As a political experiment, I posted the My Two Dollar Bill Project a couple of years ago. The idea was to see whether a simple poem and mnemonic device (keeping a 2 dollar bill in one’s wallet as a reminder) could “go viral”.
It was a total flop!
At the beginning, I even offered 2 dollar bills for sale, along with a wallet card with some reminders of the project. After promoting the idea a bit on a couple of well-traveled political discussion sites, I made exactly one sale!
The site also features the “Two Dollar Bill Challenge”, whereby anyone may, for free, add his or her name to the list of people who have taken the challenge to participate in the project, so challenging everyone else to join in. In two years, only 8 have taken the challenge, and two of those are my wife and me!
Perhaps the idea is just too “corny”. I didn’t get any feedback from anyone, so I have very little idea how it has been perceived.
I wonder, of course, how this idea might have caught on with some mass marketing—and especially if some celebrity had promoted it (instead of me, an unknown).
I have left the website up for academic purposes, I suppose—even though it is commercially and politically useless!
NOTE: I removed the website from the web on 29 September 2012.
Jack
PS. For those of you who are wondering, I still keep the same 2 dollar bill in my wallet, and I still am reminded by it every time I see it.
