April 19, 2011 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Greenpeace has laid its claim to a new world record: the most comments on a Facebook post in 24 hours.
The organization’s post, and the more than 80,000 comments it prompted, were part of Greenpeace’s “Unfriend Coal” campaign, which was created to encourage Facebook to use renewable energy to power its data centers–the huge groups of servers that store and serve the site’s information.
The campaign’s Facebook page has more than 167,000 fans, and the post was written in nine languages. Greenpeace asked supporters to comment multiple times, to ask at least 10 others to comment, and to share the link on their Facebook profiles to spread the word.
Casey Harrell, Greenpeace’s campaign coordinator, said the organization also spread the word through e-mail messages, on Twitter, and in online appeals distributed through other groups, such as the environmental group 350.org.
While the post was collecting comments, a group of Greenpeace volunteers parked a van outside of Facebook’s Palo Alto, Calif., offices to talk to Facebook workers about the campaign. On the roof of the van was a large monitor showing the stream of comments on the post.
Unlike some advocacy campaigns, Mr. Harrell said, the messages came directly from people who use Facebook and not from a standard letter Greenpeace made available for supporters to send.
“There was no automated message,” Mr. Harrell said. “I thought it was pretty inspiring, pretty cool to read these comments.”
Facebook said in a statement that it has been discussing with Greenpeace how to be environmentally friendly while expanding its business. Facebook also said that it started a project called Open Compute to help its data centers run more efficiently. The project has saved enough energy to light more than 200 homes.
“It is no surprise to us that Greenpeace is using Facebook to conduct this campaign,” Facebook said in the statement. “With more than 500 million people around the world using Facebook, the single greatest opportunity we have to affect environmental change is using the power and reach of our platform.”
A blog post on the Greenpeace Web site said that an official from Guinness World Records would review the record claim in about a week. The record for most comments on a post in 24 hours hasn’t yet been established by Guinness.
The Guinness World Record for most comments on a Facebook post without a time limit is 389,141, held by the Italian artist and blogger Roberto Esposito. The rapper Lil Wayne holds the records for both “most likes” on a post and “most likes” in 24 hours.
“I think if Lil Wayne or Lady Gaga want to take us on, they’ll probably blow our campaign and our 80,000 out of the water,” Mr. Harrell said.
