We all recognize Canadian inventiveness in cool products like the BlackBerry and Lululemon gear. But yesterday was a watershed day in Canadian innovation with the launch of A Million Tweets to Remember, a movement that is revolutionizing the way social causes connect with online communities.
A Million Tweets to Remember — or 1Mtweets in the online world — seeks to digitally memorialize one million people who have lived with Alzheimer’s disease. Built on Twitter, the 1Mtweets website allows family and friends to tweet about the Alzheimer’s sufferer they are memorializing and to make a donation to research on the aging brain.
Tweeters can also create a multimedia web page — called a twibute — for their loved one to expand the thoughts in their tweet. One in three of us knows someone with Alzheimer’s and through a twibute we can give our children a portrait of who they once were.
What’s groundbreaking about A Million Tweets to Remember is that it unleashes the power of social networks for a philanthropic cause. Many of us have joined online communities and even more of us have contributed to charities. The 1Mtweets movement shows how these two aspects of our lives can be brought together.
Not surprisingly, then, Jordan Banks, the founder of A Million Tweets to Remember, is a star in both fields. “The sense of community on Twitter is incredible, making it a great resource to raise awareness for Alzheimer’s and memorialize those who have lived with this devastating disease,”?Banks says.
A Million Tweets to Remember will be the largest movement to date on Twitter and will hopefully raise a lot of money for research on Alzheimer’s. Most importantly, it will be the largest archive ever created of people with dementia.
Just last week, U.S.-based marketing guru Seth Godin commented on the power of online social communities and asked, “But where are the charities?”
Look north, Seth, look north to Canada. And check out www.1Mtweets.com.
