By Neal Wiser (follow him @nealwiser) and Peter Marinari (follow him @krisis)(http://twitter.com/krisis).

First in a series of brief case studies about using Twitter for social good.

Sure, you can use Twitter to tell people about your literal and metaphorical dirty laundry (you really shouldn’t), or you can use Twitter to try to overthrow governments such as Iran and Moldavia (please be careful), but personally, I believe that one of the best uses for Twitter is to rally people around good causes.

And despite the annoyances that can sometimes result when people misuse and abuse Twitter, except for television there has probably never been a technology that can spread the news about events faster than Twitter. As a result, Twitter may just be the perfect platform for charitable causes and institutions.

Getting the Word Out

While some may argue that anything you do to raise awareness of your cause is a good thing, what you really want is to have people take a desired action and actively participate. Otherwise, your cause is just an idea, not a movement, and it’s movements that drive change.

Enter Twitter and its unique ability to instantly disseminate any idea to thousands or even tens of thousands (if not more) people across the globe with just a few clicks. Of course, that’s only part of the equation. Because of how Twitter works, in order to receive any given message, your followers have to be online and reading your tweets at the same time you send them. Or they could subscribe to your Profile page via RSS (or another alert system) so they can catch up on your updates later. Otherwise, they’ll miss the message.

Regardless how you send your messages, we are fortunate that there are many groups who are using Twitter effectively. One of the more interesting and successful examples is BlameDrewsCancer.

What is #BlameDrewsCancer and What am I Blaming it for?

#BlameDrewsCancer is rare for a charitable organization because it’s also a meme.

As a charitable organization, BlameDrewsCancer was founded by Drew Olanoff (@drew), who was recently diagnosed with Stage 3 Hodgkins Lymphoma. Blame Drew’s Cancer’s mission is to support and raise the hopes of people battling and surviving cancer through the use of humor to erase the stigma behind cancer and by inspiring frank discussions of the impact it can have on the lives of those fighting it, as well as those who love and support them.

The #BlameDrewsCancer meme was born when, as a coping mechanism, Drew thought it would be funny to blame his cancer on, well, anything he could. He blamed his cancer for lost keys, the Phillies losing, Twitter going down, and whatever else he could think of.

Then a funny thing happened; thousands of people all over the world starting blaming things on Drew’s cancer too. From “self-inflicted dehydration” to “blinding migraines” to “annoying trance-y techno-y music,” Drew’s cancer got the blame (you too can blame Drew’s cancer. Just click here to automatically insert the Hash Tag #BlameDrewsCancer into your tweets. Then you can blame whatever you want on Drew’s Cancer).

Happy Accidents; Using Twitter as a Tactic

In one context, Drew got lucky; the humor of the #blamedrewscancer Hash Tag was contagious. It also coincided with heavy media coverage of Twitter from Larry King to the local news. The result; the meme went viral. In less than 100 days, over 11,000 people have blamed more than 25,000 things on Drew’s Cancer, and Drew and his team have raised thousands of dollars for cancer-related charities.

Of course, not every charity movement is lucky enough to have a catchy meme. Fortunately, Drew didn’t depend on luck. Realizing that a mere Hash Tag wouldn’t be enough to capture the attention of the general public, Drew turned to developer Mike Demers to create a web site, blamedrewscancer.com. The web site takes advantage of Twitter’s open API to dynamically track tweets with the #blamedrewscancer hash tag and displays them on animated picket signs.

With the web site generating additional buzz and media attention, Drew leveraged Twitter to build a grassroots team of supporters. He solicited volunteers from active twitter users who frequented the Philadelphia Tweetup scene and used team-building techniques, such as an extensively live-tweeted, blogged, and photographed skydiving expedition to establish an esprit de corps. Drew also empowers the entire team to tweet, blog, reach out to sponsors and even appear on panels on his behalf.

Drew’s Twibbon Avatar

But Twitter had even more to offer. While his team actively blogs, supporters branded their Twitter avatars with LiveStrong bands and Blame Drew’s Cancer logos via Twibbon.com to help spread the word even when they were tweeting about other things (click here to add the Drew’s Cancer logo to your Twitter avatar).

How Successful has Twitter been for Drew?

The combination of Drew’s compelling story, his Hash Tag and his newly launched domain quickly garnered the attention of the media. In the months following his diagnosis, Drew had appeared on CNN, AOLHealth, Philadelphia’s Fox29 and in numerous blogs and print outlets.

And celebrities are even participating with Lance Armstrong blaming a shoulder injury on Drew’s Cancer. This tweet ultimately led to LiveStrong, The Lance Armstrong Foundation taking notice of Drew by inviting him to sign on as an official spokesperson and partnering with Blame Drew’s Cancer to provide a meaningful cause for Drew’s supporters to donate towards.

Since its inception about 100 days ago, and thanks to the media coverage and to Twitter, BlameDrewsCancer has been visited over 85,000 times. Additionally, three well-attended fundraising events have generated over $3,000 in donations with a fourth, Drew’s Blame-a-Thon, a 24-hour, marathon benefit concert and film screening held in two locations and live-streamed globally via the internet, is scheduled for Wednesday, 9/9/09. Drew’s Blame-a-Thon represents the culmination of a summer of raising awareness and donations for the fight against cancer. A sellout crowd would raise as much as $10,000 for LiveStrong.

A Good Meme Travels Far and Wide

In addition to the successes listed above, gene research company 23andMe has joined as an official sponsor, contributing $1 each for 500 unique blamers to LiveStrong and helping with costs for the Blame-a-Thon. Taco Bell has also offered an unsolicited $1,000 to LiveStrong for the next set of unique users who blame Drew’s cancer and are planning to send social-media-driven Taco Bell Truck to the Blame-a-Thon.

Meanwhile, Drew continues his fight against cancer (he has had a chemotherapy treatment the week of each fundraising event and Blame-a-Thon will not be an exception) and plans on continuing to raise money for LiveStrong by using the awareness generated by Blame Drew’s Cancer to help other young people fighting cancer find support both online and locally via social networks.

How to Use Twitter for Charity

While there are no hard and firm rules for using Twitter to promote and organize your charity, organizers should keep the following in mind:

• Use Twitter as the foundation of a viral strategy. It’s the fastest, best way to virally spread word-of-mouth.
• Augment Twitter with other social networks and tools. Twitter is great, but don’t limit yourself to only Twitter’s audience.
• Make sure your virtual strategy is realistic. Setting goals too high will result in disappointments instead of surprisingly exceeding expectations.
• Legitimized by partnering with established brands. Many brands like to partner with good causes organized by smart people.
• Advertise in the medium your users communicate on. In other words; be where your “customers” or likely followers are.
• Don’t focus on top-down advertising. It’s slow and hard to build momentum.
• And if you can launch a catchy meme, do that too.

Good luck.

For More Information

Blame Drew’s Cancer Web Site: http://blamedrewscancer.com
Drew’s Blog: http://www.drewolanoff.com
Blame-a-Thon: http://www.blame-a-thon.com
Follow Drew on Twitter: http://twitter.com/drew
LiveStrong Foundation http://www.livestrong.org
American Cancer Society http://www.cancer.org
Make a Wish Foundation http://www.wish.org
Tweetup scene in Philadelphia http://www.phillytweetup.com
Mike Demers http://mikedemers.net
LiveStrong bands http://www.livestrongaction.org/avatar
Blame Drew’s Cancer Twibbon Logos http://twibbon.com/Search?searchQuery=blamedrewscancer

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



#BlameDrewsCancer for this Case Study

We all have our reasons for being active on Twitter, the popular micro-blogging site. Whether you want to grow the readership of your blog, want to connect with like-minded people, or simply want to socialise online, you have your reasons for being a member.

Today I want to look at Twitter from a different perspective, and cover seven uses for Twitter that can be highly useful but certainly aren’t very common.

1. Reputation Management

A few days ago Darren mentioned how Twitter have now tweaked their title tags which allows for higher search engine rankings for your profile name. This may seem like quite a small and irrelevant change to some, but those with their focus on reputation management will know this is a big change.

With the internet growing in popularity by the day, anyone can ‘Google’ your name and find out a lot of information about you, therefore it’s important that there are no negative results in the top 10 listings. If you are working on protecting yourself, you can build an optimised Twitter profile and update it regularly so that you cover one of those top spaces.

2. Product / Service Reviews

Have you ever wanted to find a product review from someone who doesn’t seem to be pushing the item as an affiliate? I know I have. A good way to do this is to use the Twitter Search Engine and type in exactly what you are looking for. Of course you won’t find results for everything, but when people are pleased or angry about a product or service, they are likely to want to share it with the world.

3. Testimonials

Whether you are promoting your own product, or you want some genuine reviews for a product you want to share with your followers / blog readers, then Twitter can be great for that. I’ve been considering doing a review for ‘The Sedona Method’ on my blog which is a personal development program that has literally changed my life.

I asked my Twitter followers what they thought of it and got some great responses. Now if I was to put a review of this on my site, I would have more people who ‘back up my claims’ which add to the social-proof of the offering.

4. Find Beta Testers for Products or eBooks

If you don’t have a blog or any other form of ‘audience’ online, it can be hard to get in touch with people who can help you test certain programs or even eBooks. Thanks to Twitter, I even had a professional copywriter proof-read a 2,000 word blog post for me for nothing in return (I did offer).

5. Live News Tracking

For any of you that may have heard of me before, you’ll know that I spent the last 15 months living in Cape Town. Recently there was a fire in the city that covered Table Mountain, and it was literally a few hundred metres from where I used to live.

I was able to track updates about the fire and make sure that people were OK by watching all the reports on Twitter. Additionally, you could do the same for hurricanes, tornado’s or any other events that you would like to keep a close eye on.

6. Find Solutions to Problems

Going back to blog owners, how many of you have been frustrated by the inconsistency of Feedburner’s feed count reporting? I know some days I lose half my readers and then a few days later they all come back. Well, with Twitter it’s easy to find that you aren’t alone. People rarely blog about small problems, but they are happy to write about them in 140 Characters.

It’s not only Feedburner that you can find help with of course, you could ask your followers any number of questions, or just use their search feature to see if anyone has covered it before.

7. Competitions

I couldn’t write a post like this without highlighting the excellent work that @namecheap are doing with their Twitter profile. From March the 10th to March 24th, they asked a new question on Twitter every single hour, and the first three people to answer correctly received $9.69 added to their Namecheap account (enough for a .com domain).

This means that they got literally thousands of followers on their account, thousands of people sending them @ tweets from their profile, and even lots of blogs like this one covering their excellent use of the service.

What other uncommon uses can you think of for Twitter?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



7 Uncommon Uses for Twitter

The great thing about Twitter is that it has the potential to solve real time problems extremely quickly. With a host of people available online at a particular moment, you can use it to get help on a multitude of levels.

This real time capability has helped establish Twitter as a ‘help engine’ and the twittersphere is awash with stories of how Twitter has helped its users. Guy Kawasaki has had a laptop cable hand delivered by a fellow Twitter user – Matt Perez has used it to test different versions of a website on various mobile devices. It has even had more humanitarian benefits helping to prevent death threats at a school. It has even proven it’s worth through live tweeting at conferences, when a speaker became ill, and people rushed to help.

Many of us are now turning to Twitter as the first place to get an answer or help on a potential problem, its alot quicker than waiting for a reply on a message board. So, if you decide that the Twittersphere is the place you want to ask questions and get help, what are the services and sites you should be following on Twitter?

Mahalo Answers

Twitter: answers

Jason Calacanis, and the team of Mahalo have jumped in quickly on the real time potential of Twitter and registered the ‘answers’ Twitter account, something you would have expected Yahoo Answers to do. Essentially what they are doing is providing an additional interface to the Mahalo site, via Twitter, then letting you know when someone answers the question. Maybe not just as realtime as some of the other services listed here, but useful nonetheless.

CSS Help

Twitter: thatcssguy

Justin Rockwell has found a niche. He now makes about $350 a week scouring Twitter for people tweeting about their problems building Web pages. Using the Twitter ID ThatCSSGuy , he offers to help solve their problems and asks for a tip in return, building both brand exposure for himself and offering a useful service. Follow him if you are in any way involved with web development, and in need of CSS or HTML answers

Twittez

Web: twittez.com

Twittez is a very simple web application that crowd sources for you by looking for the text “does anyone know?” within your tweets. In my opinion this is a very clever way to introduce new users to their service, and gain traction by integrating seamlessly with the Twittersphere.

Twecipe

Twitter: twecipe

Twecipe is the Twitter counterpart of lookandtaste.com . It’s great in that it actually allows Twitter users to tweet at it, and receive recipes back. Genius. If you have a few random bits and pieces around your kitchen and need to cook up a simple recipe, Twecipe is the bot to follow. Well actually, describing Twecipe as a bot is a bit inaccurate. That particular tweet gave me a chuckle a while back.

LazyTweet

Twitter: lazytweet

LazyTweet works right from within Twitter. Just #hashtag your question with the term #lazytweet, and it picks up on it, and resyndicates both via its website and via the Twitter account LazyTweet. Followers of LazyTweet can then visit the website, and either offer an answer via Twitter, or via the comment box on their site.

Twtpoll

Twitter: twtpoll

Another genius little application that allows users to perform market research – at little or no cost. Major brands like EMI are using it to work out how their marketing spend is working out. Now that’s clever Web2.0 marketing. Create your poll on the site, and post on Twitter for your following to vote on. New polls appear syndicated on the website at twtpoll.com – which gives you particular poll question that extra bit of exposure.

ToAnswer

Twitter: toask

Twitter: toanswer

Similar to how Mahalo works, toAnswer posts your questions for other users to answer, then alerts you when an answer is forthcoming. They have two twitter accounts setup, one for the answers, and one for questions. To Ask a question follow toask – and post an @ message to it. To answer someone else’s question simply follow toanswer then post the [questionId]. Both questions and answers are syndicated on the toAnswer website.

WhoisHosting

Twitter: whoishosting

WhoisHosting have come up with a brilliant way of boosting their public profile via Twitter. Basically their twitter bot allows you to find out which webhost is hosting a website. Want to know where Twitip.com is hosted? No problem. Simply send a direct message to the Twitterbot, which will reply with the details.

TwAnswers

Twitter: @askthat

Put together by a lone developer, @le_punk – twAnswers allows posting of a question both through the website at twAnswers, and via the twitter account askthat. It works in much the same way as toanswer, however it features the latest contributors in a sidebar, providing further exposure of it’s users, and thus giving back to the community.

Commuter feed

Twitter: commuter

There’s nothing worse than being stuck in traffic. Well, thanks to Twitter, commuters in the US can now at least pre-emt builds up of traffic, and alerts you to it, before you hit the road. You can now warn fellow road users of builds up of traffic just by tweeting @commuterfeed – with the details of your traffic knightmare. The service isn’t perfect, as it can’t currently geo-tag you, however they have worked on proposing an open standard for traffic alerts, which could help to see something like this take off worldwide.

As Twitter grows in size, these services will only get more and more useful. Websites such as Yahoo Answers, and Microsoft’s recent offering QnA are at real risk from some of the service listed above, as more and more people turn to near real-time answers to give them the help they need. Any of you guys got any other twitter bots or websites that you use to get real-time help? Let me know in the comments.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Twitter: The Real-Time Answer Engine

I saw this a few months back – but was reminded today about it by Momma. Enjoy!

Control Lights with Twitter from Justin Wickett on Vimeo.

What other fun, novel, bizarre uses have you seen for Twitter?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



How to Turn Your Bedroom Lights off With Twitter [VIDEO]