Slightly unusually this post does not highlight the use of the online tools rather how a campaign failed to utilize them.

GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) paired up with the AD Council to launch the “Think B4 You Speak” campaign. The campaign’s ultimate goal was “to reduce and prevent the use of homophobic language in an effort to create a more positive environment for LGBT teens.”

With the assistance of three Hollywood celebrities the campaign created three witty TV ads.

The site thinkb4youspeak.com was created to give the campaign a digital presence. It was well designed and offers useful text content for not only teens, but educators and parents.

I really liked the ads, so after watching I wanted to pass them on to friends. However, the site provided no applications to directly email, or share them on my FaceBook. Realizing that building such tools into a website can be tricky I logged on to YouTube. I was sure they had at least created a YouTube account so that the videos could be spread online virally. To my surprise the campaign had not utilized YouTube.

I poked around a little and found that the famous YouTube Producer Chris Crocker had produced a clip addressing the misuse of the term “gay” back in July of ’07. The clip had since received over 1,745,000 views! From a digital PR perspective this is a huge opportunity. The theme of the campaign had already been the focus of online dialogue. Chris’s clip was by far the most viewed but it wasn’t the only one posted. His clip had received over 50 video responses and an impressive 52,040 text responses.

The ThinkB4YouTalk site invites viewers to submit their own videos. If carefully planned and implemented it would have been interesting to see how much online participation could have been created if the producers of this campaign had sought to create dialogue with the thousands online who had already shown interest in the issue.

One last area: It is projected that FaceBook will soon have more subscribers in the US than MySpace. For any campaign targeting generation Y, FaceBook is one of the most effective tools available. I would have strongly recommended the creation of a widget that allowed the campaign to not only go viral but to create a sense of online community between those who are willing to commit to the change in their vernacular.

Click to see site and the TV ads.