Social Media Giving Thanks

It's Thanksgiving Eve and while the kids are ready for a 4 day vacation, many organizations are using the power of the internet to make change for people this holiday season.

Epic Change
I first started chatting with Stacey Monk a few weeks back while working on Creating Magic. She helped share the story of a volunteer, Zoe Flanagan, a student at Lewis & Clark in Portland, Oregon. Yesterday I saw a flurry of Tweets about Tweetsgiving. Honestly I thought it was another Chris Brogan move, but come to find out its powered by Epic Change. The premise of Tweetsgiving is to to

demonstrate the power of the social web by raising $10,000 in 48 hours to build a classroom in Tanzania.

I think this is awesome. As of 10:30am on Wednesday, the site had already generated over $5,000 in donations. The Tweetsgiving fundraising is powered by ChipIn, a simple Flash application that allows you to keep people up-to-date on ChipIn events you organize to collect money. The power of this is that anyone who feels passionately about the cause can grab the embed code and put the widget up anywhere they want from Mysapce to their Blogs or websites.

Rock For Hunger
Using the power of some blog posts and the new Ning community, Rock For Hunger was able to organize an amazing Thanksgiving Breakfast for the homeless. They have organized over 60 local volunteers, oatmeal, eggs, fruit, OJ, plates, cups, utensils, socks, clothing and many other items via a forum post, a blog post and some email exchanges.

In fact, the SEO and search engine traffic to the post was so successful, they had to make 2 new volunteer opportunities to include all the volunteers.

Change.org + Myspace
Obama is not one to miss out on volunteers and an opportunity to get feedback from his fellow Americans. Change.org/ideas is a site where you can add your ideas to improve America and they can be voted on Digg style. The idea has also been replicated on Myspace to get teens and young adults involved in the new administration. Obama is really using this Social Media power to stay in touch with every American that wants to have a voice.

Do you know of any other organizations that are getting involved with Social Media this Thanksgiving to give back? Please let me know and I will be sure to add them to the post.

Happy Thanksgiving, be safe and keep rocking!

-Greg Rollett