And that’s what happened at SXSW Interactive, in Austin, where Rob Wu of the digital fund-raising platform CauseVox, and bloggers Leigh Durst from LivePath and Deb Ng launched a social media campaign to raise funds to aid in the disaster just hours after it occurred, using the hashtag #sxswcares and a quickly assembled website, sxsw4japan.org.
The campaign, which partnered with the Red Cross, began with a goal of $10,000 — which it quickly reached. It is halfway to its new goal of $50,000.
There will be lots of talk about the influence of social media at SXSW this week. As Deb Ng wrote on her blog, “If we can’t do some good, then all our talk about influence is just that: talk.”
