Last month, Brian Powell blogged in Ad Age about cause marketing. This isn’t a field I’m familiar with, but we’ve all heard the news that charitable giving is down due to the recession and I thought there might be some interesting innovations coming from this discipline.
Brian’s main point was that “cause marketing should be ideas with business and social impact.” He believes this discipline is so important it will eventually be fully integrated into a company’s overall marketing efforts.
Just a couple of days ago, I looked into the SocialVibe widget that’s available on many of the social networking sites, such as Facebook. It’s simple: pick a charity from their list, pick a sponsor (aka advertiser), place the “badge” on your social network or blog site, and earn charitable donation points. In other words, if I can drive traffic to one of my sites, and people click on my badge, my charity gets a donation. The catch? Every visitor who clicks the badge sees a short ad or request by the sponsor (e.g., rate an ad, pick a baseball card, etc.).
Interactive cause marketing? A radical new twist on the old customer brand loyalty programs? Whatever it’s called, I like it. People can “do good” with the assistance of brands, while brands get attentive watchers of their messages. In this day of people skipping commercials due to DVR recordings and with print publication readership down, this is really quite inventive.
How is your brand helping customers to “do good”?
I just finished listening to a webcast entitled “From Brainstorm to Firestorm: Creating an Environment for Viral Marketing Success” hosted by SmartBrief and moderated by one of my favorites, Guy Kawasaki.
In Guy’s opening take, he stated the obvious: you get more followers with any social media tool by being more interesting; and you’re more interesting by providing interesting links and information. The three tools he uses are Objective Marketer (for email campaigns), TwitterFeed, and TwitterHawk. Another tool, TweetMeme, he felt to be the single most powerful way to get followers.
Andy Sernovitz had a slightly different perspective. He felt that allowing people to participate and share however was best for them was the key. Rather than TweetMeme, he would go the ShareThis approach where people could “share the love” for you/your brand in whichever they wanted.
Stacey Kane of California Tortilla (voted best burrito in D.C.) said they leveraged their TacoTalk email newsletter into effective Twitter campaigns to drive store traffic. One example: providing a “secret password” on Twitter for a free taco in-unit; conversion rates were much higher than when the same thing was done via newsletter.
Brendan Hart with National Geographic talked about the importance of connecting with the brand. For instance, on Twitter, they’ve invited people to solve a puzzle of Mount Everest at their website; as someone improves upon the time, NatGeo posts that result on Twitter, keeping it fun and interactive. On their website, people can post photos they’ve taken and a couple are selected for inclusion in each issue of the print magazine. Involvement on all fronts.
Stephanie Miller of ReturnPath summarized things this way: Use Twitter when brevity over clarity is desirable, email when content is king, and Facebook when a brand wants to be more engaging. She gave an example of Oreo, which has 1.3 million fans on Facebook and where nothing has been posted since early March vs. Coca Cola, with 3.4 million fans, who seem to be so engaged that every few minutes one of its fans is posting something. Do people love Coke more than Oreo? I’m not sure. But what’s clear is that Facebook is more important to Coke and its fans know that. In short, she said whatever social media we use, we must commit the time and resources.
As with any form of marketing, no matter the way in which we connect with our consumers, we must be channel appropriate and engaging.
Your thoughts?
When I got my new Kindle, I started to realize how much Amazon has been lagging behind in its merchandising efforts. When Amazon first came to market with its ability to recommend books based on past purchasing patterns and/or interests, that was a real step forward in online merchandising.
But think about it: while Amazon has broadened its scope on what it sells, have they moved to “Merchandising 2.0″or beyond? In my view, they are no longer leading.
Just for starters, why can’t I…
View the “back of the book”? I want to read the book description (better than the publisher’s version), see which authors/publications have written a blurb on the book recommending it, and read the author bio.
Be notified when an author I like is going to publish a new book? Even on the Amazon site itself, one doesn’t have this feature.
See all the books that the magazines are touting as great reads for the month? Real Simple had a summer book section in its June issue. When I read it in May, nearly 3/4 of all their recommended new books weren’t available on Amazon. This happens to me a lot. If a magazine or publication is going to help sell books through recommendations, shouldn’t Amazon be savvy enough to take advantage of it?
In the past week, a new answer/search engine, Wolfram|Alpha, was launched. Brought to us from the folks that make Mathematica software, the website declares it is ”Making the world’s knowledge computable [in our] ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.”
In other words, the objective is to be able to produce a “report” of all the world’s digital, computable information with one concise search. At this point, they’ve got a nice working model, but the information in the engine isn’t as good as it will be in the future. For instance, when I put in “Hippopotamus and African Elephant,” I got much more info on the Hippo than the Elephant because it’s a species (silly me). I just love the visual tree created that shows the relationship between the two animals. (Click here to take a peek.)
Will Wolfram|Alpha eventually include encyclopedia-style information? There is some debate on this. Currently, it doesn’t, but this first step is a good one and I’m excited about its potential. As soon as I got the “report” concept of what this engine was trying to do, I had visions of being able to type in a question and having a full report generated – facts, figure, prevailing point of view, dissenting views, bibliographies where I could learn more, etc. This would leave me more time to think about what I was learning. I believe the general public would be excited too. For years I’ve been hearing consumers complain about how hard it is to find things online, how much time they spend looking for information, how results are often not related to what they’re searching for, etc. Information overload…managed.
At the same time, consider the work being done by Erik Hersman and the Ushahidi website, where the content of cell-phone text messages, sent during a crisis (earthquake, terror attack, etc.), are being analyzed for content so that news can be shared with the rest of the world much more quickly. I encourage you to take a few moments and listen to Erik’s speech at TED: click here to listen.
Putting the two ideas of fact and language-based computable data together, it’s easy to see how businesses will be able to use the newer engines to get a quick read on things like customer satisfaction, new product launches, and so on. And it could be done globally or locally. In short, this evolution in our access to knowledge will allow us more time to analyze information and to subsequently develop better plans, ask better, more nuanced, questions, and more. Exciting times!
