Hugh Jackman is using twitter to “auction” a $100k donation to charity. People have to convince him, in 140 characters or less, why their charity of choice is worthy of the money.
I do feel this is a bit popularist and not exactly the researched and considered way that we’d all like to see people making their decisions about donations. It also fails to promote a commitment to a cause - focusing instead on a one-off, attention-seeking kind of approach. But I suppose if it reaches to a new audience then that’s not a bad thing.
—UPDATE—
Charity:water have moved really quickly, getting children in Ethiopia to hold up signs to Hugh, asking for the money. They then posted the picture on twitter.
Came across this good twitter feed from Wildlife SOS India.
I think it’s good because:
- It’s from the field
- It’s from a field worker – you actually get to hear the voice of someone who’s at the coal face, i.e. it’s got a personality
- It’s lively and written passionately
- It’s updated frequently – they’re busy, they don’t need to stop to tell me about the need, I can read it in almost every post
- it’s teaching me about something I didn’t know about before – i.e. I’m engaged.
I think most charities can learn a lot from this. Twitter isn’t just another way to broadcast your latest press release or organisational line. It’s social media. You need to use it to tell a story and that story has to involve people – in the narration or the subject matter or both. Charities have no greater stories than what happens every day in the front line. Twitter lets you uncover these hidden gems, as long as you give the right person the twitter account.
I love this from digital agency Poke. It’s a little machine that they’ve build for their local bakery. When freshly-baked deliciousness is ready, staff just have to twist a dial, press a button and then a message is published to twitter - Letting everyone know that freshly baked bread and cakes are ready for buying.
A really excellent application of the technology.
More from Iain Tait.
Image of superman by Adrià garcía
A bit of a shameless plug for ActionAid’s Mega Mouth campaign. Go and get involved!
But not too much of a shameless plug, because it’s really good.
A real life super hero, Mega Mouth, is walking around London in the run up to the G20, gathering messages that he is then going to shout out at the Put People First rally this weekend.
People can submit messages for him to shout on the ActionAid website or via Twitter. The Twitter campaign is really good – there’s an almost constant stream of updates as Mega Mouth walks about and they make a real point in following everyone who follows them and sending them a message encouraging them to get involved.
What’s even better is the use of Qik to show Mega Mouth’s progress around London – live! Qik is a video broadcast service that lets broadcast, in real time, footage you shoot on your mobile phone.
I’ve had a play around with it and it’s really good. Only problem I found was that it did take a while to stream and it kept having to buffer the content that I was viewing, but I’m sure they’ll get this sorted.
It really opens up a lot of opportunities – especially for citizen journalism and the ability for people to publish their own content. The boundaries between traditional broadcast media and the “new” communications tools are being broken down even further.
Man asleep, 4rank, flickr
Ok, so this isn’t about the worst twitter feed in the world, but all the other titles I could think of were rubbish.
Twitter is a social networking tool. This means that it must be social. This means that you can’t use it to pump out an anonymous corporate line. If you’re going to use it for marketing you need to use it as a tool to make connections with your audience. You only get these connections by having a personality and being interesting.
A good example of someone doing it wrong are Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats. Post after post reads just like the beginning of a press release, linking to a web page where you can read about their latest policy brief, or something that someone has said. If I wanted to get their press releases I would sign up to their RSS feed from their website. If I’ve subscribed to their flickr feed then I want a connection. They need to give me an insight into Nick’s life and the inner workings of the Lib Dems. They need to give me personality and a story to keep me interested, otherwise I’m going to switch off.
There are some brands that are doing it well.
Innocent: personality with a distinct voice that is telling me interesting things.
Red Nose Day: again, a strong voice with a personality behind it means that I pay attention to their tweets.
Brands really need to get to grips with this if it is going to be a successful marketing tool.
Any other examples of brands/orgs tweeting well or badly?
charity, digial, social media | admin | 
April 15, 2009 9:27 am | 
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