Donate your unused twitter characters and help raise awareness

by | 23 Comments

It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday, everybody’s lookin’ forward to the weekend, weekend. Wait… who sang that again? Erm… Once again its Friday and we have another Focus Friday segment where we look at how businesses are using social media today. One that caught my attention was Ben and Jerry’s World Fair Trade Day Campaign. What is fair trade you ask? Fair trade is a movement that helps producers and consumers get a better deal or better trading. This helps producers to improve their live and helps to reduce poverty.

Like Starbucks, Ben and Jerry’s play a part in growing the fair trade movement as well. Recently, Ben and Jerry’s launched a campaign where twitter users can help donate their unused twitter characters to help promote fair trade. By visiting Ben and Jerry’s website or FairTweets.com , twitter users can send tweets and put their unused characters to good use. What Ben and Jerry will do is, they will automatically use the remaining character, to good use to raise awareness for fair trade. It’s like putting an “ad” about Fair Trade into every tweet, so if you use only 20 characters out of the 140 characters, the remaining 120 characters will be used as an “ad”. Look below

Example of Ben & Jerry’s Fair Tweet

What a great way to get people to chip in and help. At the moment there are more than 120,000 twitter characters donated to help Ben and Jerry’s fair tweets campaign. If I am not mistaken, Ben and Jerry is the first to put unused characters to good use.

Take away from Ben & Jerry’s fair tweet campaign

The best thing about this is, twitter users don’t need to do anything as everything is integrated into the website, and this allows users to continue their daily tweeting while helping a good cause at the same time.  Good example of making it easy for users , just like what we talked in previous blog post where Samsung was our best example of social integration as well as making it easy for users to reach them.

I am looking forward to the end of the campaign to see the results. For sure this is a campaign to watch. What do you think? Would you donate your unused characters? Let us know in the comment box below.

Disclaimer: I wasn’t paid to write this nor did Ben & Jerry’s asked me to write it, i wrote because I thought the idea was creative and I am waiting to see the results of it at the end of the day.

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  • http://www.pamelahazelton.com Pamela Hazelton

    I still don’t get this, really. I mean, how will my followers understand what it actually means?

  • http://askaaronlee.com Aaron Lee

    @pamelahazelton:disqus You’re first again, amazing. Indeed I get what you mean, I guess curiosity can make someone to click and find out more. Moreover your followers might ask you about it.

    That was why I mentioned it was like an *ad* in your tweets. Overall I actually love the creativity of the campaign. One reason why I want to see what happens after 8 days and see what Ben & Jerry’s achieve.

  • http://www.pamelahazelton.com Pamela Hazelton

    I definitely think it’s creative. But I wonder if having to explain it all (or link to a site where they have to read lengthy text to really understand) interrupts the process of what many biz tweeters are trying to do? I.e. I couldn’t advise any of my ecommerce clients to do this…

    I mean, I’ve already spent 10 minutes reading what it’s all about (had to read *their* definition of Fair Trade as well).

  • http://justicewordlaw.com Justice Wordlaw IV

    oh wow @askaaronlee:disqus this is a very creative resource to use online. I really like how Ben & Jerry have started doing something like this. It is very small but powerful enough to really help out a great cause.

  • http://askaaronlee.com Aaron Lee

    Indeed, I guess not many people knows about fair trade, I know about it because I learned about it last year when I did my research on Starbucks. This could be a good thing as it could raise awareness about “fair trade” itself as not many people knows about it.

    Certainly is a creative way to get people to participate in something not many people know. Moreover Ben & Jerry had been a huge supported of fair trade since the start. As for explaining to people what it is, actually
    @jowyang:twitter
    supports this type or idea, as he mentioned that social media by the company alone is not scalable and companies need to have a way for customers to participate or what he like to call “OCP = other people’s content”, this for me is one of them. Of course
    @jowyang:disqus
    also talked about rewarding their most loyal advocates too.

  • http://www.pamelahazelton.com Pamela Hazelton

    I totally agree. The difficult part is finding away to getting followers/users involved with the simplest amount of effort. Once they understand, they’ll likely support. Let’s find a creative way to truly reach them – otherwise it’s just people clicking because someone else did. :-)

  • http://askaaronlee.com Aaron Lee

    I agree, that’s the difficult part indeed, I guess the first step for everything is the hardest.

  • http://askaaronlee.com Aaron Lee

    Indeed, baby steps for everything is powerful. The result is still small at the moment, maybe it will continue to grow after 2-5 days.

  • http://www.pamelahazelton.com Pamela Hazelton

    Reminds me of the “color of the bra you’re wearing” on Facebook. Took off like mad. But, I do wonder how much awareness it raised. After all, lots of women were in giggles while the men tried to figure it all out.

    For anything to be a success, people need to continue to talk about it… Ben & Jerry’s is the perfect company for this…

  • http://askaaronlee.com Aaron Lee

    LoL! Yeah i heard about the colour bra campaign too. I am still confused what it is haha! As for B&J, I agree that in order to make this a success, people still need to talk about it. Wonder how B&J will go around doing that. Maybe they will read this and respond to us? Who knows.

  • http://diyblogger.net/about Dino Dogan

    I guess I missed that one :-)

  • http://diyblogger.net/about Dino Dogan

    Very creative way of using the unused. How long before novelty wears off? I dont mean to be a negative Nelly, but as I started reading about it, I thought..hmmm, thats neat. And by the time I was done reading about it, I was over it. D’you see what I mean?

    Only time will tell of course. But I have to applaud them for at least trying to think in an innovative way.

    So today, I’ve learned about the unused space on Twitter AND What Color is your Bra, on askaaronlee.com

    We call that a twofer :-)

  • http://diyblogger.net/about Dino Dogan

    Very creative way of using the unused. How long before novelty wears off? I dont mean to be a negative Nelly, but as I started reading about it, I thought..hmmm, thats neat. And by the time I was done reading about it, I was over it. D’you see what I mean?

    Only time will tell of course. But I have to applaud them for at least trying to think in an innovative way.

    So today, I’ve learned about the unused space on Twitter AND What Color is your Bra, on askaaronlee.com

    We call that a twofer :-)

  • http://www.pamelahazelton.com Pamela Hazelton

    Woman on facebook simply posted the color of bra they were wearing as their status. Thus, a status for the day would just be “black” or “pink”. The idea was to raise awareness about breast cancer. IMO, most saw it as a game because the male friends couldn’t figure out what was going on.

    It was a good idea – with not-so-great execution.

  • http://www.pamelahazelton.com Pamela Hazelton

    Woman on facebook simply posted the color of bra they were wearing as their status. Thus, a status for the day would just be “black” or “pink”. The idea was to raise awareness about breast cancer. IMO, most saw it as a game because the male friends couldn’t figure out what was going on.

    It was a good idea – with not-so-great execution.

  • http://diyblogger.net/about Dino Dogan

    Seams like the intention got appropriated by triviality. That happens to a lot of ideas.

    Btw…Gray :-)

  • http://askaaronlee.com Aaron Lee

    Indeed I get what you mean @dinodogan:disqus , similar thoughts too. Like @pamelahazelton:disqus gave us the idea on the colour bra, perhaps this is similar too, I will still keep an eye on it though to see if it continues to grow.

    Glad you were able to learn two things here in this blog Dino, oh.. I am wearing a stripe boxers.. now you learned three things :)

  • http://www.pamelahazelton.com Pamela Hazelton

    Found this YouTube vid that explains FairTweets in 1 minute.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX7busQUJo0&feature=player_embedded

    Brilliant.

    Now, just find a way to entice/explain in 140 characters!

  • http://twitter.com/jwongjk Jan Wong

    They surely thought this through, did they? A very clever use of unused characters. Not sure if this idea will catch on elsewhere though. Seems like an idea that will be replicated by ad agencies for advertisement purposes. Time will tell! :)

  • http://askaaronlee.com Aaron

    Testing

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  • http://www.semlerresearch.com us fda

    Your way of thinking is too innovative and much creative thinking.. Excellent post sharing with us.. Thanks a lot..

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