The world outside of Twitter and other social media won’t have heard of the Beat Cancer Everywhere campaign. For 24 hours between Friday 16^th October and Saturday 17^th October, anyone who sent a tweet, updated their facebook status or blogged with #beatcancer helped raise money for cancer research.

I tweeted twice. Once to follow the crowd, and the second time to mention that repeating #beatcancer multiple times in one Tweet wouldn’t increase the “donation”.

My two tweets resulted in a $0.02 being donated to non profit cancer charities in the US. The total amount donated by all us caring Tweeters and Facebookers around the world is about $2,000. ebay, PayPal and the Miller brewing company will be making the donation. That’s going to take a huge dent on their bottom as you can imagine.

I’m actually ashamed to have got caught up in a

“social media experiment and movement created by Everywhere, a social media communications and content company based in Atlanta, Georgia”.

The About page on the website reads to me like a promotional piece for the company concerned. Just a few snippets…

We were headed to BlogWorld in Las Vegas with a few of our clients, including Jermaine Dupri. We knew we’d be in a hotbed of major bloggers and twitterers

If Ashton Kutcher could get a million followers, couldn’t we take on a social cause through social media?

In addition to the corporate sponsors (eBay/Paypal and MillerCoors Brewing Company), Radian6 is donating its services for best in class tracking and monitoring. Slash7, a web design firm, donated time to build the www.beatcancereverywhere.com site  which will showcase real time tweets and data. Sevans Strategy, a public relations and new media firm, donated media outreach and partnership services.

It’s a campaign designed to appeal to the inner slacker.

“Hey, cool. I can sit here in bed and help set a world record and donate $0.01 by tweeting.. I’m, like, soo concerned about cancer – I’m sooo gonna tweet and re-tweet the shit out this baby.. Go team me, that’s $0.10 off the bottom line of billion dollar corporations. Take that PayPal – hear my Tweet roar! Raaar. Suck my fat one Miller Light –  mmm, yeah – that’s real sweet, just like your beer…  Ohh, loook – funny video link. What’s this charity tweet thing all about again?”

What a fucking joke. If we were all so concerned about cancer, we’d make a proper donation to a local cancer charity or volunteer.

But look at the homepage of the site. 208,695 mentions of #beatcancer. That’s impressive in 24 hours. What’s less impressive (and speaks volumes about the campaign) are the extra donations people made. A total of $744. Ok, so it’s $744 and not be sniffed at. But when the whole of the TwitterFacebookVerse has been all abuzz with it, that’s a shockingly bad result for the charities concerned.

And the reason is that this was never about the charity – it was all about  “look what we can do with social media – isn’t this cool”.

And the joke is on us.