Haiti hoaxers and Facebook breast cancer opportunism
Nothing like a natural disaster or charitable cause to get the hoaxers and cynical marketers active.
This patently stupid status update is spreading across Facebook:
This status is being tracked, the owners of facebook have confirmed they will send $1 to the rescue fund for the Haiti earthquake disaster for every time this is cut and paste as a status. You only have to leave it for a minimum of 1 hour. Lets all do our bit to help.
I know people are desperate to do something tangible, but copy and pasting a frankly ridiculous piece of bunkum on to a social network site isn’t helping anyone. Who starts this tosh and for what purpose?
Worse though are the companies making deliberately cynical attempts to capitalise on charity work.
The Box Prize Giveaway company, which has amazingly weaseled its way into the top 20 fan pages on Facebook, is trying to leverage some of the interest in breast cancer which has recently spread through the site. Their offer:
“We will donate $10,000 for every one million new fans added to our page by January 31, 2010″.
For a company that’s business model relies on high volume participants this is a great way to boost numbers. A million fans for $10,000? What a cheap piece of marketing! And all wrapped up in a warm charitable blanket.
Here’s a counter offer: I’ll laugh out loud for ten seconds for every million people who un-fan the Box Prize Company. Now that would be charitable.
Bra pic from Tracey’s photo stream.
By Dom Waghorn, Head of User Engagement at 
