The Mini Feeds of Facebook pages up and down the country have been awash with animated faces over the last few days. This weekend saw an NSPCC campaign urging users to change their profile pictures to one of their favourite childhood cartoon characters. The campaign has seen huge press, the Facebook group attracting almost 90,000 fans and the LA Times reporting that ‘nearly every of the 20 most actively searched terms on Google were to do with ‘old cartoons’ on Saturday morning’.

So well done to The NSPCC then? A genius piece of Crowdsourcing to promote The NSPCC’s wider cause. Except the campaign had absolutely nothing to do with them.

Moreover, no one knows exactly who set up the campaign. Speculation has been rife that a group of paedophiles came up with the idea as a means of identifying young children. As disturbing as this sounds, I find it highly unlikely that paedophiles were the source of this campaign and how it would help them identify children anymore than just looking at normal profile pictures.

Regardless of who set it all up, The NSPCC have played a great PR game in their handling of this situation. A statement on their Twitter page read: ‘Although the NSPCC did not originate the childhood cartoon Facebook campaign, we welcome the attention it has brought to the work we do.’

The campaign has also helped The NSPCC to reach the magic number of 100,000 Facebook fans. So credit to The NSPCC for utilising Crowdsourcing via Facebook to grow awareness for their cause, without even setting up the campaign in the first place! A triumph for Crowdsourcing and good old fashioned PR it seems!

A final thought, does anyone know who was really behind this campaign?!