The Power of Twitter (& its users)

Twitter is an excellent potential tool for getting public support for a particular cause. Trouble is, in order to spread the word you really need a lot of followers so that lots of people can hear your message.

In starting out trying to get publicity for your cause you probably won't have many followers, so you need to get your message to someone who does have lots of followers and who is willing to retweet your message for you. Here lies the dilemma. No doubt all the celebrities and such get so many tweets that even if they are checking their '@replies' they will probably miss yours in the flood they get every second.

I've been thinking about this for sometime as there are a couple of causes that I'm desperate to help and get the message out there for. Many of the charities I support already have great public support so I'm concentrating my efforts for the next few weeks on 2 in particular.

The first of these is Project_18. Those of you who have already read my blog will be familiar with Cate Bolt and her fantastic idea to help both the children and the orangutans of Indonesia. Currently circumstances are difficult for the Bolt familiy, partly due to their dedication to this Project, and are now having to camp around Queensland having been evicted from their house shortly before Christmas. Fortunately they've got slightly warmer temperatures than we have here in the UK at the moment, but it's constantly raining and besides a family deserves a home. It can't be easy camping with 9 children in the best of circumstances.

The second of these is Jenny Rowbory. Jenny suffers from severe ME which leaves her bed-bound and unable to sit up. Jenny lives in the UK where we are fortunate enough to have the National Health Service - that is, until the won't pay. She has had many medical consultations and has finally been given a treatment plan. The difficulty is, that it will cost £35,000 and her local PCT won't pay, or even contribute towards this. Not to be deterred she has written a wonderful poetry anthology which has now been published in order to help raise the money for her medical costs.

These are my 2 chosen causes for January and I need your help. I'm not asking for money, I'm just asking for you to do a bit of typing. I think that the only way to get real support for these causes is to get them noticed and picked up by a public figure and one of the ways of doing this is through Twitter. I think that perhaps, if a group of us agree a time to be all logged in together, preferably when a figure or two of choice is also online (trickier I know, but some seem to be on for large chunks of time), then if we all tweet them at the same time, with the same message then it might just get through.

I can't do this alone. Will anyone spare a few seconds to help these worthy causes?

Thank you.