Cartoon Campaigning

I came across a site which encourages you to create campaigning cartoons using a simple drag and drop interface. Click here to see my feeble effort about my current rage. Its a kind of 'cartoon blog'. I have seen some really excellent examples of this including a 45 frame cartoon of stick men that gave a simple explanation of the root cause of the credit crunch while causing me to laugh out loud (its strong language may not appeal to all however). This is surely a highly effective tool in the hands of the right people. You need that mix of artistic flair and caustic wit, and while I may not have it, surely most organisations will have someone in their midst with these talents. Ask around!

Social Media and Segmentation

I read with interest a blog post this week listing six common fallacies about Social Media Marketing. The main message is that it is not a quick or easy fix; it takes time, effort, and understanding, but it can reap great rewards. The same has always applied to traditional marketing. Sure the occasional mailing has hit the jackpot but mostly response rates climb only as the marketers really begin to understand their audience. I recalled fondly a client of ours called Tim who was a marketer at what was then John Grooms (now called Livability) claiming that he understood the profile of his donors so well he was regularly getting 42% response rates on warm mailings. And so pleased was he with this knowledge, he was extremely cagey about its make up.

Of course, Social Media is quite different - you can't segment your market because you don't know who they are, you don't approach them, they approach you.

Or is it? surely the same rules apply, just with a different emphasis. Another article claims to have a scientific method for calculating ROI on Social Media -well its got to be worth a look. Just as on a traditional database you have your regular donors, your appeal respondents, your eventers and your catalog purchasers, so in terms of social media you have your web segments. The eventers will be on Facebook and Myspace, the campaigners will read your blog (may even be Tweeters on your behalf), the moaners will be on the discussion forums, the corporate supporters may be tracked through Linked In, and so on and so on. As with all segmentations there will be overlaps, with some supporters being in several segments. The next step should be to capture all this information into the back office database to gain a deeper understanding of who interacts with you through which social media.

In fact the logical extension of this analogy is 'social media cross marketing'. Just as traditionally, any charity will try to upgrade a Christmas card purchaser to be a regular donor, so maybe the natural ambition of the social marketer is to upgrade, for example the Facebook cause subscriber to all kinds of other interactions - some will work naturally, some won't work at all. It just goes to underline the main point of the 'Six Fallacies' - the chief ingredients of social marketing success are hard work and trial and error.

Friend Ranking and profiling

So I read a few articles about Friend Ranking, and I got to thinking, is this so very different from traditional database profiling? Well of course it is, but its useful to set out the differences, or as the teachers used to say, “compare and contrast”.

In a traditional database, you would go about profiling like this: (skip this bit if you’re an old hand)

1) Extract your data and send it off to an agency for wealth screening. Load the new profile codes back in. American services offer more detail than in shy old England, but even here a lot of information can be gained

2) You have been creating links between all you contacts as you go – employees/ directors/trustees/board members/ family members and so on. (One major art institution I have worked with for a number of years monitors over 100 of these relationship types.) Then look for patterns where people have more than two or three – very often they will overlap with each other because they come from similar backgrounds.

3) Combine step 1 and step 2 and find out who is wealthy and is giving and who is wealthy and is not giving and who knows who.

4) Create an action plan for each of the prospects unearthed through this process. Apply Henry Drucker’s Seven Heavenly Steps, and off you go.

FriendRanking is a new tool offered by SocialMedia that will measure people’s influence by their interactions on social networking sites. The original purpose of this was to try to maximise response to advertisements by including references to your most influential friends.

Step 1 You create a presence on Facebook and other similar social networking sites.

Step 2 The ranking system scans your ‘friends’ and their interactions with each other to find out who influences who.

Step 3 You create an ad which relates to you, but which references the influencers of the people on whose pages it pops up.

Step 4 You turn these ads into appeals for your cause, and you have a sort of peer to peer fundraising network going on, with the profiling, such as it is, all done automatically done for you.

So what’s wrong with that? I have some problems with this approach:

1) The key to success on the Internet is permission – people always initiate their own actions on the net and anything that comes unasked for will not be popular

2) Social networks are supposed to be just that – Social. People do not want to have a financial proposition put to them when they are just trying to make friends. Maybe it could work on the professional networks like LinkedIn, but I have a (totally unproven) theory that LinkedIn subscribers use that network for self promotion, not philanthropy.

3) The whole point about traditional profiling is that you build a list of your best donors and prospects. While ultimately a successful Friendranking campaign might just generate some funds, if you have no direct relationship with either the influencer or the donor, how are you going to maximise the value of that relationship?

Will it just go away? No because Facebook already tried this with Facebook Beacon, and it did not take off – the fact that someone else is trying suggests that the developers are convinced that it can be made to work, its just the approach that needs to be perfected. I think we are going to have to take Friend ranking seriously whether we like it or not!

RSS - really simple syndication or local government gone mad?

Last week I was asked to take over the running of a Wordpress site set up to campaign against the housing targets set by the Regional Spatial Strategy for the area where I live. The reason for the photo is that one of our main defenses is that building on the floodplain near us will heighten the risk of a re-run of July 2007 floods round Tewkesbury.

Sorry - this blog is not supposed to be a rant against the whole system of RSS planning and the predict and provide model (daft thought they both are). The interesting thing about this new challenge is that I am now going to have a practical vehicle through which to attempt to engage my supporters.

The site generates a fair amount of comment from those who are prompted to read it by email or word of mouth, but I want to start generating buzz through other means such as cross posting to other blogs, persuading folks to sign up to the RSS feed, and generating a few bookmark entries in Delicious, Digg etc. One of the issues I have come across quite early on is the tag issue, or to use the jargon of social networkers, folksonomy. How do you know what tags really cut the mustard in a given area? I latched on to the NFP tags through acquaintances on Twitter, but if I don't have any friends on Twitter in the housing debate arena, that's not much good. Time I acquired some maybe!

Well the housing debate is all hotting up with the Regional Spatial Strategy (those initials again) coming up for debate in the Commons at the end of October. Hope I can make some noise before then.