Call them Tweetovers Tweftovers – those unused characters out of the 140 allotted for each message on Twitter.
God – and Biz Stone – only knows how many orphaned characters there are in the Twitterverse every day.
But now someone wants to put them to good use. From MediaPost’s Media Creativity:
With World Fair Trade Day approaching on May 14th, Ben & Jerry’s has launched “Fair Tweets,” an initiative that takes unused Twitter characters and replaces the dead air with Fair Trade messages. The company is a huge supporter of fair trade, having transitioned all possible ingredients in support of local farmers.
Visitors to the site, created by Amalgamated and Stink Digital, can sign up to become Fair Trade supporters. Automatic messages will then start to append themselves to a person’s tweets, regardless of how many or how few characters remain. If you simply Tweeted “I ate a cupcake” to your followers, your remaining characters would say something like: “I didn’t use all 140 of my characters so I’m using all my leftovers to promote #FairTrade. #FairTweets http://fairn.es/z21“
Sample Fair Tweet:
Even small Tweftovers can be Twitcycled Twecycled:
Even Tweets with as few as six characters remaining can promote Fair Trade with the addition of a #FT hashtag.
Here’s the demo video.
Fair (Tweet) warning: If you don’t donate your Tweftovers, Sally Strothers will come to your house.
Campaign Outsider 
Great–just what we need: another way for the “do gooder” crowd to feel smug, self-satisfied, and sanctimonious about supporting “worthy” causes without doing any real work or heavy lifting, or making any genuine sacrifice–it’s a perfect fit and oh-so-typical!
Sounds like someone needs a nice bowl of ice cream and a hug.
Good point, and even Fair Trade itself is not without issues. But hey, awareness is the first step to action, and these things often end up raising a good amount of money for minimal effort. And who wouldn’t prefer it to red vests on the street?