#BeatCancer sets a worrying social media World Record

Some great news today, turned only slightly sour by its possible repercussions.

The Twitterverse was set alight over the weekend when attendees at the BlogWorld & New Media Expo sent tweets and Facebook status updates with the hashtag #BeatCancer.

This wasn’t just some vague rallying call, this was about money. For every tweet featuring the hashtag,the initiative’s sponsors donated one US Cent to cancer charities.

It was certainly a success; the tweets and status updates echoed across the web all weekend and it’s been announced today that #BeatCancer set a Guinness World Record for “Most widespread social network message in 24 hours”. Not only that but $70,000 was raised to be split between for charities.

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Don’t get me wrong, this is great. The money raised is wonderful – but that world record? You can just see the eyes of social media marketers around the world light up at the idea.

How long before every two-bit promotional campaign is trying to increase “engagement” by trying to beat the world record? You can see the tweets already: “Tweet ‘#OurBrandname’ to help break the World Record for ‘Most widespread social network message in 24 hours'”.

Of course, they’ll mostly fail; most people will happily retweet a hashtag to raise money for charity but will see through commercial attempts to copy the idea. Still, I can imagine enough people would retweet this spam for it to become an annoyance and a trending topic.

Grumpiness aside, congratulations to Everywhere, the agency behind the campaign, and the charities who will benefit from the money raised.