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Patients' social media campaign was a breakthrough

Two friends diagnosed with leukemia turned to their social networks to try to save their own lives, and with help from their friends and family, showed just how much can be done in a short period of time. Their methods could easily be replicated to help others.So many things go viral nowadays, many of them not having anything to do with anything serious. But when someone's life is at stake, social
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Two friends diagnosed with leukemia turned to their social networks to try to save their own lives, and with help from their friends and family, showed just how much can be done in a short period of time. Their methods could easily be replicated to help others.

So many things go viral nowadays, many of them not having anything to do with anything serious. But when someone's life is at stake, social media can prove to be more important than ever in efforts to save them.

A Stanford professor brought the friends' project to the attention of the audience at the Web 2.0 expo in San Francisco Wednesday. The business school's Jennifer Aaker presented a slideshow, "Creating Infectious Action: The Dragonfly Effect," that highlighted the effort of one her students, Robert Chatwani.

Chatwani's two close friends, Sameer Bhatia and Vinay Chakravarthy, were in danger of becoming casualties to a disease that claimed nearly 22,000 lives in 2009 and their friends were going to do everything they could to try to prevent that from happening. 

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They concentrated on bone marrow drives, because for most patients, that's the only cure. And because marrow infusions require a "near perfect genetic match," the highest probability for a match lies within a patient's ethnic pool. For Chatwani's friends, that meant South Asians, who comprise only 1 percent of the minorities who comprise only 20 percent of the 7.5 million registrants in the national bone marrow registry. That's a one in 20,000 chance. For Americans of European descent in the registry, there's an 80 percent chance of finding a donor in the registry.

And even though they came from a country with more than 1 billion people, India had no national bone marrow registry.

In the slide, Chatwani explained the path to their action: "Friends got together. We all knew that we needed to do something. What were our options? Do nothing. Do something. Do something SEISMIC. Our simple answer: If the odds were 1 in 20,000, then all we needed to do was ... hold bone marrow drives and register 20,000 South Asians. And then we'll find a match."

Of course, the clock was ticking. They only had two weeks to get this done.

"THE CHALLENGE: We needed to move fast. We needed to scale. We could not fail."

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Methodically, they created a model that could serve other campaigns well. They focused on their goal and formed teams to help each friend. Each team had a leader, a marketing person, someone to drive operations, someone to handle education and a person in charge of regional leads. They built brands: "Help Sameer" and "Help Vinay."

They created form letters that introduced Bhatia and Chakravarthy, and asked recipients to register, spread the word and learn more.

Viral videos for the campaign
Viral videos for the campaignToday

They harnessed social media, using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google Docs, even MySpace. Their strategy built an instant brand and incorporated blogs, videos, widgets, viral email and pledge lists that they coordinated with outlets in traditional media and through their real life connections at universities, work, temples and downtime pursuits.

They made it easy for others to host bone marrow drives, with step-by-step guides, including in the guide banner ads and viral videos. 

The payoff, in those two weeks: 470 bone marrow drives and 24,611 South Asians registered.

VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi wrote about Aaker's presentation, which included more details about the drives, which drew corporate sponsors such as Adobe, Accenture, IDEO and Cisco.

Bhatia found a perfect match, while Chakravarthy found a close match. Bhatia continued to blog prolifically from the hospital. Videos were made of the bone marrow transfer.

The organizers shared their lessons from the campaign:

  1. Develop a clear goal.
  2. Reverse the rules. How might others address the challenge? Do the opposite.
  3. Tell true stories that connect on an emotional level.
  4. Design for collaboration. Enable others to contribute.

Sadly, this story doesn't have a happy ending.  Bhatia died in March 2008, three months after his transplant. Friends made a memorial slideshow they shared with the rest of the world. Chakravarthy also relapsed after his transplant and succumbed to death in June 2008. 

But their legacy is that they helped match 266 other South Asians to donors in one year through these drives.

As professor Aaker describes the Dragonfly effect, they did it: "Small acts can create big change."

More social media stories:

Check out Technolog on Facebook, and on Twitter, follow Athima Chansanchai, who would like more lives to be saved, by social media, or other means.