Environmental Campaign

In researching companies that utilize digital technologies to promote their environmental campaigns, it becomes apparent that Greenpeace is one of the main protagonists using social media to its advantage. In campaigning for the environment, non-profit companies are inherently the major players in these types of campaigns. Other companies that utilize social media effectively for their respective causes are Amnesty International and Oceana.

Amnesty International apparently send tweets to members of Congress attempting to obtain pledges to support their causes. This can prove quite effective when the 100,000+ followers of Amnesty Int. are essentially reading these tweets and monitoring the then public response from the Congress members. This puts pressure on the member of Congress. Amnesty Int. also utilizes other Social Media channels such as Facebook to gain support and offer resources for those that wish to join their causes.

Oceana focuses more on photo-rich content over social media to spark support for their causes which mainly consist of, you guessed it, ocean-related sustainability and issues. They provide links in photos that when shared multiple times over Facebook generate more hits in a shorter amount of time than a non-digital approach could possibly offer. Photos also play to people's emotions which earns them more support than a plain-text document etc.

Greenpeace uses a similar approach to Amnesty International in using Social Media to call out corporations or antagonists to it's causes. The "Arctic Ready" campaign, calling out Shell over social media by impersonating their PR practitioners, is an effective way to raise awareness for their motives. I also saw this technique used during the huge BP oil spill scandal, when a person that remained anonymous created a fake Twitter account posing as BP and gained exponentially more followers than the authentic BP account!