Comments on: Ashton Kutcher Ends Hunger in the US by Tweeting

By: Reid Peifer

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 20:05:38 +0000

Hey Joel, thanks for the comment and for providing some much appreciated context to the discussion. The title and the proposition is of course facetious. I was looking at the Ashton Kutcher effort through the lense of marketing and communication and wondering if the technology is applicable to normal folks.

Absolutely the amount of money being mentioned is scarcely a drop in the bucket, and I’m sure it’s presented far more as a marketing effort than out of any serious attempt to address a systemic and hegemonic problem.

But… what can you or I take from this example? Here’s a dude with a built in audience (something we lack) and some new and interesting communication vehicles (which we have at our disposal). Can we leverage things like Twitter or UStream to create instant and live dialog and better communicate our message? Or are these tools dependent on the built-in audience that only comes with celebrity?

What kinds of communication vehicles have worked for your organization? Are you using Facebook, twitter, etc at all to any success?

I’m currently volunteering with an innercity school to try and use the web and some of these tools to more effectively benefit the students and their community. All insight would be much appreciated!

By: Joel Berg

Joel Berg — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:23:15 +0000

Is this supposed to be serious? Hunger systemtically impacts 36.2 million Americans. Low-income Americans would need more than $20 billion — yes billion — extra dollars per year in food purchasing power to end U.S. hunger. The ten million donation is only 1/2400th of the amount of money needed to solve the problem. Giving people the false impression that a few tweets can end a major social problem is absurd. To truly end this problem, we need serious government leadership and for corporations to raise wages, not just give a few token donations.

– Joel Berg
Executive Director
New York City Coalition Against Hunger

By: Nick

Nick — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:59:51 +0000

I think the key is to have an audience that you can talk to that are genuinely interested in the things that you have to say. Ashton Kutcher is this huge celebrity and there is a lot of celebrity worship out there, so he has a pretty big audience to work from.

You or me, we work in a field where there is an audience, but you have to work a lot harder to get them to listen because everyone is trying to get you to listen. I don’t see any problem with shooting out a twitter message saying “Hey I’m playing around in Photoshop with some sweet new brushses, come look – **ustream link**”. You’d probably get a few people, increase your profile in their eyes, and, if you’re good, possibly have a bigger audience the next time you give it a go.

So that’s the main problem: getting the audience. Once you get that, if you are actually good at the stuff that you’re doing, then you’ll be golden. I’d certainly watch a designer create a web template from scratch if for nothing else then to see the whole process from someone who actually knows what their doing’s perspective.