Photo credit Patrishe

The 200th episode of Extreme Makeover Home Edition is taking place where I call home, ‘The Rogue Valley.’ It didn’t take long for word to spread, and for a social media storm to hit.  A lot of businesses are jumping to the aid of the at this time, unknown winning family.  It is, after all about community helping.

Business leaders in the Medford community are stepping up and offering a $1 a ‘like’ on their Facebook pages with the money being donated to the winning family and the construction of their new home.  In less than 24 hours I’ve seen several Medford businesses step up to be a part.  PremierWest Bank, Airport Chevrolet, Southern Oregon Subaru, Dollar Buick GMC, Spring Air Heating and Cooling Those are just the ones a saw last night.  I’m sure there are many more to come.

I’m a big fan of local businesses getting involved this way with local causes.  It brings together commonality and adds quality ‘likes’ to a business page.  We’ve done this for several of our clients and I personally have ‘liked’ several pages this very way.

There is also a ‘local’ Facebook page dedicated to this episode, Extreme Makeover Home Edition Jackson County, which in less than 12 hours has over 700 ‘likes.’  That then brings me to what a ‘Social Army’ can do.  We had a courageous young man who just lost his battle with cancer at the age of 9.  In 8 short weeks he accumulated over 16,000 ‘likes’ to the Team Etahn Page.

The Upper Rogue Cal Ripken League has just named a field in Ethan’s honor.  What a great story it would be if EMHE chose to rebuild the Ethan Jostad Field instead of a home, but that probably isn’t going to happen.  The members of Team Ethan would like to see EMHE re-build the diamond and have flooded the social media waves to make their case.

Within minutes of EMHE posting the Oregon show on EMHE Facebook page over 200 comments were made with about 75% of them being in support of Ethan and the makeover of the field.  EMHE only shows posts by them, but click on recent posts and hundreds upon hundreds of posts requesting the project for Ethan.  They have also flooded the local episode page which required a post from the local admins that reads “The support for Ethan Jostad is truly amazing. Ethan truly inspired and continues to inspire many people. However, please understand that this page is for updates pertaining to this local home build. No decision makers from the show view this page. Please direct future comments regarding Ethan to the main page below and allow this page to be used to rally our community around whichever family has been chosen.”

I’ve been following the Team Ethan page from the beginning and have brought it up in a couple previous blogs.  It certainly shows that with a common cause and emotion, how powerful social media can be.  It will be interesting to see how this all plays out over the next couple of weeks.

About the Author:

Mike Frey

Before co-founding Paradux Media Group, Mike spent more than 15 years in the world of marketing and advertising. While working with hundreds of locally owned businesses, he developed an appreciation for minimizing clients’ dollars while maximizing tangible results for those clients.

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