Dec 3, 2010

Digital Death

Anyone with a twitter or facebook account knows how essential they are in terms of keeping up with people. Recently, celebs have found them to be marketing genius, allowing fans to have a 24/7 look inside their world.

Hoping to profit from the constant need-to-know world we live in, Keep a Child Alive launched their "Buy Life" campaign on 12/1 (in honor of World AIDS Day). The goal was to have celebs like Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga and Alicia Keys go "digitally dead" in order to raise money for AIDS research.

Well, we're 3 days into things and guess what? They've only raised about $200k. With well over 50 million Twitter/Facebook fans following these celebs I'm sure Keep a Child Alive was expecting to reach their goal by now.

My biggest issues with this whole thing:

1) You can't donate less than $10. Call me crazy but it's the holiday season during a recession! People barely have jobs and money to pay their bills, eat, and provide some type of holiday season for their family. While I'm all for charity I think the organization shot itself in the foot by putting a $10 minimum on donations. If you're going to ask for charity allow people to give what they can. Many people have been turned off by the fact they can't donate in smaller $1 or $5 denominations.

2) Celebs haven't stated the amounts they've donated. Keeping it 100 all these folks have money... tons of money. They could've all came out of pocket and knocked out this $1 million goal easily. Not knowing how much your favorite celebs have donated towards the cause is a bit questionable.

3) This is an example of narcissism at its best. From the site:

Starting December 1 - World AIDS Day - the world's most followed celebrity Tweeters are sacrificing their digital lives to help save millions of real lives affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa and India.

That means no more Twitter or Facebook updates from any of them. No more knowing where they are, what they had for dinner, or what interesting things are happening in their lives. From here on out, they're dead. Kaput. Finished.

Basically fans will have to "suffer" in digital silence not knowing what their favorite celebs are doing, where they're going, eating, seeing, etc... I think the public's desire to know this was grossly overestimated. Yes, we're a nosy bunch and will jump at the chance to overindulge in free information... but shelling out $10 for this stuff? That's okay. I'll pass.

I've actually found it a bit refreshing to have some of these celebs gone for a few days, though I think they'll be reaching in their pockets and making some "anonymous" donations so they can get back to blogging, tweeting and posting about their fabulous lives.


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