This week a random Facebooker with a passion for Golden Girls is hoping to get his hero, Betty White, to be the host on SNL and he’s using Facebook Groups to do it.  The man is David Matthews and he is using the group’s popularity to publicly direct message at SNL’s head honcho, Lorne Michaels.  The group is called “Betty White to Host SNL (please?)!” and has over 230,000 subscribers, all gained in the last few weeks.

While the official Betty White Fan Page is experiencing only slow, steady growth as part of the support (it has ~50,000 subscribers), we can see that the page dedicated to pitching her as an SNL Host has grown over the last week from approximately 30, 000 to 230,000 fans.  This has grown as quick as previous Facebook trends  - groups searching for 1m users, posting your bra color as your status, or Doppleganger week - and is almost a weekly occurence nowadays.   NBC has not responded officially to this request, and that’s where a bit of humor enters the play.  If Lorne Michaels doesn’t agree to this, he surely is alienating a large group of SNL watchers and fans who would certainly show their ire, and with the recent Conan-Leno debacle, it’s not a good time for more criticisms.  That said, if he does agree, we can be sure that there will be thousands of request groups every week for the SNL host.  Although it’s questionable whether that is a good or bad thing for SNL and NBC.

The reason this is coming up so strong all of a sudden is Betty White’s appearance in a Snickers ad during the Superbowl.  It was voted as one of the best ads of this year’s event, and was watched by the largest TV audience of all time, nearly 100,000,000 people.  It’s interesting how the advertising world of television and Facebook are beginning to merge in strange and unpredictable ways.  This is better exposure for Betty White than any paid advertising  could ever achieve, and it’s all from user generated content.  The concept that the users can choose and create their own advertisements and causes means that today’s advertising spenders need to be keenly aware of what they should be paying for and what they should be trying to get for free.

We’ll keep you updated on whether SNL has her on the show.