Peeves, Pets, and Pontifications.

What We’re Thinking

As part of Alicia Keys’ AIDS charity, Keep a Child Alive, in an interactive twist on the fundraising technique where you have someone pseudo-arrested and get donors to “bail them out,” a number of celebrities including Justin Timberlake, Lady Gaga, Usher and others are staging their virtual deaths. The way it works is this: they’ve sworn off social network communications venues until Keys’ charity raises $1 million.

There will also be videos featuring the stars laid out in coffins – visual confirmation of their virtual demise themed their “Last Tweet and Testament.”

So what? you might be asking. (I did). But then, I don’t follow Justin, or Lady G or Ush. In fact, I’m not much of a follower. But, in this game, I’m the minority. There are gigascads of those who are. And do. In fact, you should think of it as a media problem:

Celebrity Tweet Reach (followers)

Justin Timberlake 3.5 million

Lady Gaga 7.2 million

Alicia Keys 2.6 million

As to frequency… well, Alicia may gain some serious frequency with the coffin videos, but in the Twitter world, it’s the infrequency she’s using to deliver her message. So, Alicia has the attention of more than 13 million celebrity-tweet-junkies right there – a percentage of them ostensibly willing to fork over a buck to get their particular pop icon back on the tweetdeck – and that’s not even accounting for the long list of celebrities who’ve agreed to participate. When you get done adding up the numbers – they look pretty good. How will you be able to donate in order to get your Khloe Kardashian tweet fix? Alicia will be receiving donations vie text messaging and bar-codes, of course!

OK, I think why they are doing it, is awesome. BUT these people signing off Twitter and Facebook doesn’t compel me to give. I follow a few of these celebrities on Twitter and this isn’t making me rush to open my checkbook. I’m trying to think of who might actually do that…. Anyone have thoughts on who they would pay to return to FB or Twitter?

This is interesting to me. One way to think about this might be to, for example, use the typical breakage figures for direct mail as a starting point. So… if it broke like direct mail (e.g. about a 1% response) and if each of the 1% contributed one dollar, then you would have to reach 100,000,000 folks, $5 – 20,000,000, $10 – 10,000,000 folks, etc. I’m betting on a breakage of .5% (depending on how much press the initiative gets). I figure if they’re reaching 40,000,000 people with it, they’ll hit their mark pretty quickly. It would be interesting to start a pool on when they’ll hit their mark.