We’ve covered a lot of interesting stories this week, including a charity bike ride in the US and a new anti-bullying PSA. What made those two specifically stand out was celebrity involvement. The bike ride featured Katee Sackoff, possibly best known for playing Starbuck in the Battlestar Galactica reboot, and the anti-bullying PSA was being fronted by Monica Lewinsky. When we covered these we cover them because we felt they were interesting stories about marketing ethical projects. One thing I hadn’t counted on was whether the celebrity involvement would make a difference to our reporting.
I wrote up the stories as I usually would and when I came to tweeting them as I do for every story I put up, I included the celebrities twitter handles onto the tweets. Both Katee and Monica were kind enough to retweet the stories. For a few hours after each retweeting my Twitter went a bit mad and it was great. Checking on the Twitter analytics for this month says that because of those two tweets we had 95% more impressions than we had the previous month. Both retweets meant that a lot of people had a look at the site and hopefully some of them might come back.
It struck me how the difference between having a celebrity involved within your ethical campaign and not and how it can make a huge difference. Both those retweets got to about 20,000 people more then would look at my usual tweets. And days later I’m still getting people clicking on those links through the retweets.
I ran a campaign earlier this year to raise money for a local good cause, the Phoenix club, part of that involve some people very kindly giving us characters within their works such as Denise Mina, Shaun Hutson and AL Kennedy giving us character names in forthcoming books, and comedy writer John Finnemore giving us a character name on one of his radio plays, I got some traction when I posted about these things but nothing compared to when the authors mentioned it on Twitter or Facebook and again it proves that they have an audience you might not have and it can make a huge difference if you can get celebrity support and help.
I think it’s great that some of the celebrities give me time to such great courses and I hope they realise how much of a difference a tweet, a retweet or mention can be to some of these causes.
There are some who look to attack celebrities, but I prefer to think of the good that so many do, rather than easy attacks.
So thank you this week to Katee Sackoff, and Monica Lewinski, not only for helping some great causes but also for helping this site get to a few more people and hopefully some of them will find something of interest here. On the off chance any celebrities read this please send this to your other celebrity friends and if there are any celebrities out there who would like to adopt us and retweet us occasionally then please get in touch as it would be really cool 😉
Links
Monica Lewinsky Debuts “In Real Life” PSA and New #BeStrong Emojis
