Good Intentions Don’t Make Up For Poor Research

This weekend (October 17 -19, 2009) gave us an enormous example of how even the best of intentions cannot make up for not doing enough research to give people accurate information about how to help. In this case no actual harm was caused to anyone but a great many people wasted time and energy doing something they thought would help a good cause but that didn’t. They also unintentionally created a giant wave of Twitter spam that seems to have peaked sometime on Saturday, October 17, but as of this writing (4:00 pm PDT on Sunday, October 18, 2009) is still not over.

It all started with the desire to use social media to do something good. That led to an experiment designed to see if Twitter could be used to raise funds for cancer research. According to the website set up for the fund drive the details of the plan were put together quickly when the Managing Director of Everywhere, a social media communications and content company based in Atlanta, Georgia who was heading off to the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas came up with an idea. (To keep the research for this article clear this information is taken from http://beatcancereverywhere.com/about.html which I will now refer to “the BCE site.”) The idea was to sign up corporations to donate one penny for each tweet that used a specific hashtag during one of the days of the Blog World Expo.

The Blog World Expo was held in Las Vegas and ran from October 15 through 17, 2009 (http://www.blogworldexpo.com). Among the many attendees were NuDia’s own Jay and Jack who I’m sure can provide lots of interesting information about what it was like.

The BCE site was set up quite quickly.  The About page describes #BeatCancer as a social media experiment and explains exactly how it was supposed to work. The exact language is: “In a 24-hour period of time starting Friday, October 16th at 9 am (PDT) and lasting until Saturday, October 17th at 9am (PDT) people all over the internet stratosphere will be asked to send tweets and Facebook status updates and to blog using #BeatCancer in their posts. Ebay/Paypal and MillerCoors Brewing Company will donate a penny ($0.01)* for every Twitter message, Facebook update or blog post that includes the phrase #BeatCancer. All money will be donated to non-profit cancer organizations including SU2C (Stand Up to Cancer), Alex’s Lemonade, Bright Pink, and Spirit Jump. All of the non-profits are 501 (c)(3) organizations and accredited by The American Cancer Society.”  (The * means up to a designated amount. In my experience this caveat is not unusual when corporations enter into a potentially open-ended agreement to donate money.)

The BCE site home page shows Tweets with the #beatcancer hashtag drifting by and also provides links to cancer charities so that visitors to the page could make direct donations to those charities.  The people running #BeatCancer also contacted the Guinness Book of World Records to see if #BeatCancer could set a world record for the distribution of the largest mass message through social media. I could not find anything on the Guinness website referring to Twitter but the BCE site says that Guinness agreed to participate. That would have happened within the last few days so it could very easily not have been put on the website yet.

Then #BeatCancer got a big break. The extremely wide-read, influential and almost always completely trustworthy website Mashable.com posted an article about the hashtag effort that was written by the site’s Editor-in-Chief Adam Ostrow. The article “Social Media Campaign to Beat Cancer Eyes Record in Guinness Book” (http://mashable.com/2009/10/16/social-media-campaign-to-beat-cancer-eyes-record-in-guinness-book) was probably posted at about 12:50pm PDT on October 16, because Ostrow sent a tweet with a link to the article at that time. This is three hours into the 24 hour period for using the hashtag, so it provided a timely notification of the fundraising project. A link to the article was sent out by Pete Cashmore moments later. Cashmore is @mashable on Twitter and has over 1.6 million followers which makes him one of the most powerful people on Twitter. He is usually extremely reliable. I follow him on Twitter and consider him a very trustworthy source of information. The article they were tweeting about, however, had two serious problems. First, although Ostrow stated very clearly that this was a 24 hour effort, he did not give the specific 24 hours when it was happening. He just said that it was happening “today.” The article said that more details could be found on the beatcancereverywhere.com website but the link went to the websites homepage where the cute little Tweet clouds floated. To find out what the actual 24 hours for fundraising were, a reader had to click on “about #beatcancer” on that homepage.

Ostrow tweeted two reminders to use the #beatcancer hashtag, at 1:45 pm and at 5:35 pm PDT. Both of these were well before the Oct. 17 9:00 am PDT ending point for both fundraising and counting Tweets toward a world record. Cashmore tweeted a reminder to use the #beatcancer hashtag at 1:10 pm PDT on October 16. This was also a timely reminder.

So where’s the fail? The fail is that Pete Cashmore, for whom I have great respect, apparently did not read the about page on the BCE site. As a result he encouraged his 1.6 million followers to keep on using the #beatcancer hashtag after it was no longer raising any money or being counted toward a potential world record.

One hour after the 9:00 am PDT deadline, @mashable tweeted “<– eBay/Paypal & MillerCoors are donating $0.01 every time you mention #beatcancer today. Pls RT!” A second tweet came almost five hours later. “<- Reminder: $0.01 is donated to cancer charities every time u mention #beatcancer today. Please RT!” Naturally his 1.6 million followers and the people they retweeted wanted to help such a good cause. Twitter was flooded with tweets using the #beatcancer hashtag and urging others to do so.

During the retweeting process some information got jumbled up just as it does during a children’s game of telephone. The word “today” which was unhelpfully vague to start with, got dropped out of many RTs with the result that some of the people tweeting #beatcancer don’t realize that there was ever any time limit on its usefulness. Another substantial group of people are under the impression that the contribution will be $0.01 for each use of the hashtag rather than per tweet containing the hashtag. Their tweets look like this: “#beatcancer #beatcancer #beatcancer #beatcancer #beatcancer #beatcancer #beatcancer #beatcancer.” Despite the good intentions of the people writing these tweets they are simply spam.

Then at about 7:00 pm PDT (ten hours after the end of the fundraising drive) Pete Cashmore gave the whole thing another kick start with an article on Mashable.com titled “Tweeting to #BeatCancer: 200,000+ Tweets So Far.” The article was upbeat and optimistic. The opening paragraph: “Twitter has been virtually taken over this weekend by a great cause: #BeatCancer gets brands to donate 1 cent for every tweet containing that hashtag. It’s been a huge success so far, with 200,000+ tweets being posted since the launch yesterday.” (Bold in original.)

Wait! When did this become about “this weekend” instead of about “today”? The 200,000+ Tweets aren’t what was accomplished “so far” that’s the grand total.

In accordance with his usual (and usually helpful) practice @mashable tweeted a link to the article, giving his 1.6 million followers the impression that the fundraising drive was still going.

At the time of this writing (3:30 pm PDT Oct. 18) #beatcancer has finally fallen to #2 on the list of Twitter Trending Topics but the tweets are still going strong. Many of the people who are using the #beatcancer hashtag think that they are helping to raise money. Some of them are only trying to raise awareness about cancer. Other people are using the hashtag in moving tweets about loved ones who are fighting cancer or who they lost to cancer.

What are the lessons to be learned from this experiment?

(1)  ALWAYS do your research especially if you have the power to influence a huge number of people. If @mashable had checked on the exact 24 hours of the fundraising drive he would not have given the hashtag those belated boosts which created a tsunami of Twitter spam.

(2)  Avoid using the word “today” in your tweets especially if you are asking people to retweet them. Be as specific as possible, including about the time zone. Twitter is global.

(3)  When something ends put a notice on your homepage. The BCE homepage Twitter counter remains where it was at Sat. 9:00 am but there is no announcement that the fundraising drive has ended.

(4) Check at least a little bit of your feedback. Comments on both Mashable.com articles point out that the fundraising is over but Mashable.com has not posted any updates nor has @mashable tweeted any updates.

This was a worthwhile experiment and the people who created it had only the best of intentions but I hope that its lessons will be applied to future attempts to use Twitter to raise funds for charity.

Finally, there’s the bitterest pill of all. There are 100 pennies in a dollar. Despite all of that energy and all that goodwill, #beatcancer raised only $2.087.03. (Or $4,174.06 if both companies are contributing one penny per tweet.)

Related posts:

1. UDATE: #BeatCancer + Twitter + @mashable = FAIL: Bonnie Mater On October 19, 2009 Mashable.com published an article titled “#BeatCancer...
2. More Deaths Or More Twitter?: Colleen McAllister David Carradine.  Michael Jackson. Billy Mays.  Dom DeLuise.  Ed McMann. ...
3. Fringe’s Second Season, Episode Two: Bonnie Mater Editor’s note: This post contains spoilers. This is the third...
4. Fringe Episode 2.3 “Fracture”: Bonnie Mater Editor’s Note: This review contains spoilers. In the third episode...
5. ‘Fringe’’s Second Season Off to a Good Start: Bonnie Mater (Warning: This post contains spoilers) Fringe, Fox’s series about a...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.