Anna Liza Bella (Home)

Back in 2009, we at MTV thought that there was something compelling about the data that could be compiled from countless Tweets, posts, status updates and blog entries in the Internet universe. What if with clever design and strong visuals, this data could actually become entertainment?

Well, we got really lucky the first year we rolled it out. That was the Video Music Awards of Kanye West vs. Taylor Swift fame, when a drunk Kanye stage crashed Taylor’s acceptance of the Best Female Video award by grabbing the mic and proclaiming, “I’m sorry, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.” So, thanks to Mr. West’s antics, the first-ever VMA Twitter Tracker went down in history with his big mug dwarfing the other celebs for the first quarter of the show.

Several awards shows and iterations later, MTV won a Shorty Award for Best Integration of Social Media with Traditional Media for the 2010 VMA Twitter Tracker and the NY Times just featured Stamen Design (our partners in this endeavor) in their Business Section Slipstream article.

Now that it’s been proven as an entertainment vehicle, how else will this info be manifested into viable forms of entertainment? Is it only a matter of time before this can be the seed for a new reality show? 

Alicia Keys’ Keep A Child Alive campaign has come up with an intriguing way to capitalize on celebrity for a good cause. A number of well-known personalities, such as Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, Elijah Wood and Serena Williams are “dying” digital deaths — they will cease to communicate on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking platforms. Their profiles will not be revived until their fans succeed in donating over a million dollars to the charity, which helps provide medical care and support services for children and families dealing with HIV and AIDS in Africa and India.

Fans can text the first name of the celebrity they are mourning to 90999 and $10 is automatically donated to the cause. There are also $35 t-shirts with a bar code that can be scanned using a Stickybits or Wimo app on smart phones to donate, though this option seems somewhat clunky and roundabout.

My prediction is that the time is ripe for social media and cause marketing to come together, especially when the user doesn’t have to do anything that isn’t already part of their every day behavior. I am curious to see how quickly they hit their goal of $1 M, not a very high one given that Lady Gaga has over 7 million followers and counting. Of course, it does open up some celebs to the somewhat sad situation wherein none of their fans donate and they must spend the rest of their digital lives in a limbo between “life” and “death”. Oh how it will chafe to not be able to tweet such important and momentous messages like this one from Ryan Seacrest:

“Lunch time at idol. great food from RN74 brought in…Been hugging families all day and just realized I have body glitter all over my jacket”

Maybe it would be better for some to just donate a portion of their large salaries instead of exposing themselves to that kind of torture…

I was recently at a dinner with some friends bemoaning the fact that Twitter has been having a tough time keeping up with the volume of traffic. We have definitely reached a saturation point… when the car wash/lube place on 4th Ave. in Brooklyn has an LCD sign saying, “Follow us on Twitter,” it’s the beginning of the end. So my friends told me that I should consider posting some thoughts to chronicle how Twitter will decline. Will it have the same fate as Friendster? We’ll have to wait and see. For now, techcrunch had a scoop that I found interesting: http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/29/twitter-api-limit/