If you had a four-letter Twitter name, and you were trying to raise money for cancer research, what else would you do besides auction off your username?

Drew Olanoff, a well-known individual in social media and on Twitter, was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma not too long ago. Instead of letting it get him down, he decided to turn it into a positive and started the #BlameDrewsCancer hash tag on Twitter that led to many donations from corporations for each time it was used. Now that it appears he has won his battle with cancer, Mr. Olanoff is not giving up fighting cancer and has decided he has an amazingly hot commodity on his hands: his four-letter Twitter name, @drew.

As shorter Twitter names have dried up, people have been stuck with longer and longer names.  So Mr. Olanoff spoke with people from Twitter and received their blessing to auction off his user name (followers not included) with all proceeds going to the Livestrong foundation.  The minimum bid is $10,000, and all bids are placed on the Twitter service by posting a message including the hashtag #drewbid.  Bids will be accepted until 12 a.m. (Pacific Standard Time) on Nov. 9, 2009.

Well, the good news is that not only has the minimum bid been met, but it already for a 150 percent bump thanks to well-known TV personality Drew Carey.  Mr. Carey is currently the host of the long-running TV game show The Price Is Right, and also had a successful sitcom called The Drew Carey Show.

Mr. Carey has already bid $25,000 for the user name, and he has also promised to raise it to $100,000 if he can get 100,000 followers to his current user name, @DrewfromTV by the auction cut-off date of Nov. 9.  As of this posting, he is at 20,040 followers, an increase of approximately 7,000 in just the past 15 hours since he issued the challenge.

There is no word as of yet of any other potential bidders for the username.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, October 4th, 2009 at 3:10 pm under Social Media.

Read more entries by Sean P. Aune.
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