Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Usher and other celebrities have joined a new campaign called Digital Life Sacrifice on behalf of Keys’ charity, Keep a Child Alive. The entertainers plan to sign off of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday, which is World AIDS Day. The participants will sign back on when the charity raises $1 million.

“It’s really important and super-cool to use mediums that we naturally are on,” Keys said in a phone interview from New York last week.

For the campaign — which also includes Jennifer Hudson, Ryan Seacrest, Kim and Khloe Kardashian, Elijah Wood, Serena Williams, Janelle Monae and Keys’ husband, Swizz Beatz — celebrities have filmed “last tweet and testament” videos and will appear in ads showing them lying in coffins to represent what the campaign calls their digital deaths.

Raising money for children? Good thing.  Raising it on World AIDS day for a charity devoted to providing anti-retrovirals to HIV positive children?  I like it.

Getting celebrities to sign off Twitter and to film them in coffins as  a “last tweet and testament?” Wow.  Words fail me as to exactly how … tacky and tasteless this exercise is.  Don’t believe me?  Head over to the site to see for yourself.

Don’t get me wrong: this is a great cause.  I just question this marketing effort behind it.  It goes without saying that HIV is a deadly disease which causes incredible hardship, suffering, and death around the world.  But, having celebrities “play dead” in coffins just seems to trivialize it all.

And besides, with a strictly “negative” appeal by celebrities to not sign back on until $1M is raised, isn’t that just begging some cynics to appeal to everyone to *not* donate any money?

And when will we begin to see others publicly acclaim that some celebrities are better off “in coffins” than they are alive?  (not that I am, of course — but you can bet some smart aleck will)

Man, I’d love to hear a professional marketer’s opinion on this.  I’ll bet there’s going to be a lot of noise, but not a lot of signal on this one — which is a shame, because I think direct appeals in a tasteful way could just as easily raise the money that they’re looking for.

1. Can the power of disclosure excuse everything? How about anything?  You know, I get that mortgages need to be paid, and that we’re in the worse recession since whenever.  I get that.  But I think there’s something also to be said for the importance of credibility and personal capital.  Its great when you’re someone like Chris Brogan who has a ton of it to spend, who is largely beloved by his fans and community, who will give him the benefit of the doubt.  I am not saying that what he did was specifically wrong — but what I will say is that disclosing the relationship probably had much less of an effect on his credibility as a result.  

For lesser (and greater) bloggers, I think Duncan Riley has the gist of it: when you take money for your opinion, even if its clearly marked as such (and “nofollow’d”), what enters the minds of your readers is the possibility of the breakdown between integrity and commerce.  If you have the trust of your audience and explain the rules, it’ll probably work out (as it did in Mr. Brogan’s case) as shocking as the first case will likely be.  

But it may not for others.  And it may not for all things.  It would be an interesting social experiment, for example (pun intended) to see how elastic the trust is that Chris Brogan’s community has in him — and, for that matter, if transparency is all it takes.

Without belabouring the point (and the idea of schadenfreude aside), I think the answer probably lies somewhere between being barely intrusive and far too intrusive with the advertorialization of content, with the tension, of course, for bloggers who are actually trying to make a go of it (rather than test it), in trying to maximize profits (and therefore posts), all the time 

2. Ted Murphy is a genius.  If I told you Chris Brogan was going to be doing a paid post for Ted Murphy two years ago, you would have branded me a crazy lunatic loony tunes bat-crap super crazy (and I would have put *my* integrity at risk!).  But at the end of 2008 what do we have?  One of the biggest thought leaders in social media taking Ted Murphy up on an offer after all.  Yes, the details are clearly different and important, but I think we need to save some of the spotlight for how crafty Ted Murphy is.

He could have put his tail between his legs, or he could have stuck with it — and more to the point, wined, dined, and otherwise got to know a lot of important thought leaders in a more personal way to point out, yea, that he is fact not the Devil/ Satan/ Evil Incarnate.

I suspect many of them were (rightly) convinced, and in so doing, realized that it is difficult to write brutal posts about the enterprise a man represents when you’ve actually met the same man.  All details aside, I know I did.

3. Sponsored posting has crossed the rubicon.  Now that Chris Brogan (and others) are doing it, I think it will be a clear sign to the herd that it must be OK.  I think others are going to do it for a bunch of reasons, not including the very legitimate fact that, returning to my original thoughts, mortgages and bills must be paid, and even a little help can be a good thing.  There will be fall out of course.  Some purists will beat their chests about the death of blogging (again).  Others will experiment a little more.  Others still will dilute their blogs so much that it will make the blogging gods cry a little more. They’ll probably suffer in other ways.

But this weekend, I think paid posting crossed a rubicon of sorts, thanks in no small part due to the crafty work of Ted Murphy.  It may change subtly, but I think that blogging is probably going to change in a way many had turned their noses up to just a few years ago — and given a network of factors, it will likely continue change in Izea’s favor for the near future.

There are a few (tech) blogging topics that are eternal. Comments vs. no comment.  A-listers vs. non-A-listers.  Techmeme sucks vs. Techmeme is still teh hot.  Also, for those in social media: Digg is pwned by a small number of diggers.

Yes, in a bit of unverified research that would have fit in the tech scene in 2006, popFail has “dugg up” (sorry, couldn’t help myself) some data that confirms what Digg management has furiously tried to avoid over several iterations — that a few individuals pretty much own the front page of Digg (specifically, 10 users have submitted over 30% of front page views).

In Digg’s own defence, those that make up that top 10 are quite different than what I remember in the past, so perhaps its efforts at “democratizing” digg has had some effect (although perhaps not in the way it was originally intended).

At any rate, I’m not sure if this “problem” will ever really be solved, as there will clearly *always* be a hierarchy of activity on social media sites, and there will, for any given activity, and there will likely be some kind of unequal power / logarithmic distribution of said activity.

That is, folks at the top are probably *WAY* at the top in terms of activity, “friends”, or whatever metric you’d like to choose.

If that’s the case, there might be algorithmic ways to change smaller details around it, but if this is indeed the nature of the beast, then there will *always* be diggers (or reditters, or mixxers, or propellers) that are more active than others, and always at the top of any “list”.