Litterati: Hashtag like a Boss

Seeing a friend post about ‘mobile social movement’ (please recommend a better label haha) Litterati made me think further into the subject of ’cause and effect’ social trends from the apps on your phone and essentially, the internet. The idea behind Litterati is brilliant. Take a picture of trash, hashtag it, pick it up and dispose of it properly. Since it’s hashtagged/geotagged, you can directly see the impact of the cleaning effort, problem areas of litter in your area, plus identify the brands that produce the most litter. The next step would be taking this information and working with companies and organizations to find environmentally friendly and sustainable solutions.

This mobile ‘call to action’ could evolve to anything from act’s of kindness, telling jokes, donating food to a family. It would make ‘doing the right thing’ With any positive opportunities, there’s the flip side that naturally bring negative results that would happen including practical jokes, ‘jackass-like’ recipes for disaster. Overall, this could help inject a bit of positive results other than just hashtagging another “Come At Me Bro” photo.

Video proof of a benevolent act of some sort could bring a bit of integrity back into brands and their customers. For example, take a Klondike commercial but have it end with your target audience submitting an act of kindness of some sort. “What would you do? I’d visit seniors at a home. I recycle all home glass/paper waste.”

With 15 seconds of video now on instagram, this opens a floodgate for all types of user created video content. Similar to the Sun Drop commercials, anyone can submit a video with a certain hashtag that can be part of a contest for virtually any brand that’s clever enough to reach their target. The real challenge is making it fun to do, fun to watch and of course, relevant enough to get people motivated.

Why Stop There?

The same goes for YouTube. For all the videos on YouTube and as much time the world’s internet community spends watching them, there should be a bill or nonprofit – SOMETHING developed or written to turn views into donations. This isn’t entirely new, as some videos purpose are to gather views and turn them into helping people. So for example, every 1 million views there are to a video, $5,000 is donated to a charity that is pre-selected by the uploader from a list given during the upload process. Clearly some cap has to be instated, similar to the timer that most kickstarter or indiegogo projects are given. Maybe 30 days, maybe 60, maybe 200. I’m not here to talk specifics but to communicate with you what traction (if any) something like this could get and if it’s something YOU’D get behind.

So if Gangnam Style reaches 2 billion views this year (they’re currently at 1.7), the thought of a whole orphanage in Rwanda gets healthy meals for a year seems worth it, doesn’t it? The turnstile for popular YouTube videos spins way too fast for it to NOT go towards some sort of beneficial purpose. Something good has to come out of all the dumb videos on the internet, haha, there I said it. No doubt, keep watching TED talks. As a precaution to stray away from any corruption this may bring by excluding any corporations like Blue Cross, GoodWill, Salvation Army, etc. Small, third-party, mid to lower level non-profits and more community-raised projects are the way to go these days.

Would you download the Litterati app? What app would YOU make to help others on a large scale? One thing is for sure, there’s always room for doing good.