I don’t know if Ben & Jerry’s is really doing the world much good through their promotion of the Fair Trade movement, nor if anyone at Ben & Jerry’s actually cares about fair trade, but I’ll say this: Fairtweets.com represents real business change.
No longer owned by notorious do-gooders Ben and Jerry, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream nevertheless still promotes itself as a green and socially-responsible company.
When I first came across Fairtweets.com, I scratched my head a bit. When I noticed that Fairtweets.com points its users at random articles about the fair trade movement including the negative ones, I scratched it some more. Then I started digging.
At Fairtweets.com, you can send your tweets to the world. There are lots of ways to use Twitter, of course, and Fairtweets.com is just another … until you see what’s happening under the hood.
The idea behind fairtweets.com is simple: send your tweets from there, and whatever space of your 140 characters isn’t used gets re-purposed as a link to a random story about the Fair Trade movement. So it’s all good, right? If you believe in the movement and are OK doing Twitter from fairtrade.com, you do a good deed.
Here’s the business change:
Fairtweets.com works on a simple premise: by counting backward from 140 as you type your message, Fairtweets can decide what to display after your tweet. Since at the end there’s always a link to another page and that link requires six characters, fairtweets.com works as long as your tweet is 134 characters or less.
Meaning that after building the simple twitter interface, whoever wrote fairtweets for Ben & Jerry’s had to craft a different message for tweets of one character, tweets with two, three, and so on up to 134. And having done so, Ben & Jerry’s has made a very simple app do their bidding and look as though someone is doing something pretty darned magical in the background.
Of course, the do-good message Ben & Jerry’s is using fairtweets.com for could just as easily be used for more traditional promotional schemes, or pretty much any grouping of 134 messages or even computer viruses.
Amazing. Simple. Business Change.
If you’d like to do some good for the Fair Trade movement I encourage you to head over to fairtweets.com to send out a few tweets. And if you need help planning your next business change, reach me, here.
