This week's blog post will focus on the #nomakeupselfie, an example of how powerful social media can be.
The #nomakeupselfie started trending in the UK on March 18, 2014 when women started posting pictures of themselves without makeup on Twitter and Facebook.
This trend evolved organically into a cancer awareness theme and the selfie posters pledged to donate to cancer charities.
Cancer Research UK jumped on the trend immediately by responding with: ''Thousands of you are posting #cancerawareness #nomakeupselfie pictures and many have asked if the campaign is ours... It's not but we love that people want to get involved!'' on their Google+ page.
Cancer Research UK set up a number to text for donations and in less than seven days, they have raised over £8 million ($13,200,800 USD) for cancer research in Britain. This 'organically grown' campaign made a huge impact on social media and has been getting attention in national media.
According to Adweek, ''Author Laura Lippman apparently started the trend to support actress Kim Novak, who was criticized at the Oscars.''
From this, the hashtag #breastcancerawareness and donation links to Cancer Research U.K. were added to the selfie tweets.
A rep for the Cancer Research U.K. group was quoted saying ''It's brillant it's raising so much money. It's totally unexpected because it wasn't something we planned.''
Dr. Harpal Kumar, chief executive of Cancer Research UK, said: ''We've been overwhelmed by the support people have been showing us through the #nomakeupselfie trend.'' She goes on to say that Cancer Research UK does not receive any government funding for their research so its phenomenal that the public is so being so generous by enabling them to fund critical research that could not be funded six days ago.
This tweet from @CR_UK was posted on March 21 in response to all of the support of the #nomakeupselfie.
Although the trend and campaign have received a lot of criticism for lacking substance and purpose, the money that Cancer Research UK has raised doesn't lie. I think it is very cool that women everywhere are inspired to take a no makeup selfie and donate to charity at the same time; its a great cause!
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