I just stumbled across such a simple idea entitled ‘I Wear Your Shirt’. Basically some guy in America will wear any T-Shirt for a 24 hour period. Some of the companies have included Cruise Liners, Tooth Paste Brands, Social Media Websites etc.
The idea is that an advertiser buys the day at face value so, for example, January 1st = $1 and December 31st = $365. All days for 2009 are fully booked however he is planing on teaming up with a mate from a different time zone for 2010 and selling the spaces at double the price (2 people!).
Here is what you get for you hard earned dollar:
This year he will be set to make $67,000! Check the site out at: http://iwearyourshirt.com/
Sitting at my desk I got a new message at work. Opened it up to see a potential life saver that will put a smile on my face. It ended up being a letter sent to Richard Branson by a guy who was massively dissatisfied with the in flight food. For the rarer few of you who still have not had this delight enter your inbox you can see it here (click the blue download button in the new window).
After time I started to hear more and more people chatting about it until eventually it was on The Times’ website so obviously this was starting to get media attention. The thing that shocked me though was just how quickly the online social media hype exploded with chatter about the letter. Using Twitscoop a colleague produced the below graph:
This was sent round yesterday and as you can see there was an exponential increase in hype on Twitter.com. It turns out that the key spark to this inferno was Stephen Fry (twitter name – stephenfry) who mentioned the letter on his twitter page.
This exercise shows the power of social media and the potential in harnessing it for brands to get an insight of how they are regarded at a peer to peer level and a non bias audience. The more companies start to see social media as a serious influence to their brand image, the more we are going to see encroachment of corporations into our online personal live’s to influence what we think. Obviously I am all for it otherwise I would have some serious moral dilemmas with my job however it is going to be interesting to see how far it is taken.
