By Mae Lorraine Lorenzo When it comes to marketing campaigns or sending out any message, social media is an effective tool. Social media platforms are a great equalizer, too – no matter your social status, age, gender or educational background, you can have a voice. Online 10-year challenge for the environment shows a forest turning into a dry patch of land. (@ClimateSeed) The accessibility of social media is both boon and bane as there’s really no sure way of controlling what information is available for people to consume. In the case of environment messages, however, social media is a powerful tool and we’ve seen many positive impacts brought about by an effective “green” online campaign. We checked various online platforms to search for successful environmental campaigns to show that when it comes to championing the cause of Mother Nature, we need all the help we can get to put the message across. WWF’s Endangered Species Emoji Everyone has probably used an emoji more than once in their lives. It’s such a powerful “symbol” that people often use it to convey different types of emotions, activities, occasions and more. Sensing the effectivity of using emojis, the environmental group World Wide Fund for Nature launched the #endangeredemoji campaign which encourages people to use endangered animal emojis on Twitter. The emojis include the Galapagos Penguin, the Asian Elephant, the Maui Dolphin, the Giant Panda, the Green Turtle, the Blue Whale, among others, to raise awareness that saving our planet is also saving their habitat and their lives. The 10-year challenge Early this year, people posted photos of themselves from 10 years back, showing friends online how much they have aged physically in a decade. A few weeks since the viral post, civic groups started posting the environment version of the 10-year challenge, and the pictures are quite disturbing. Most of the photos showed how nature deteriorated in the last 10 years – polar bears looking gaunt because the rising sea levels and the melting ice caps destroyed their feeding grounds, majestic ice caps have turned to ice patches, and once lush forests now reduced to dry patches of land. #trashtag challenge The #trashtag challenge is one of the most significant activities in social media today. Instead of encouraging people to do something dangerous, it encourages netizens to do their part for the environment. People would go to different areas and start cleaning the place by segregating trash and making sure that a place becomes clean after. People first have to take a photo before the activity and then post a picture right after and use the hashtag #trashtag. It’s a great campaign which produced over 50,000 posts on Instagram which means that people actually completed 50,000 successful cleanup activities. The trashtag challenge first began in the US and eventually reached our shores. The #trashtag challenge has raised awareness on the problem of litter affecting our oceans and beaches. This only proves that with the right messsage, social media can be put into good use. Lessen the selfies and the OOTDs, the environment needs all the help it can get.