I’ve been asked to participate as a blogger/twitterer in this friendly contest, called #IJustPlantedATree @SXSW 2012. For this participation, they’ve given me one of their slick Nokia Lumia 800s to use.*  From the site:

So, during our time at the Interactive portion of SXSW, we invited 50 of our favorite Twitter friends to help us out in our mission. They will take part in a 48 hour online Twitter challenge using the hashtag #ijustplantedatree. Each time they tweet with that hashtag, 5 trees will be planted locally by our friends at the Arbor Day Foundation. To make sure we keep up the pace, an online leaderboard has been established, and will start to keep track of who is planting the most trees.

There is a sub-contest where the tweeter who plants the most trees gets one of the shiny new Nokia Lumia 900 phones. Great if I win, but I’m not concerned about winning. If you re-tweet me, you’ll also be helping plant trees (not helping me win).

So if you see Tweets regarding “ijustplantedatree” you’ll know what I’m up to.

*Disclosure – it is my option to keep or return the phone – I have not decided yet what I will do. I will update this later.

If you haven’t seen Drew Olanoff and Drew Carey on CNN, – watch it now.

If you don’t have time to watch, here’s the short version:

• Go to Twitter.
• Follow DrewFromTV – Drew Carey of The Price Is Right, Whose Line is it Anyway, The Drew Carey Show, etc.
• Drew Carey will donate $1 because you followed him. Ultimately he’s promised LiveStrong Foundation up to 1 Million Dollars – $1 for each Twitter Follower.

Just follow the guy, help reach a $1 Million donation. More info at http://www.milliondollardrew.com . If you don’t even have a Twitter account, this is a reason to get one.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Drew Carey Bids $100K For Twitter Name (huffingtonpost.com)
• Make Drew Carey give away $1 million (cnn.com)
• Help Drew Olanoff Raise $1 Million Dollars for Cancer Research (pulverblog.pulver.com)

CHARITY SMACKDOWN:: Celebrities Compete, Charities Win www.charitysmackdown.com

Congratulations to the Smackdown Teams! Our big winner is Team Corbin! PayPal will donate an additional $5,000 to Stand Up To Cancer. Watch this space for more exciting Charity Smackdown action!

I am truly grateful to all my Facebook and Twitter friends, blog readers and everyone who pitched in an passed along the messages we sent out about Team Corbin and Stand Up to Cancer. I know I asked people for money, and bothered them with messages over the 10 days of the project. But as I wrote in my Charity Smackdown Update, and my Why I Stand Up To Cancer – Abby articles, I take the fight against Cancer personally and I hope you do too.

In total the project raised over $30,000 for 9 causes, all of which are real dollars and will help real people in need. So, Smack Talk aside, we all won something for our causes – awareness, dollars and new friends.

Some information – my use of Bit.ly URL in several of my tweets and Facebook posts lead to over 1137 clicks to the Team Corbin page, most directly from the URL being clicked via someone’s browser or email, but some via Twitter, Facebook, Twitter search and clients, and some smaller number from my own website. While I can’t draw any scientific conclusions regarding where people most participated from without data from the Charity Smackdown site owners, I did learn more about activating a network and getting people interested in a cause.

smack09, su2c, stand up to cancer

Over on the Stand Up To Cancer blog, they tell great stories of people who are inspiring. One of my stories and reasons for Standing Up To Cancer is about my cousin, Abby. At age 12, when many of her friends were more interested in boys, haircuts and bat mitzvahs, Abby had some symptoms that no one could figure out.

She took it upon herself to go online and do her own research, and her conclusion was unfortunately correct: she had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. And if you quote her the Larry David quote about “the good kind” she’ll look at you with fierce anger, then tell you there is no good kind of Hodgkins.

Abby went through hell, lost her hair, was sick all the time from chemo and radiation, and basically lost a year of her childhood. All while managing to complete school work and come back the next year as President of her class.

I look at her now, a grown woman, at an Ivy League school, working for a prominent government office as an intern and probably in line for a serious job there, and I marvel at how she has continued her life.

But I also know she and her family always have be on the look out for the Big C.

So, as part of this Smackdown, I Stand Up for Abby, and I’ve made a donation today to Stand Up To Cancer, in hopes that my amount will make a difference for the girls like Abby in the future.

Click and donate, please. The Dropdown menu lets you donate more than $5, by the way.

I’ve been asked to participate in Charity Smackdown 09 – a cause marketing event contest between teams lead by Celebrities with Social Media ‘notables’ on each team. Each of the Smackdown Teams has from March 16th at 11pm EST to March 26th to raise as much money as possible for the causes.
My cause, as it has been since last year, is Stand Up To Cancer. Cancer has touched my life in terrible ways through family and neighbors over the past few years, and this is my way to give back. (More stories as the week goes on).
My team is “Team Corbin” led by musician (and High School Musical star) Corbin Bleu, and including Natali Del Conte (@NataliDelConte), Tech Reporter for CNET and CBS’ the Early Show, and Jared Eng of celeb blog JustJared.com (@jaredEng). My team is up against some stiff competition, from celeb power like Alec Baldwin and 2 of the stars of Heroes, and also from some top social media celebs like Mashable’s Pete Cashmore, WalMart’s 11 Moms, MCHammer and Chris Brogan.
Will You lend me your friends and your network to help promote this cause?

*****Call To Action******

Please help me to at least place respectfully in this competition by taking one or more of the following actions:

1.    Look for the donation widget below and Please link to it.(A simple way to do this is to copy the Web Address of this page, and make it a link via your Facebook Status message – see below). (UPDATE:)

2.    Make your own post in support of my team and link to or embed our donation widget.
3.    Donate. If you can spare the $5-10 you’d usually spend on Starbucks for the week or something, that’s great. It all helps. If I could get 100 friends to send $5 or $10 I’d be absolutely ecstatic. If Cancer has touched your life, consider doubling what you’re giving.
4.    Add my team’s donation Widget to your blog,  MySpace, or webpage. There’s going to be a separate thing for Facebook.
5.    I’ll be Tweeting about #Smack09 – please follow me and my teammates on twitter (@howargr) and ReTweet my posts – or “like” them on FriendFeed. The hashtag is #smack09. Also, follow @smack_talk on Twitter.
6.    Change your social network status or IM status to “Support Team Corbin and help @HowardGr to Stand Up To Cancer”  http://tr.im/smackdown #smack09 please RT”
7.    Send an email to friends: “Hi, my friend/colleague/this guy I know Howard Greenstein is part of an online event to raise money for Stand Up To Cancer. Please see URL for more details and to support his cause, donate at URL.”
8.    Suggest something that I should do here that I haven’t thought of yet. Comments are open.
Anything you do (even donating to one of the other causes) is helpful to this event, and to me. This event goes for 9 days –  if I’m bugging you let me know, or just delete the mail.
Finally, this event is called a “smackdown” because some of the fun is talking smack to the other teams. It is all in good fun, and no one (including me) should take offense.
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You for helping me and for helping my team in this cause.

Disclaimer: The event is called a “SmackDown” because there will be “Trash Talk,” defined by the Urban Dictionary as: “In the course of a competitive situation putting down your opponent verbally or saying how good you think you are. Often involving talk of moms or sisters” ie: “Your momma’s computer is so slow, she can’t even use Facebook.”

I have no intent to personally insult or harm anyone, make them feel bad or send them crying home. This is all in good fun. And we’ll all watch the “Your momma” references. My mom reads the blog. Enough said.

Full Disclosure part: The contest is sponsored by PayPal and Tech Reporting blog Mashable (Disclosure – I’ve recently been working on an article to be published in Mashable – non-compensated).

The contest money raising will be done via PayPal – and the organizers assured me that aside from the usual transaction fees (2% or so for Non-Profits) that the full money goes right into those charity controlled accounts.

I was asked to participate by my friends at Weber Shandwick (I’ve consulted for Weber in the past, but not recently), who first introduced me to Stand Up 2 Cancer last summer. SU2C  is

“a new initiative created to accelerate groundbreaking cancer research that will get new therapies to patients quickly and save lives. SU2C’s goal is to bring together the best and the brightest in the cancer community, encouraging collaboration instead of competition. SU2C utilizes the entertainment industry to create awareness and to build broad public support for this effort.”

SU2C supports AACR.org – which states in its financials that “88 cents of every dollar spent supports research grants, fellowships and scientific education for AACR member scientists, as well as public education. ”

A few folks on the net have recently complained about these kind of online fund raising events – even saying this promote the corporate interests over the charities. I disagree. Having worked on the 9-11 relief efforts as part of the Twin Towers Fund from 2001-2003, I can tell you some of the largest companies in the world made huge donations that, while they may have hit the newspapers or news wires for the day, helped the lives of people for years to come.

I sense this long term awareness and effort to help is the intention in this event, and I’m supporting it. Kudos to Pete and the Mashable team for stepping up for this event.

If I can help raise money for my cause, for any of the great causes, if I can raise awareness about these causes, then I will have done something useful and valuable during this week. I’m going to be asking you, my friends and readers, to pass along messages, support the cause (any one you choose) and enjoy the playful smack talk that goes with this ‘smackdown.’

The widget below (to be inserted when it goes live) will allow you to donate to SU2C and the “promote” page for Team Corbin will allow you to add a badge to your blog, MySpace, website,  or other site in order to spread the word.

Please help me promote this fun online event, and please donate what you can. Thank you.

It is a bit of a bold strategy, calling on all of us to promote his conference in the context of helping a charity at the same time. I’m not sure I love the strategy, actually, but it is bold and it has the potential to be a new model:

• Paying for mailing lists =”tired”
• Paying a charity in exchange for people’s attention = “wired?”  (Or even Causewired?)

Lee’s article is below – go read it, sign up (and tell them where you found out about it, eh?).

Social Media: Can it Raise Just 5000.00 Dollars to Help 5 Year Olds? – Emerging Communications Blog

Let’s have a public test of the effectiveness of social media. Let’s do it with the aim of measuring the reach and usage of social media (and hopefully with some serendipity regarding the results). Let’s do it in a way that helps us understand the role and significance of social media on the emerging communications landscape.

Creative Commons awareness is about letting people know they have a choice when they share their words, pictures, and images in public- they can limit how those media are used, or they can allow people to re-use them in specific ways that benefit everyone. (This article is (cc)2008 attribute-share alike).
Read more about these 2 great causes:

Blog Action Day 08

On October 15th bloggers everywhere will publish posts that discuss poverty in some way. By all posting on the same day we aim to change the conversation that day, to raise awareness, start a global discussion and add momentum to an important cause.

Be Common on October 15, 2008 | Social Media Club

October 15, 2008 represents the first opportunity to evangelize the importance of standards and move this mission forward in partnership with Creative Commons.

So what can YOU do to help create more awareness around the important service Creative Commons provides? There are 3 ideas which certainly would help which have been bantered around, but I suspect the community can come up with more by October 15th. The key theme is just to identify a way to let folks know about the best practices around the sharing/creating of creative works leveraging a Creative Commons License.

bad08, blogactionday, creative commons

THE PAY IT FORWARD CHRONICLES: The Small Good, A New Book and A Busy Fall

First the Small Good. A concept that I first ran across earlier this year as I listened to a podcast. Here’s the basic premise:

Someone has a need, an issue, a problem. They come to you for help. From your prospective it takes little effort to help this person – maybe a referral to a tax attorney you know or a tip on how to get better publicity for your company.

To the person your helping, it’s HUGE! You have saved them time, money, worry – whatever that may be.

My Small Good for the day is letting you know about this. I hope it provides you good value and something to think about.

helping government become more open, transparent and effective through better use of published information.” Show Us a Better Way asks “Do you think that better use of public information could improve health, education, justice or society at large?”  The task force put up 20,000GBP for the winner of that competition to develop the best idea. (I noticed the Google prize via Tom’s blog).

All these prizes to improve the world, plus X-prizes for 100 mile-per gallon cars, space travel, and more.

I hope that these contests and market forces can help us improve the world in some significant way, and I’m glad some big companies are asking for solutions with their hands on their wallets. Now, about that idea for a jet pack I had…