Social Causes 2.0
Everyone basically knows that the web has grown to become a place for raising awareness about the plight of humankind. Whether it’s the disasters in New Orleans through hurricanes or wildfires in California or even with human-created disasters such as Darfur, the Internet has become a beacon of hope of spreading the word and inciting action from those concerned global citizens.Helping to lead the charge on the plagues against humanity is the team from Livingston Communications. Geoff Livingston and Qui Diaz are two people that I know that are actively engaging the community and their most recent expedition is to raise awareness and encourage action against the plight of those in Darfur. With the Save Darfur campaign, they have taken advantage of online videos, social media, websites, and much more to get out the community to help them pressure the incoming Obama administration to keep their word to cease the senseless violence and “genocide” in the country.
The Internet is a very large place and for social causes, it seems that there is no better place to reach the masses. Whether it’s by simply establishing a website, which is perhaps the most important “stake in the ground” you can make online that will help support your efforts, or sending out e-mails to qualified leads through a online marketing campaign, or perhaps via means of social networking sites like Myspace or Facebook, there are many touch points that you will be able to garner support from.
Still not convinced or unsure as to how you can take advantage of the web to promote non-profit charitable & social causes? If you’re organizing efforts to help in accomplishing success with a cause, try taking these steps to drive more interest:
- Create a website - if people can’t find information about your cause online or anywhere else, why would they pay attention to you at all? This is the place where people will sign up to help.
- Employ search engine marketing - start with SEO to help drive down costs, but if multiple organizations are promoting your cause but you think differently, then you might consider some SEM tactics.
- Send out emails with helpful information - An email marketing system will help keep people aware of what’s going on with the cause. Make sure it’s useful information that will keep your subscribers motivated & they will share it with their friends. Use qualified leads taken from your website and other lead generations. These are your true “followers”.
- Engage the public with online videos or photos - Use sites like Viddler, YouTube, etc. to promote videos of your cause. Regardless of what it is, there are powerful movies and images that can help your cause & at the same time, allow people to embed them and share virally with others.
- Set up social network pages - people who are on social sites like Facebook, Myspace, Squidoo, etc. will not want to link out to your website when it will cause them to leave the social site (they’re having fun there). So create a cause annex page on the social platform and this will allow for global discussion and enable “fans” to share the cause with others in their networks much easily.
- Create widgets - sharing is good…no matter where or how. Widgets will be that extra step to make sure that anywhere your audience turns, your cause will be front and center. The widget will be a badge of proof letting people know that someone cares about something.
These are just some small steps that you can take to help promote your cause. But don’t forget that rather than covering small areas on foot in real life, the Internet offers you a much greater opportunity to extend your social cause reach. Take advantage!
Popularity: 8% [?]
Promote self less and value more.
A press release was issued today by self-described “The Powerful Promoter” Matt Bacak that highlighted his recent success on Twitter and Facebook.What’s better than soaring to the top of a popular social networking site? How about skyrocketing to the summit of two of them? That’s the envious position The Powerful Promoter, Matt Bacak, found himself in last month when he entered the Twitter elite…
Earlier this year, Bacak hit the 5,000 friends’ mark on Facebook to land in the top 500 members. Now he’s entered the Twitter elite…That position places him handily ahead of the hometown big business competition: Home Depot…Bacak also ranks 468 out of 506,626 Twitterers worldwide.
Source: PR Web
The problem? He’s promoting his success that doesn’t exist and a lot of respectable bloggers and social media experts all believe that it’s all a sham. You can read their reactions here or take a look at the Twitter search conversation here.
But I’m not here to attack Matt Bacak. Rather, I’d like to examine how all this boasting and excessive networking can only go to hinder customer service and crowdsourcing. For someone who has numerous and perhaps thousands of friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter, respectively, it seems to me that it’s a major dilution of your brand and message if you just simply set out to increase your fan base. First of all, why wouldn’t you want to keep in touch of all the people who have some important relation with your brand/message? Are you telling me that even though you are following 10,000 people on Twitter, you can understand and comprehend what’s going on in the Tweet stream of life? That’s not possible unless you stay at your computer 24 hours a day and monitor its every movement.
You might be saying that it’s no different than having 10,000 followers. Wrong. Having an excessive number of followers is not necessarily a bad thing, because they are all interested in something that you’ve tweeted about previously or it’s something about your profile and what you like to say that they find interesting.
Excessively promoting that you have accumulated thousands of friends on Facebook or any other social network is just friend hoarding. You need to make sure that with any network you create online that it’s truly giving you some value. Are they all your friends? Do they have some professional connection (e.g. you met them at a tweetup, sent them a resume, had a class together, etc.) with you? What investment are you putting into the relationship?
I believe I enjoyed what online expert Aaron Brazell wrote in his blog: “let social media be about the overall community.” Why not take his advice and make it be all about the community? There’s no need to try and reach out for personal gain. That is web 1.0. If you want to participate in the next generation of the web and market to your audience, you need to remember that it’s all about the community and that they are now your biggest advocates. Stop putting yourself on a platform and boasting about how much success you’re having on Twitter and Facebook. If you want to impress your audience, what about simply telling them what service and value you have provided them with your efforts online?
Popularity: 9% [?]
Personality may not be included but it’s not hard to create.
About a month ago, I friended a guy by the name of Rohit Bhargava on Facebook. I had heard about him through a mutual friend and heard he wrote a book Personality Not Included. When Rohit accepted my request, he sent me a simple message:
Thanks for your friend request, I just approved it. Let me know if you happen to pick up a copy of my new book, Personality Not Included. I’d love to know what you think!
Well I did pick up his book. And it’s definitely a great book to have. I’ve read several business and internet marketing books and there are a few of them that I would gladly recommend to people based on a variety of reasons. Personality Not Included is a great book that helps show companies that they can’t just rely on the same type of messaging. People are no longer interested in reading or interacting with a “faceless” company. Instead, they want to know that the companies they are talking to have some character and, to put it simply, some personality.
Being authentic isn’t going to cut it anymore. Sure, you must make sure that how you interact with people is genuine and not fake, but now to make sure that you have a great brand, you need to have some characteristics and personality. Personality Not Included talks about ways that you can strengthen your brand. But what does the word “personality” really mean? According to Rohit Bhargava: “Personality is the unique, authentic, and talkable soul of your brand that people can get passionate about.” Isn’t that what marketing is all about? I agree with his assessment that marketing is not all about selling. It’s about building a relationship. If your brand has a personality, it helps to form a rapport and builds trust that your customers will find pleasant and entertaining, thereby giving them some motivation to promote your brand on your behalf.
Personality Not Included is a great educational book that offers some real insights and also examples of brands that are doing it right, and maybe some that aren’t. It goes through the process of how to establish a personality in addition to why you need to have one. But it’s not that straightforward of a process…you may encounter some resistance in establishing a personality - so that’s also something that is addressed in this book.
There’s not much else I can say without acting as an accidental spokesperson for this book (read more about this personality in Rohit’s book), but suffice it to say that if you’re hell bent on being talked about and forming a global community to help spread the word, you need to make sure that people know your brand is alive. No more automations. No more anonymous emails or templated news. Make it seem that you are a big company acting small.
Being an online can help in your personality. Making use of blogs, emails, social media, and even your website can help show that your brand is a living entity and cares about its consumers. Everything you do should have some sort of impact that people will use virally to spread your message, or perhaps create a message you didn’t intend.
Not sure if your brand is faceless in the crowd (or at least online)? Here’s a test that Rohit thinks will help:
- Individuality: Is there a real individual or group of individuals that your customers associate by name as the people behind your organization?
- Backstory: Does your organization have a credible history that consumers can understand, connect with, and talk about?
- Relationships: Do you have a way to recognize your repeat customers by face, name, or voice so that they are not treated like new customers each time they contact you?
- Policies: Can individual employees choose to change or bend policies based on their interactions with customers?
- Language: If you read your marketing, sales or website descriptions for your business out loud, does it sound like a real person is saying it?
- Spokespeople: Are individual employees encouraged to tell their friends, families, and contacts about what they do, and are they given training in how the company describes and positions itself?
There’s an answer key to this six-question test. Want to know what your results are?
Read the book…
Popularity: 10% [?]
How NOT to screw up Email Marketing (if doing it yourself)
There are a lot of email service providers (ESP) that you can turn to that will gladly help you send out your mailings to a targeted list…all for a minimal fee. In most cases, it’s best for you to have them help you out, but if you feel that you are up to the task of sending out your own mailings by yourself, then here are a few tidbits that may help you avoid disasters and complaints:Check out the differences between various D.I.Y. email providers.
There are a variety of email providers that allow you to do it yourself. Some are web-based and there are others that could potentially interact with your database system directly so everything is a little bit more automated. Or there are some that are custom-created which could wind up costing you tons of money. Just some to look into are: Constant Contact, Vertical Response, Email Labs, Real Magnet, etc.
Look at the fee structure and any limitations on list sizes (and any additional costs for more names), details on how to upload lists, custom templates, landing pages, survey capability, event management, reporting, etc.
Make sure you update your list everytime.
One of the main complaints that you’ll get is that people on your list will ask to be taken off the distribution list, but if you don’t comply and you send them another email (inadvertently or on purpose), then you will have a potential CAN-SPAM violation and your emails could be blocked not only by that individual but also by the ISP (@comcast.net, @verizon.com, @gmail.com, @aol.com, etc.) itself, thereby removing your ability to communicate with all those other subscribers who wanted to receive it, but are on the same ISP.
If your lists are all controlled within the individual email service provider, then your lists should be updated when someone decides to “opt-out”, but if you are managing your lists through an Excel, Access, or other database form, you will need to maintain that list constantly to make sure you don’t SPAM someone.
Do NOT send out emails with 100% images.
Not only is that probably a SPAM tactic, but it’s also bad marketing! With viruses appearing in images in emails, email inboxes are a lot smarter these days and ALL images are automatically blocked when they first appear. Background images will not appear either. So the best tactic is to make sure that a majority of your email is text.
Assume that your subscriber will be viewing this in an inbox with a white background - so don’t make your text white. Instead, choose a dark color…black is the perfect choice.
While webpages are probably better with images, stick with text for emails. Text is king.
Form a rapport with your subscriber & keep them informed.
Make sure that you put somewhere on the email you’re sending out something that let’s the recipient know why they are receiving this. I know when I receive an email long after I subscribe, it confuses the hell out of me and I don’t know why I’m receiving this nor how I subscribed. Reassure your subscriber that it is a valuable email they are receiving.
If your subscriber has subscribed but doesn’t receive your emails, then maybe it’s in their junk mail folder. That doesn’t do you any good, now does it? Your goal then is to help educate your audience to add your email to their address book which should guarantee that it’s appearance in their inbox 100% of the time.
Be aware of Murphy’s Law.
If you think that everything will go the way you want, then you’re mistaken. Always make sure that you account for any slight mishap, regardless of how insignificant it could be. When I send out emails, I always make sure to schedule them at least 30 minutes after I enter it into the system…that way if someone comes to me last minute with a change, I can go to the system and shut it off. It doesn’t help to double-check your information too to make sure you didn’t misspell anything or have a broken link. Believe me, it can (and does) happen more than you think.
Try and assign a database list later on in the process.
As one who’s been dealing with email marketing for a few years, I’ve run into a lot of worst-case scenarios. One of the worst things that you can do is send an email promoting something to a list that doesn’t want it or have any interest. Think about a time when you were sending out an email to someone in Outlook and accidentally hit send without realizing it wasn’t going to that person. Or, if you’re using a web email like Gmail or Yahoo when the browser automatically sends the email without you touching the button. It’s happened before…and nothing will prevent it from happening again. Unless…
You assign a default list to that email template before you start working. This default list can be your email so if anything bad happens, YOU are the only one affected, not the 30,000 names you would have sent the email too, along with your company’s reputation. This default list can also contain a variety of your email aliases so you can use it for testing to see how an email will look in different provider inboxes. Once you’re absolutely sure you want to send out the email, THEN insert the target list. Your stress level will thank you.
Track your efforts.
There’s a macro view of reporting. It’s not just looking at how the open rate or click rate of a particular email is. It can affect how you send out your emails in the future. Any smart email marketer will tell you to “TEST TEST TEST” your emails. If you see a pattern on specific emails doing better on a certain day, then pay attention to that. Look at the numbers and see if anything makes sense. Reporting is a powerful tool…it’s not there for decoration.
Want to know how your links in your email are converting? Don’t just rely on the reporting to show you which links clicked through. Implement some clickstream tracking using Google Analytics or some other third-party system. That way you can monitor where people go on your site, the behavior of their surfing, and much more. This is what your marketing higher-ups would like to see.
Keep it simple!
Remember that text is king with emails. Do not try and make your emails so graphic and flashy that when people get it in their inbox, it’s basically all white space. Use formatting of the text to your advantage but also make sure that it’s user-friendly and compatible with the way email systems are. Stick with the common fonts, but don’t forget that you can bold, underline and even italicize your copy. You want fancy? Let it stay with the landing page.
Have a Call to Action.
If you want someone to do something (e.g. buy your product, click to book, etc.), then TELL THEM. Don’t just have an email with nothing to do. It’s basically saying “Hi, how are you? I thought I’d just check in. Talk to you later.” What’s the point?
Popularity: 10% [?]
