This Tiny Facebook Change Helped ALS Ice Bucket Challenge Go Crazy Viral - a podcast by Jay Baer

If you haven't seen your friends douse themselves in ice to support ALS research yet, you're probably living under a rock. 

The ALS Ice Bucket challenge has raised over $13.3 million (compared to $1.7 million last year) and has over 260,000 new donors.

Why is the ice bucket challenge so effective? 2 reasons:

1) It plays on the power of video, which is much more visceral and experiential than text or photo could ever be.
2) It happened concurrently with the new Facebook update that now allows videos to autoplay in your news feed.

The other important reason this challenge has succeeded is that it wasn't ALS who asked people to dump ice on their heads, it's friends. And while we may not all have a personal connection to ALS, we do have personal connections to our colleagues and friends so we want to support the cause in their honor.

This is a lesson that all businesses, not just non-profits can learn from: Social media is about people, not logos, and it's the individual connectivity that makes campaigns successful.

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SPROUT SOCIAL SHOUT OUT

Today's Sprout Social shout out is a three-part challenge to Sally Hogshead (http://twitter.com/sallyhogshead), author of the new book, How the World Sees You (http://www.amazon.com/How-World-Sees-... Rory Vaden (http://twitter.com/rory_vaden), best-selling author of Take the Stairs (http://www.southwesternconsulting.com... and Jess Ostroff (http://twitter.com/jessostroff), Managing Editor at Convince & Convert and Director of Calm at Don't Panic Management (http://dontpanicmgmt.com). 

You have 24 hours to complete the ice bucket challenge and/or donate $100 to ALS research!

OUR SPONSORS

Candidio (http://candidio.com), a simple and affordable video production company. Follow @candidio on Twitter. 

Sprout Social (http://sproutsocial.com), a social media management and analytics company that Jay uses for much of his social media every day. Follow @sproutsocial on Twitter.

ABOUT JAY TODAY

Jay Today is a video podcast with 3-minute lessons and commentary on business, social media and digital marketing from New York Times best-selling author and venture capitalist Jay Baer. Join Jay daily for insights on trends, quick tips, observations and inspiration at http://bit.ly/JayToday.

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