Want To Do Something Good On Twitter? Chances Are You Won’t Manage.

Some of you may be aware that today is the World Environment Day so we should probably try to pay more attention to green issues today than we usually do. I know that I myself is not that eco-friendly person as I keep forgetting to unplug my laptop for the night (and I guess the fact that I feel very much guilty about it in the morning does not change anything) but I still think that today is just the right day to try and do something for a greener life – at least for one day.

Unfortunately, if your first idea is blogging or tweeting of how important it is to save energy or turn the water off when brushing teeth, you might be surprised as social media world does not seem to be too eco-friendly and this is a huge disappointment for me.

The thing is that about two weeks ago I covered here on Profy a great initiative by United Nations Environment Programme that seemed to be easily achievable and exactly the type of initiative that must get tons of attention from the blogosphere and social media users. But now that the deadline for the goal is here, it looks like I just have to certify a failure.

The idea was simple: the UN organization appeared on Twitter and in order to draw attention to their goals from Twitter users, they have offered to plant a tree for every new Twitter user who follows their Twitter account before the World Environment Day. The goal did not sound very ambitious to me: they wanted to gather 100 thousand users and plant 100 thousand trees.

And since all it takes is following their account (which is free and only involves a minute of one’s time or so) and the number of users already on Twitter is huge, this really seemed like an easily achievable goal. Yet I decided to keep an eye on their account to see what results they achieve – actually hoping to see a huge number of people way over 100 thousand followers.

Now imagine my surprise and disappointment when I now see mere 9,429 followers. So it’s ten times less trees than they planned to plant for Twitter users. I don’t know how it could happen: I saw some of my followers were pretty enthusiastic about the idea and chose to retweet it and share it with their followers as well. That reaction made me quite enthusiastic but I guess it should have taken Oprah to mention it for UNEP to reach their far from ambitious goal on Twitter.

Which makes me think that while social media is a good tool and some creative marketing people know how to use it right to ensure viral growth for whatever it is that they promote, sometimes it just does not work. Unfortunately even the best of purposes can be left virtually unnoticed without an extra push here. I am probably too idealist but I am disappointed because I hoped that collective efforts could easily turn the goal into reality.