If resistance to donating bone marrow is the result of thousands of years of regional history, what can be done to effect change?

Understanding the source if this resistance is an excellent start. Humanistic design thinking tells us to focus on the person we are trying to help. This may sound easy, but oftentimes, business leaders, nonprofit directors, and political officials draft a “plan of action” that is finalized before any action is taken. Getting everyone on board is paramount; deviation from the plan is discouraged.

While a non-human-centered approach might simply create the goal of getting more South Asians in the bone marrow registry, those who have taken the time to understand the community know that a more nuanced approach is necessary. According to Carol Gillespie, executive director of the Asian American Donor Program, “We can’t just educate the donor. We have to educate the entire family, and that is very unique to the South Asian culture.”

How do you think we can go about educating entire families about entering the bone marrow registry?

Andy’s Note: This guest post was written by Toby Branz, great Friend of the Dragonfly

 In an adult life filled with serious responsibilities and high expectations, it’s easy to forget that we once saw the world as our playground.  As children, we just wanted to have fun.

Guess what?  We still do!  There are plenty of ideas out there about why we engage so readily through fun.  As we discuss in The Dragonfly Effect, one important and possibly surprising element of successful social movements is the fueling effect of fun.

Game designer and author Raph Koster wrote, “Fun is just another word for learning”.  Positive psychology explains fun in terms of flow. Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of involvement, energized focus, and success in the process of the activity.  Neuropsychology boils down the ideas of flow, learning, fun and addiction into one word: dopamine.  The release of dopamine is associated with pleasure, motivation, concentration, learning, reinforcement, and addiction.  Every time an activity releases a jolt of dopamine, you connect that activity with a pleasurable or fun feeling, which motivates you to do that activity again and again.  And finally, life experience and common sense tells us that everyone loves to have a good time.

Consider the success of Volkswagen’s viral marketing campaign dubbed the fun theory.  In one video, Volkswagen converts the stairs at a train station into a giant piano, resulting in 66% more commuters choosing the stairs over the escalator.  In another, the Volkswagen crew wires a regular trash can with motion-activated depth sound effects, so tossing in some trash yields a dramatic whistle and a loud “splat”.  People are so delighted that they even start picking up other people’s garbage to experience the fun again.  The videos quickly went viral, and the stair video and trash can video now have over 19 million combined views on Youtube.   The campaign infuses fun into everyday activities to encourage people to do the right thing.

Don’t underestimate the power of fun.  It can drastically increase your audience’s willingness to engage with your company or non-profit, as we can see with Silversmith Vineyard’s inventive new Crowd-Made Wine Project.  On the Silversmith Vineyards Facebook page, anyone who “likes” the winery’s page can instantly participate in the wine-making process, contributing to such decisions as when to press the wine, when to rack the wine, and what type of barrels to use for aging.  The wine-making process becomes a game, and anyone can be a player.  Every step of the process is explained in clear, short videos posted to the Facebook page by Matt and Tom Johnson of Silversmith Vineyard.  In this way, even those of us who aren’t wine buffs or part-time sommeliers can enjoy playing the wine-making game.   ”We can tell through the comments we get that some people have lots of winemaking experience, but for some it’s clear this is their first rodeo,” Tom says.  Matt and Tom are, of course, hoping the crowd will eventually want to buy this wine, in one or two years after the entire process is finished.  ”We will open up and pre-sell first to our Facebook participants,”  says Matt. ”This is the first time I’ve heard of a winery inviting outside participation in crafting a wine… This may be the best use of social media in the wine world.  Tom and Matt do their own Facebook posts and tweets.  It’s just the two of them taking on this crowd-sourced wine project.  It doesn’t get any more authentic or real than that.”In her Huffington Post blog, The WineFashionista, Mary Orlin writes:

Of course, authenticity is an integral part of engaging your audience.  If you’re not truly moved by the story you’re telling, no one else will be, either.  Tom and Matt state their objective clearly in the first video, “We just want you to like our Facebook page, participate in the process, and have as much fun making wine as we do.“  Sounds authentic to me.

“We had 150 to 200 Facebook fans when we started this,” says Matt.  Now they have over 800 fans.  ”We didn’t have Twitter at all.”  Now Silversmith has 457 followers.  The Johnsons use social media to connect with people by getting them involved in the process. Their end goal is to make wine-making fun, and eliminate the intimidation factor that too often prevents people from understanding the wine world.  It also doesn’t hurt that it’s a lot of fun to watch each video, as Matt chats directly into the camera, and then cast your vote about that particular stage of the wine-making process.

Read Mary Orlin’s excellent full article here.

Now, what action can you take to make your company or non-profit more fun?   Go ahead, take a risk.  Who knows? You might just have some fun yourself.

 

Toby Branz is an opera singer, educator, fun-seeker and all-around talent. You can find her here

“It is not about how differentiated our stuff is, but whether we can make a difference to people.”

This excerpt appeared in End Malaria, a remarkable collaborative effort championed by Seth Godin that I had the privilege to contribute to. For every copy of End Malaria sold, $20 is donated to End Malaria Now ($over $250K raised so far!)

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Design and business once seemed to occupy opposite ends of a spectrum. But in the last 10 years, we’ve seen a growing number of people challenge this assumption. Recent articles on design thinking proliferate – ranging from those that highlight its potential for business to those that warn of its impending decline.

But despite news-cycle driven waxing and waning, the case for adopting a design thinking approach to business is quite simple and clear. Design thinking helps creators get over unintentional biases and misconceptions to create better, more useful things. Time and again, initiatives falter because they’re developed with the host brand, organization, or cause—rather than the target individuals’ needs—foremost in mind.

When deep empathy isn’t applied to guide decision-making, fear of failure exerts influence over decision processes and rapid prototyping is rarely used to solicit quick and early feedback. Design thinking offers tools to address these challenges. It helps creators get into other people’s heads and hearts, understand their needs, and iteratively test alternative approaches to learn how best to fulfill them.

So now we know that design thinking encourages a human-centric orientation, hypotheses testing, and frequent, rapid prototyping. But how do you actually incorporate design thinking into your work?

Here are three ways to get started:

Think Human. Focus on your audience rather than make assumptions about them. What are their goals and dreams? How can you help them achieve them? What do you want them to do? How might they resist? Where are your leverage points that will cause them to act? Don’t rush in with a single solution, though! Test some alternatives, and be prepared to return to square one several times.

Connect with People. Tell stories. Stories are sticky: they bring facts to life and infuse them with context and passion. Physiologically, our brains are hardwired to process stories. Stories organize and orient complex information for us. Psychologically, we need patterns to help us understand the world. Telling stories also increases the chance that your audience will be able to visualize what you are talking about and thus remember it (humans remember 85 or 90 percent of what we see, but less than 15 percent of what we hear). Salient, meaningful messages, however brief, mobilize communities.

Turn Ripples into Waves. Learn from trials. Think critically. Iterate. The right tests—and the subsequent tweaks—can amplify growth. Small details (wording, images, placement of links, etc.) can massively impact your campaign. Use social media tools as a cost-effective way to observe users and refine your approach.

While greater success is a welcome and likely outcome of the application of design thinking, the key to understanding it is to realize that it’s not just about making a product that will sell more. As Umair Haque writes in The New Capitalist Manifesto,  “In the industrial era, firms sought to differentiate products and services. The name of the game was adding perceived value through more elaborate brands, cleverer slogans, or more gripping ads. Difference, in contrast, is not about how differentiated our stuff is, but whether we can make a difference to people, communities, society, and future generations.” If all you want is to differentiate yourself, there are a million tips and tricks out there waiting for you. If you want to work more meaningfully, design thinking will help you lead the way.

If you enjoyed this, you’ll enjoy reading End Malaria, Nicholas Carr’s chapter ‘Build Bridges’ in particular.

Amid economic gloom, the news just gets worse. Last month, the unemployment rate rose in most states (in some cases as high as 11 percent), hitting millions of Americans in their pocketbooks. We also learned that in 2010, one in fifteen Americans slipped below the poverty line. Meanwhile financial giving fell by 11 percent in the past two years, according to Giving USA. How are these facts related? You might think that, with less disposable income at hand, this is a time to further scale back charitable giving.

The opposite is true. When incomes and bonuses decrease, revenues falter, and businesses stumble, it’s more important than ever to give–not necessarily more, but in a way that matters more. When incomes are down and wallets are stretched, the effectiveness of our giving is what really counts.

This means making more meaningful giving decisions. Whether you’re a parent volunteering at your child’s school, a recent college graduate taking an unpaid nonprofit internship, or a technology entrepreneur giving millions to reform public education, think about how to maximize the significance of your gift.

First, transform your giving process from reactive to proactive. Instead of waiting until the holiday season–when mail solicitations flood in from worthy organizations–and making a flurry of gifts because this is the time of year to give, sit down and take stock. Identify your passion, learn about it, and direct your time, mind, and dollars to aligned causes and organizations. Give to what interests or excites you most and make it a long-term affair, rather than a “philanthropic one-night stand.” Actively deciding to give to causes that move you deeply is far more fulfilling than the momentary gratification derived from signing a check and mailing it to a nonprofit about which you know little more than what’s on the brochure they sent you.

But while engaging your passion is important, giving in a vacuum, guided by emotion alone can only get you so far. To make a bigger impact, you also need to shift your giving from sympathetic to strategic. This means doing some work. Not many of us do this–65 percent of all gifts have no research behind them, according to a 2010 Hope Consulting survey. Yet shouldn’t every dollar you give deliver the greatest benefit possible to the people you want to help? It’s hard to have this happen without conducting some research.

So instead of responding to a late night television ad that pulls on your heart strings (and TV marketers and phone solicitation companies sometimes take a huge percentage of every dollar given), tap into the expertise of the hundreds of online nonprofits and funding intermediaries out there. Many do the research, assessment, and measurement for you and connect you to giving opportunities. Giving through trusted intermediaries means that, instead of giving to invisible recipients, you can see how your generosity is used to help an impoverished widow in India start a small business or to buy a computer for a low-income student in Detroit.

Collaborative giving is another way to maximize bang for philanthropic buck. Instead of giving only at your place of worship and being ‘done with your giving’ for the year, create a giving circle with family, friends, or members of your religious community, and learn together about an issue of shared interest. You can pool funds¬-moving from isolated to collaborative-and make joint giving decisions, helping your money go further than it would have if you made a gift alone.

It’s true that the idea of giving when government, corporate, and personal budgets are being slashed might seem counter-intuitive. But in times like these, giving is critical. If charitable funding shrinks, the organizations providing critical services to the unemployed, our children, and our community members may be forced to choose between scaling back their services or reducing their staff–at a time when we need those essential services and dedicated nonprofit employees more than ever. So in the midst of economic turmoil, when everything seems out of control, let’s focus on what we can control–how we express our generosity. We don’t have to give more–just in a way that matters more.

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This post originally appeared here and was written by Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen. Laura is the author of Giving 2.0, which will be released tomorrow. You can learn more about the book by visiting the Giving 2.0 website: http://giving2.com/

For those of you in the Bay Area, there will be a book launch party for Giving 2.0 this Thursday, October 27. More information here.

The power of one man’s story, (and the use of social media to tell his tale), is dominating press articles, mobilizing communities, and spreading hope and awareness around the globe. However, you may be among the 25% of the marketing population who have not heard about Amit Gupta. Amit is a young, South Asian entrepreneur.  Three weeks ago he was diagnosed leukemia. As of today, Amit has 40 days to find a perfect bone marrow donor match.

As marketers, we often think about messaging strategy or what the best call-to-actions are for an advertisement. We face challenges such as determining how to move people down the marketing funnel from “awareness into action.” Sometimes we lower our price or, we improve our product. But for Amit and others in his scenario, there is no magic marketing bullet. We can’t put the product on sale. We can’t use Groupon or Loopt for a group or location-based bone marrow match promotion. Our call-to-action, please tweet and swab, is very straightforward, from the heart, and needed immediately.

As part of the advertising community, we also know the benefit of reaching the right audience at the right time. That said, being the good marketers that we are, we want ask you to get involved in the campaign for Amit.

Our request is simple–we ask that you and your friends take a cotton swab test to see if you are a bone marrow match for Amit Gupta or others. 

For the direct marketers in the group, you’ll notice the sentence above is bold and in italics. That, of course, is another marketing technique we do in attempt to reinforce the primary “ask” of the messaging. We’ve also got one other marketing component to point out—target market. The audience we need to reach is the South Asian or Indian population. If you have media contacts or know any South Asian celebrities or techlebrities, your connections could help Amit get the word out.

To be crystal clear about our message and call to action, we hope you’ll visit bit.ly/swabacheek right now to sign-up on line or www.amitguptaneedsyou.com to find a cotton swab event near you. Your tweets and retweets are working to spread the word. According to Peoplebrowsr, from October 1^st to October 13th, stories about Amit had 4,236 mentions, 2,674 retweets and a total reach of over 13,258,947 people on twitter. Amit’s original post has been Tumbld over 7,300 times. This caught the attention of bloggers, and soon enough, Amit’s story was featured by the likes of Seth Godin, TechCrunch, BoingBoing, Laughingsquid, Flickr, Kottke.org, and Beth Kanter.

As is often the case with news that receives widespread interest in the social mediasphere, the story continued to move upstream. First, CNN Money ran a story, followed by SFGate.com, Ad Age, The Huffington Post, AOL, and The New York Times.

Adding to the media attention regarding Amit’s story has been an incredible amount of organizing. Dozens of individuals have stepped up to organize bone marrow drives in high schools, colleges, and community centers fueled by student-run groups 100K Cheeks and organizations like DoSomething.org. As of 10/1, the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) had 188,181 South Asians registered. Because of social media and your efforts, we’ve had 687 sign-ups online and at college events which is great. But, we have 40 days left to move more of the tweeters into swabbers. Sign ups and swabbing will save lives.

You can find a list of those drives at Amit’s website: http://www.amitguptaneedsyou.com/. If you haven’t already, we urge you to attend one of these events to get swabbed or volunteer. Or, organize a swab drive of your own.  It’s really that easy and The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) and DKMS are dedicated to helping anyone host a drive, and the test only takes a few minutes and a Q-tip-like swab inside the cheek.

In a recent New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell wrote that, “the revolution will not be tweeted.” As we’ve already seen in Amit’s case, it isn’t just a single tweet that creates massive change. It’s a single tweet, followed by a few more, followed by a few thousand more, followed by some blog posts, followed by even more blog posts, followed by mainstream media attention that brings the cause to the people at large. Most importantly, it is a combination of these things followed by real life action. So please, get swabbed or help Amit get the word out today. Amit’s life, and the life of many others, depends on it.

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This post originally appeared Ad Age here and was written by Jennifer and Porter Gale.