Yesterday, someone who I was friends with in high school, but wasn’t really “friends” with, asked everyone to repost something about curing multiple sclerosis in their statuses. I can appreciate the sentiment. Who doesn’t want to cure these horrible afflictions? But this is not how you do it.

This is the same problem I had with Neil Gaiman and the “save the libraries” campaign. Ok, sure, it’s great that you want to save the libraries. Who doesn’t? But just tweeting about it doesn’t get the library saved.

“It raises awareness,” I hear people saying. Were you not aware that the library is a dying beast? Have you somehow been hiding under a rock and not heard about this? How terrible multiple sclerosis is? What is this cancer thing, anyway, and why should I care?

Granted, there are some extenuating circumstances that make this seem ok. Seem ok. First, the status message that we were to echo asked everyone to pray. Well, ok. Maybe in your world, if everyone prays for it then God solves whatever problem it is. In my world, someone has to actually solve the problem. Call it “God’s hand” if you want, but posting requests to re-tweet a request for people to pray to God to maybe cure a disease seems a lot farther removed from actually trying to cure the disease.

Also, I’m not afflicted with MS. And nobody I know is afflicted with or affected by MS, as far as I know. So maybe it sounds callous, but I don’t really care about MS. Now… Ask me about cancer, and you’ll get a different answer. But I think this is the same with anyone in regard to their life experiences. Here’s the thing, though. If my “friend” had said, “My kid has MS. Help me cure it with prayer,” I might have been a little more moved to do something crazily uncharacteristic like pray.

So what’s the problem? If you want to raise awareness, choose to raise awareness for something that people aren’t aware of. Multiple Sclerosis? I know about that. The National MS Society? No, I’m not aware of that. Nor am I aware of any other organization that claims to put money toward research or rehabilitation for the disease.

If you want to call people to action, make the action worthwhile. Maybe prayer is good for you, and that’s fine. Maybe it’s just my opinion, but if you want to see something done, you can’t just wait around for God to fix it. Yesterday, at the same time I complained about this particular person’s request via Twitter, I made a donation to the National MS Society. It was small, but in my mind, this is much more likely to cause good to happen than praying about it.

Now you’re going to say, “So, Owen, it actually worked! You read that Facebook status, and maybe you didn’t re-post it, but you gave money!” No. You’ve got it wrong. I gave money for two reasons. First, because it could frikkin cure MS. Second, because I’m not such a cold person as what I wanted to say in response.

I dunno. Maybe you can’t afford to give money. Maybe all you can do is re-tweet and hope someone else sees it and suddenly and spontaneously comes to the conclusion that your cause is something they’d like to fix with personal time, effort, or money. I doubt it. Instead, donate some of your own time, effort, or money to the cause you want other people to support. Then tweet about that, which other people are going to be interested in.

I saw a tweet recently, something to the effect of, “You can’t call something ‘Inspirational’ unless it inspires you to do something.” Be inspiratonal. Cause people to take action.

If you’re going to call to action, make it re-tweet-able on it’s own. If you make the message something important enough or interesting enough, you won’t need to tell people to repeat it. I think this is the essence of viral marketing. You want other people to do the work for you without having to give them anything. That could work. It does work.

If you ran a marathon to raise awareness for some cause, tweet about it. Heck, if you’re going to run and you need sponsors, tweet away, I’ll sign right up. There was a local art studio that needed some cash to remodel, and they tweeted about it. I donated a good bit to that just on a whim because that idea sounded good to me. But it was a direct action I could take to affect some change.

I hope some of this is sinking in to folks. And on the flip side, I hope that it’s not, because I can hardly afford to fund everyone who’s got a great cause and knows how to pitch it to me.