As you will I am sure have noticed this weekend people all over the web have been tagging their tweets with #BeatCancer in order to break a social media world record and raise money for cancer. The idea is simple in that a donation of $0.01 will be made for every mention on Twitter, Facebook and blogs and in the first 24 hours the total had reached over 200k mentions, very impressive. What worries us is that this is a massive amount of coverage and it is certainly a very noble cause but that represents a paltry $2000 raised for charity in return for pretty much owning services like Twitter for the weekend.

As you can see Ebay, Paypal and Miller are sponoring the initiative so they are in effect getting blanket coverage of social media in return for a tiny amount of money. You have to take your hat off to the people running this campaign for tapping into the public’s good nature but are the motives really as good natured as we are made belive? This is the sort of stuff that marketing dreams are made off and you can read more about how the idea came to fruition here.

As a one off this works well and will hopefully raise over 10k by the time it is finished but the big worry is that other brands will see how cheap this is to get off the ground and will copy it in the same way they did the hashtag competitions and just start trting to game the trending topics on Twitter with copycat donation ploys.

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