Yesterday was Pink T-shirt Day, a day of solidarity and protest against bullies and bullying. I wore green. Oops.
I support the spirit of this day but it wasn’t on my radar this year. I find that odd as I’m well read and pay attention to what’s going on around me. In fact, the first I heard about it was a Facebook update from my friend Natalie about being bullied into wearing pink and then, later in the day, a poster on the community board at Starbucks.
So what was wrong with me? Or was there something wrong with this community building campaign?
It may have been a two-fold problem. First, I’m certain that radio & TV covered the story. Now that I go looking for the information I see that The Vancouver Sun did I piece but there’s nothing recent turning up on the websites for the CBC, QMFM and a half-dozen other radio stations. Even if they all talked about Pink T-Shirt Day, I might not have tuned in at the right time. So, what about the campaign’s online presence?
Using the search phrase “pink t-shirt bullying” I couldn’t find an offical presence on Facebook or Twitter. YouTUBE showed up this great flash mob video which I remember watching a month ago.
The trouble is I wasn’t clear from the video when I should wear a pink shirt to support the campaign. And watching it once, a month before the event wasn’t enough to stick it in my permanent memory. These sorts of marketing only work when the news finds you at the right time and with repetition. Remember Erik Qualman’s point in his book Socialnomics that consumers no longer look for news, the news finds the consumer.
Could it have been a matter of timing? A campaign ramped up too late to reach me through the many teachers, parents and childcare givers in my social graph? Or maybe it was my bad for failing to notice the hints around me? My intention here is not to pick on the marketing efforts of the Pink T-Shirt Day team. Rather I want to highlight the importance of timing and the need to include both online and offline marketing in any campaign.
Now, I’m going to mark February 23, 2012 on my calendar so I remember to wear pink next year. I hope you will, too.