Sometimes great things happen as a result of many little things. Like real social stuff for and from real people, and even in real-time (not to forget to mention the trend of 2010).

Today happened a small fairytale resembling the Christmas Carol from Charles Dickens. Place: Berlin Charlottenburg in Germany.

It started last Friday when the blogger Sachar Kriwoj involved people on Twitter and via his blog Massenpublikum (German for “mass audience”) to help a little flower shop in his district from being closed. The story is that the owner was forced to close the shop for half a year because of a severe health issue. When re-opening it a few months ago he quickly realised that it would be too hard to build up again what he achieved previously. Therefore he decided to close the shop after Christmas, abandon his dream and simply work as an employee in another flower-shop, applications he sent already. Like he put it “There are people who are worse off than me”.

Now, to Sachar’s girlfriend this was not just any flower shop but her favourite one. The two of them learnt the story and that in total 10.000 Euro were needed in order to keep the shop open. 4000 Euro could already be collected via private sources, but where to take the rest from?

Sachar added the case simply as a new project on Betterplace.org which helps to collect money for projects worldwide and of all backgrounds. He tweeted the message out to his followers like “if everyone of my followers would give less than 2 Euros then we would make it”. Lots of retweets followed and lots of people got engaged during just 5 days – and despite skeptical voices even from the blogosphere the target was reached! 144 supporters helped to make it happen, and thanks to blogger Sascha Lobo who put in the last couple of hundred Euro, even one day earlier than the deadline, which was the end of day tomorrow, on Christmas Eve.

The result: the shop owner has an entirely new perspective for 2010, something he did not even dare to dream of about five days ago. Sachar and especially his girlfriend like many other people keep their little favourite flower-shop.
And what about the ones who tweeted, blogged and contributed financially? They can be very proud of being part of something really special.

The #blumenladen (“flower shop” in German) is not only one of the best examples for the true and positive powers of Social Media I ever experienced. It is also one of the great examples to show how to use Social Media for Charity purposes and shows how powerful it actually can be.

Wouldn’t it be great to make more of this happen in 2010?

Merry Christmas everyone, and have a great start into a happy, healthy and successful New Year 2010!