If you happened to see a number of men walking around with magnificent handlebar moustaches last November, this is why. Commandeering the month formerly known as November, as the perfect time of year to raise awareness of prostate and testicular cancer, Movember relies on spreading the word through social media channels and participants creating video and image galleries of their Movember progress.

Greenpeace launched its campaign on the very network it was protesting about: Facebook. The simple yet effective idea trying to persuade Facebook to unfriend coal,, It proved to be successful. Over 500,000 people signed the online anti-Facebook petition and more than 330,000 of them took the time to watch the video.

Macmillan ran the worlds largest coffee morning which was a great success, they raised over £850,000 by the end of the last year. They also incorporated social media to help spread their campaign and engage supporters by encouraging them to let everyone know what they were doing to help raise money by putting up videos and images. The majority of the events were also put onto a tweet map so you could see what was going on in your local area.

This was a straightforward campaign fromt the UN where they identified the fifty most influential people on twitter and invited them to join the UN social envoy. This involved them sending a tweet once a month to help raise awareness about malaria. This simple action caused a wave of re-tweets, blog posts, YouTube video posts and other online activity from many of these celebrities followers helping to spread the message.

Teaming up with paint brand Dulux, Unicef is offering everyone the chance to buy one of the 16.7 million colours that make up the spectrum. For £1 donation, you can pick a shade, choose a name, explain why you picked it, and give it a description. A great use of the web to get people involved.

The National Trust is an excellent example of an organisation not only understanding the importance of social media but also the way in which it can be used on a local level. There are numerous Twitter accounts set up with each one focusing on an area therefore ensuring that the information that is being passed through is accurate and useful for supporters.

This event saw a clash between legends of Celtic and Manchester UTD coming together to help raise money for Oxfam's East Africa Appeal. They managed to raise over £300,000 and through the use of Twitter they managed to trend in Scotland, a great integration of the social platform to engage with supporters.

After the suicide of a teenager who was bullied about his sexuality left many people in dis-belief, some decided to act upon this horrendous incident one of the most active people was Dan Savage, sex columnist and gay rights activist. He decided to send a positive message via YouTube to all of those who were bullied because of their sexuality and reassure them that “It Gets Better�. The video went viral and was picked up by bloggers, vloggers, and famous celebrities. Each person added to it by creating their own encouraging videos, blog posts or pictures that spread all over the web. Webpages were created, Facebook and Twitter accounts established, stories shared, and donations made. There was also crossover to the mainstream media as some of the videos were featured on various TV channels and mentioned in the print media.

Is another example of celebrity being used for the greater good. In this case people can enter auctions to have a celebrity follow and re-tweet them. With its 178 celebrities and 750 auctions, TwitChange got over 35 million web hits in 4 weeks. Not too bad.

Epic Change created a virtual scrapbook or “hearspace� on their webpages and anyone who donated could customize this space by using various photos, videos and notes. They could then send this piece of art to their mothers as an e-card, or share it with friends and family via Twitter or Facebook. This simple low budget campaign helped to raise money for the education and protection of children in Tanzania.