The Livestrong Legacy

You remember Livestrong bracelets, right? Those little yellow bracelets. Katie Couric and Stephen Colbert wore them. They were huge.

So if Livestrong was so successful at promoting a call to action, why aren’t celebrities constantly promoting commercial products in this way? Sure, athletes and rappers do often engage in paid promotion, but the practice is not nearly as prevalent as it could be. With a few exceptions, celebrities are happy to personally promote a cause, but usually won’t personally promote a product, at least not with nearly the same frequency as they conceivably could.

Enter Twitter. There are now celebrities with 500k followers on Twitter. Within a year, there will be Twitter accounts with millions of followers. Same thing goes for the most popular Facebook accounts.

Considering that it only takes a moment for a celebrity to RT a message (and could even be automatic), a lot of these Twitter celebs know that they are sitting on a growing money machine. “Pay per tweet” could eventually generate a huge amount of wealth for these guys.

But the problem is the same reason why we don’t see Katie Couric wearing a PepsiStrong bracelet. It’s not culturally feasible. The celebrities, by and large, won’t put up with it, and neither will we. Especially amidst the populist zeitgeist of the moment.

So for a @startupweekend idea, I propose a very simple formula that can be implemented in a very simple way:

@celeb + @advertiser + @cause + @everyone_else

Yes. There’s already Causes and Social Actions and Change.org and dozens of other similar initiatives.

But there’s a gaping hole in this ecosystem. A perfect project for a @startupweekend would be to make a simple webapp that gives everyone involved in the above equation a very, very, very easy way to perform their role.

Here’s a little teaser for what the end product might look like:

This idea is an example of an edge economics principle that @UmairHaque would enjoy:

Mix the sacred and the profane.

Sacred is sainthood. You exist only to bestow good to others. Amnesty and UNICEF.

Profane is economy 1.0. You exist to extract value. You pay “fuck you” money and fly on private jets.

Both of these aren’t very sustainable. But some interesting things start to happen when you combine them at their extremes.

The “TwitterChange” idea I explore above is an example of combining social microfinance (yay!) and pay-per-post (boo!).

There’s many other great ideas that could be generated by mixing the sacred and the profane. Can you think of any?