How Social Media Is Helping Somalia

After French social media star Jerome Jarre watched a video of a young Somalian girl die from dehydration, he felt compelled to use his popularity as a way to grow awareness about the issue of malnourished and dehydrated people in Somalia.  Learning that Turkish Airlines is the only commercial airline that flies to Somalia, he quickly created a campaign centered around sending an entire cargo plane donated by Turkish Airlines full of donated items to the Somalian people.  He launched the campaign with the hashtag: #TurkishAirlinesHelpSomalia and the campaign started to attract the help and support of other celebrities.

Ben Stiller and Colin Kaepernick offered their support for the campaign and donated their own money to help the cause.  They formed a crowd-funding campaign on GoFundMe called "Love Army for Somalia" and it's managed to raise nearly $2.2 million in just 5 days.  On 3/17, Turkish Airlines committed to the flight donation and to allow the group to ship food on all Somalian flights until the end of the famine.

This campaign shows the power of social media and its ability to bring awareness to a cause that was previously unheard of.  What started as a few people looking to make a difference turned into a multi-million dollar relief effort in order to bring aid to a struggling nation.

Snapchat Spectacles

With a successful IPO, Snapchat is lighting up the Internet in more ways than one with its recent widespread release of "Snapchat Spectacles", a pair of sunglasses that can take snapchat photos and videos.  The sunglasses were actually released in late 2016 in extremely limited availability, appealing to first adopter consumers.  Retailing at $130, the spectacles were found in Snapbots, special vending machines.  However, the Snapbots constantly changed location and it became a challenge to find the product.

On February 20, Snapchat began selling the spectacles online in order to make the product more available to consumers.  They are fairly customizable, and the length and prescription can carefully be adjusted by an optician.  Snapchat is looking to make a larger footprint in a increasingly digital world, and bringing their technology outside of the cell phone realm is a great step in that direction.