Sam Deeks proud to have used social media to get a difficult issue in front of a world audience at Davos

Two weeks ago my friend Julia Lalla-Maharaj heard about the YouTube Davos competition.  Activists all around the world were invited to create video pitches for the issues or campaigns they felt most passionate about.  The YouTube community and a panel of 3 world-renowned speakers would be the judges. The prize for the winner would be the chance to debate their issue with world leaders at the World Economic Forum at Davos this past week.

Having given up her career to campaign against the painful and repressive tradition of female genital mutilation (FGM), Julia jumped at the chance, only just making the deadline to film her video pitch.

Next, we hurriedly bought the domain www.endfgmnow.org and set up email addresses. A friend made a holding page that outlined the basic campaign aims.

Then, suddenly, to her surprise, Julia made the last 5 shortlist. The YouTube community voted away like mad.  Some of the shortlisted campaigners had huge YouTube communities behind them (one had 250,000 followers at the start of the race).  Others, like Julia left the starting blocks complete unknowns.

A friend’s flat became campaign HQ.  First line of attack was Twitter – creating a new account and leapfrogging quickly to follow a huge web of influential women who might be interested in FGM and the chance to take an issue about empowerment for women to the centre of a global stage.

Within a few days, we were following a couple of thousand key people – and being followed back by about 1/4 of those.  Julia and her team pulled all the best strings from her years as a communications / PR consultant in London and all the links she’d made in her work volunteering in the 3rd sector.

If you believed the YouTube view count, Julia’s capaign didn’t stand a chance of winning. But I was confident that it wasn’t about clicky numbers from an invisible audience, or nice-sounding campaigns with palatable aims like making the whole world feel a bit better.  The organisers were clearly looking for an issue that was real and focused enough for a group of influential – and powerful – people to have a meaningful debate about on a world stage.

Which is why Julia’s pitch won. Suddenly, the Google film crew were at the flat making a ‘Davos Diary’ and the interviews and news features began in earnest.

We quickly installed a WordPress blog on the www.endfgmnow.org domain and began to fill it with video content and the occasional emailed text blogs from Julia (who by this time was whirling around Davos getting into the black books of the likes of Bill Clinton, the Gates, Klaus Schwab, Paulo Coehlo and a whole host of others).

The campaign came to a climax today with a live YouTube streamed debate exploring how the different nations can work together to end FGM – and end it soon.

It was great to see social media playing its part in this campaign in a powerful and refreshingly unself-conscious way.  This wasn’t about cute, cool social media gazing at its own navel.  It was about getting things done in a real, offline world.

But it was only when I was watching the debate live from Davos this afternoon and I heard Julia say “…and that will be on my site shortly” that it hit me that she was talking to me, sitting on my sofa in Devon with one eye on the YouTube window and the other on the tweaks I was making to the End FGM Now site.

It’s at moments like that I see how amazing tools like WordPress and Twitter really are and – despite the nerdy frustration they can bring and the cringe-inducing self-obsession – how empowering they can be.