News

Ford has partnered with Pandora to create a new cause-marketing campaign that allows Pandora visitors to use the platform’s social share feature to share a “mixtape” from playlists compiled by artists such as Jewel and John Legend. When a song is shared, Ford and Pandora will make a donation to the artist’s charity of choice.

Cause-based marketing campaign have sprung up all over the web this this year. From the high profile Pepsi Refresh Project to the non-profits like Feeding America, cause-based marketing campaigns have come into their own despite the lagging economy. Adweek has a good overview on some recent consumer research that suggest that consumers’ interest in corporate support for worthy causes has not succumbed to the downturn of the past several years:

Assuming companies are attuned to consumers’ attitudes in this regard, does this limit their own interest in supporting causes and making a point of letting the public know about it? “Not at all,” says Alison DaSilva, evp, knowledge leadership and insights at Cone. “Cause marketing provides a competitive advantage, not a license to increase prices. And when it does come to opting for a more expensive brand, we are still talking about one in five customers who would be willing to pay more — and even more moms and 18-to-24-year-olds. If you promised a brand manager that one out of every five potential customers would consider his or her brand, even though it was a bit more expensive than the competitive set, I think they would ask where to sign.”

Well, for starters they spend nearly a third of their time online on social networking sites and playing games.

“Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the web, 40 percent of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities – social networking, playing games and emailing leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie,” said Nielsen analyst Dave Martin.

At the Social Venture Network conference there were lots questions floating around about social media, but the one that seemed to keep coming up was: “how do I get new fans and keep them interested?” One of the successful method in the race for engagement on Twitter and Facebook has been to develop fun, creative and relevant viral tools for your fan community. This could be an application, widget, survey, poll or quiz. A great start would be to conduct the low impact exercise in developing your first Facebook quiz or poll with Quiz Creator or PollDaddy.

Just remember to ask yourself several questions before jumping in: How does this fit in with your content strategy and your brand? Who do you want to reach? What information do you want to share? What information do you want your fans to share? What can you do to encourage them to share it with their friends? Remember: It has to be fun, authentic and on brand.

NYTimes Gadgetwise: How to Create a Facebook Quiz
Quiz Creator makers LOLApps help with the instructions and we’re taking the liberty of reprinting them here:

STEP 1: Login to your Facebook account. Scroll to the bottom of the page. Click the Applications tab in the lower left corner. On the menu that pops up, click Browse More Applications at the bottom.

STEP 2: On the page of apps, there’s a Search Apps box near the upper left corner. Use that the box to search for the app Quiz Creator. I picked Quiz Creator because it’s simple to figure out and has fewer steps than some of the other quiz creators.

STEP 3: Click the Quiz Creator application. On the next page that appears, click the button Go To Application in the upper left corner. Another page will appear to ask you to allow the application to access your personal data. Click Allow. Finally, you’ll get to the page where you start creating the quiz.

STEP 4: On the first page, you’ll be asked to enter some basic information about your quiz. Follow the prompts and enter your quiz name — for example, “What kind of dog are you?” Fill in a short description of the quiz. Upload a picture from your computer to illustrate your quiz.

STEP 5: Enter the results of your quiz — golden retriever, Labrador retriever, German shepherd, French bulldog — as well as the descriptions the quiz taker will see along with their results. Follow the prompts to upload a picture to accompany each result.

STEP 6: Enter the questions for your quiz, and pair the answers with the desired result. For example:
Questions: What is your favorite food?
Answer: Anything – Labrador retriever
Answer: Caviar – poodle
Answer: Steak – German shepherd
Answer: Kibble – golden retriever

STEP 7: Click Next. This takes you to a page with a giant button: Install the Developer App. That pops open a new page. Click Allow. This is where the going gets tricky. Facebook requires lots of clicks to create the actual quiz application.

STEP 8: Go back to the previous page, where there’s another giant button: YES, I have the Developer App. Click that.

STEP 9: Take a deep breath. Exhale. You’re going to need to follow a bunch of instructions to pop up a bunch of windows. Some of them will direct you to yet other windows. The goal is to get some long, gibberish-to-you but important-to-the-computer text strings from one window, and paste them into another. Why do you even have to do that? I don’t know. Facebook isn’t the greatest at user interfaces, and it suffers as a result. Many people will abandon the process here rather than hang in there. You’re a Gadgetwise reader, though, so make me proud and curse this multi-window authentication process even as you complete it. But after a half dozen windows with instructions written by a software developer, asking you to please be patient type this into that window, you’ll suddenly have a page with your quiz displayed on it.

STEP 10: The final step in the quiz creation process requires you to invite one or more Facebook friends to try your quiz. Now you know why you get so many of them.

Using Our Powers for Good
The Social Venture Network’s Fall 2009 Conference in La Jolla this past weekend was a truly remarkable experience that seemed filled with the potential for world changing collaborations to happen and where words turned to action. It was was an amazing experience. Seeing Amy Goodman from Democracy Now engage with Arianna Huffington from The Huffington Post. Eric Utne from Utner Reader making himself  available to give me notes on love and life. Seeing venture capital firms and investors alike measuring organizations not just on their balance sheets, but on their socially responsible activities as well was refreshing.

Some of the brightest, hardest working and most passionate entrepreneurs trying to make a difference in the world today were there this weekend. They had important things to say. They are fighting for causes we all care about, that affect our lives and the lives of billions around the world. The Responsible Endowments Coalition for example, works to shift billions of dollars in university endowment funds into socially conscious and responsible investments. The Genocide Intervention Network, which empowers individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide around the world. Lots of for-profit businesses doing significant work for our environment, local communities and others in need discussed collaboration and ways to make more of an impact.

Successful companies like Seventh Generation and Birkenstock spoke on the evolution of businesses and profitability through sustainability, diversity, philanthropy, and transparent business practices. SVN is truly a place where people do business with their heads and with their hearts. Yet, it also was never more apparent to me that social media is a quickly evolving beast that remains out the grasp of many ambitious entreprenuers.

It seemed to be one of the prevailing topics quietly discussed over the weekend: how to increase efficiency and effectiveness in the online channel, attract fans and promote awareness. I was amazed to hear about the struggles these unbelievable organizations have to go through to generate engagement and activate people to join their cause even as they are do incredible work for the world.

I attended my first SVN Conference last October and came back completely energized and ready to take action, to make the business green and looking for new clients who embodied similar ideals. Since then, we’ve worked on the Barack Obama campaign with great success to spread important content to voters under 30 in the swing states utilizing social media. We worked to mobilize street teams and potential fans to see the Sundance Award winning movie FUEL by building their social media platform. Currently we are working with the non-profit Conscious Alliance, an organization that runs food drives at major festivals and concerts to donate to Native American reservations. The list is growing and I could go on and on about the impact that SVN had on me and the business.

Once again I’m completely renergized from the conference this year and see some very actionable ways that we can help our community. We here at GMS are digital channel experts and have spent substantial time researching, building, and anticipating the future of digital marketing and social media. We are further along in our thinking and experience than much of our competition and believe that our ideas, tools and processes should be used for the power of good. Couple that with the goals and objectives that SVN members are striving to achieve, we feel like we can do some amazing things together.

The SVN Fall 2009 Conference this year opened my eyes to the impact I can have on others businesses in the socially responsiblity space. Especially for non-profits looking to grow their donor lists and boost the average donation without a serious increase in infrastructure. The beautiful thing about social media is that there is huge potential to grow marketing programs with accountability, efficiency and effectiveness. To make that magical combination happen, the mission, goals,  ideas, efforts, essentially the brand, need to translate into a content strategy, get it out there and share it. Listen to what the digital inclined have to say about it and build from there. Match up those things with our tools and best practices, and the technology suddenly becomes less daunting.

We’ve been developing a social media toolkit for SVN memebers and non-profits. We’ve been building this toolkit and best practices to be easily implemented into your current marketing efforts. This subset of the GMS digital marketing platform will give a big boost to your marketing and communications efforts. Reach out and let us know how we can help you make this happen.

We will be posting more strategies, tools and tips here with you in mind. Stay tuned.

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–BBE (Broadband Enterprises), the digital video authority, today announced that the maiden season of its original online program, “Jen and Barb, Mom Life” (www.jenandbarbmomlife.com) has posted successful numbers—and its run isn’t over yet.

Launched last November, “’Jen and Barb’ features 43 episodes of four-to-five–minute segments on ‘life in the trenches of motherhood.’ The show has two major sponsors for all 43 episodes, including Kraft, which put up a ‘television-sized’ budget, according to Matt Wasserlauf, founder and CEO of BBE.

Over the first 30 episodes, “Jen and Barb” garnered over 40 million impressions, and its average audience is over 1.3 million impressions per episode.

Best of all, the show was profitable the day it went live.

“I read all the time about how original online video programming isn’t profitable and can’t attract television-sized ad budgets,” said Wasserlauf. “‘Jen and Barb’ proved them wrong.

“Jen and Barb—and BBE—knew something that nobody else knew at the time: no moms were doing shows for moms – not Oprah or Ellen or Tyra – and that moms online equal money online. There are over 35 million moms online with children under the age of 18. They represent the most powerful consumer group in the U.S., controlling 85% of household spending, estimated to be worth over $2 trillion. And online video is perfectly suited to them—short, to the point and you can watch it anytime.

“We proved it.”