Many of you may have seen the Trending Topic #beatcancer on twitter this weekend. It was supposed to run from Friday, October 16 9pm to Oct 17, 9am and help raise money for cancer, with .01 being donated by Ebay and Miller/Coors for each tweet and facebook post that included the “#beatcancer” hashtag in the post. They were also supposed to be contacting Guinness Book of World Records to set a record.
Huh. After a little research and after accidentally(stupidly not researching first) duping some of my own followers on another twitter account I have for petoutletmall.com on twitter(apologies to all), it appears that this #beatcancer thing was just a hoax.
Hoax researched on October 18
The original website that started this http://beatcancereverywhere.com/about.html states:
“The team at BlogWorld is proud to be part of this record-setting social media event,” said Rick Calvert, CEO of BlogWorld/New Media Expo www.blogworldexpo.com. “We’re especially excited that we can be the launch point for bringing people together to help fight cancer.”
Mashable.com, the well known authority site in the blogging world even had a post on #beatcancer.
Read the comments below too. These are what prompted my search and why I can say it was all a scam. Especially the comment about the site only being a week old, which was true(GoDaddy info for beatcancereverywhere.com).
But this morning after going to NYTimes.com and LATimes.com and using their search box for the terms twitter, beatcancer, #beatcancer, beatcancer blogworldexpo, beat cancer ebay, etc, nothing was coming up.
I ran a search for the same on Google News, Yahoo.com and Bing.com. Noda, zilch, zero. And also tried on all three of the major search engines: “site:www.blogworldexpo.com beatcancer” and beat cancer ebay, and more, nothing.
All was not lost
I guess it pays to do a little research before hand, even if it feels like you are doing something for the good of the people.
But in reality, it did bring twitter users closer together, so all was not lost. Some new friendships may have been started and I’m sure some were bonded stronger. But, it still sucks, we were DUPED AGAIN TWITTERHEADS!
Have fun,
Doc Westfield
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