Blog #4 - Diet Friendly Cheesecake

On a diet? Craving something sweet?

I'm a yes to both of those questions! 

Enjoy my baking how-to "vlog" for a diet friendly cheesecake recipe...

Click here for a link to the original recipe

My DC Photo Shoot

Did some random beauty shots around the campus - Yay Durham College!

Blog 3

The Impact of Social Media on Organ Donation, Thanks to Helene Campbell

Helene Campbell is likely someone you’ve seen on TV in the last year. She underwent a double lung transplant in Toronto in the spring of 2012 and became a international sensation through her use of Social Media to raise awareness on organ donor registrations.

At age 20, Helene was diagnosed with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) and required a double lung transplant. In the Globe and Mail article titled Transplant Hope – Use Social Media to Save Lives, Helene writes how this diagnosis changed her life, and the financial impact this transplant had on her and her family. To raise money, her friends started a website for Helene, called A Lung Story, and raised money to help cover the costs of her family’s move from Ottawa to Toronto for care.

This website was just the beginning to how Helene, her friends, family and her story helped become a social media sensation and helped do a world of good to raise awareness and registrations to be an organ donor.

According to the Globe and Mail article, A Lung Story quickly gained attention, and after local Ottawa media coverage, attention and traffic increased to over 30,000 views in just a three month period since it was created. The website was not only telling Helene’s story, but encouraging site visitors to register to be an organ donor. As traffic and interest was growing in Canada and abroad, A Lung Story added links to Canadian and international registries for organ donation. But the best was yet to come.

Seeing the potential to spread the message even further, a video was posted on A Lung Story in January 2012, encouraging the public to use social media to contact Justin Bieber and ask him to help raise organ donation awareness through his massive social media presence and followers. 

The video itself began to garner attention, and according to Campbell’s article, resulted in 326 donor registrations that day alone (about six times the daily average of new donor registrations).

Justin Bieber, with his 16.5 million Twitter followers, responded days later and Helene’s story was suddenly everywhere thanks to social media – her website got over 30,000 page views from over 122 countries in 24 hours as per Campbell’s article. That alone is a testament to the power of social media to spread the message.

But social media was not done with Helene Campbell’s story yet – culminating with Helene making an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in February 2012. Again, organ donations registrations were impacted with over 700 new donor registrations on that day. On her website, Helene has a page titled "Helene's story in the Media" which lists countless references to her story and her campaign. This level of visibility and public interest would never have been possible without her tapping into social media and using this tool to communicate.

Since then Helene’s website continues to use social media to increase awareness on becoming an organ donor. Presently her Twitter feed has over 16,000 followers, and A Lung Story’s Facebook page is highly active. In summer 2012, Helene began a new social media fueled campaign called Be An Organ Donor Dance Challenge - challenging the public to create and share dance videos where they ask their friends and families to register to be an organ donor and to give blood – again using social media as a tool to get people from across the continent and even the world to communicate and share in a common positive cause.

I think that Helene and her supporters are pretty brave and a savvy folk – brave enough to share her struggle in it’s entirely with the online world, and savvy enough to know how to tap into social media to bring enormous awareness to a worthy cause. Thanks to Helene’s blogs, her Twitter challenges to celebrities, her engaging presence on Twitter and Facebook, Helene truly caught social media’s attention. It’s refreshing to see such online tools, so frequently used for very mundane and perhaps self centered purposes, be used to make such an impact on organ donor registration and raising awareness to such a broad and far reaching audience.

Well done, Helene! Now, readers, let's use social media one last time to prove Helene's efforts have yielded results. Click on the link below to register in Ontario to be an organ donor.

https://beadonor.ca/

Website or Experience?

“Social networks aren’t about Web sites. They’re about experiences.”

Mike DiLorenzo

I agree with Mike DiLorenzo’s comments regarding Social Networks being about the experience rather than the actual website.

From where I sit, the users of Social Networks – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc – aren’t using these networks en masse because the websites are interesting or flashy or even very engaging. These websites are merely the vehicle to the Social Media experience. I log onto Facebook at least once a day not to surf the website, but to experience and be witness to the posts of my friends via the website. The site allows me to experience a little slice of their day - to catch a glimpse of my brother’s trip to Berlin, to experience the anticipation of my old high school friend who is running in the Toronto Waterfront Marathon, and so forth. It’s like a quick phone call to say hello – and that’s what keeps me coming back for more. “What’s everyone up to today” I subconsciously think as I log on each morning. That is a rewarding experience. Mind you, there are days where I scroll through Facebook and think, “God my friends are boring! Post something to entertain me!”

Furthermore, the very nature of these Social Networks lend each user a unique experience – my network of connections on Facebook will be different than the next person’s, and therefore each of us will have a unique experience each time we log in. The Social Network websites are not unique for each user – that’s not what keeps us coming back. It’s the experience we get from visiting the site and connecting with our online world that has created millions of users for these networks.

In some ways, I also feel these Social Networks also lend themselves to a new generation of “keeping up with the Jones’” – a whole other type of experience. By scrolling through updates or reading the latest tweet in your network you can’t help but compare the quality of your shared experience. Was your latest tweet or shared photo as creative or original as that of your network of contacts? Do your posts on the Social Network make your life seem exciting, one of a kind or exotic? I admit when my friends are posting photos of their third trip to Europe this year, I can’t help but think about how mundane my latest “Is it Friday yet?” post must be in comparison. A plain old website doesn’t bring about such shallow feelings in me. For example, if I saw a website about fancy exotic vacations, I generally don’t think about how my last vacation stacked up. A website is more anonymous – like Hollywood. It’s so far removed from your reality you know it’s never going to happen. In comparison, when you look at the content of the Social Network, you’re looking at the experiences of your peers, friends and family – people of similar backgrounds and opportunities – a far more realistic experience.

In short, I agree with DiLorenzo – a Social Network website is far more than just the sum of its parts. It’s truly about the experience one has when using these sites.

Citation:

Mindjumpers.com, (July 25, 2012). How to Uncover Negative Feedback on Your Facebook Page. Retrieved on October 14, 2012 from http://www.mindjumpers.com/blog/2012/07/negative-feedback

Monsternetworking.com (June 18, 2012). Twitter is Serious, Are You Serious About Using it? Retrieved on October 14, 2012 from http://www.monsterworking.com/2012/06/18/twitter-is-serious-are-you-sereious-about-using-it