April 22, 2008
Simon van Wyk and Kathryn Ossipoff from Mission Australia discuss how nonprofits can enhance their marketing activity by embracing social media to engage consumers around their brands and causes.
Download the social media for non profits podcast.
Posted By Victoria Kerr @ 3:33 PM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)
Technorati Tags: social+media, | nonprofits |
April 22, 2008
Simon van Wyk thinks social media is mana from heaven for nonprofits.
The major headline coming out of research conducted by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research late last year was that charities in the US are outpacing the business world in their use of social media/web 2.0.
The study of the Forbes Magazine list of the 200 largest US charities, called Blogging for the Hearts of Donors found that more than a third of the organisations are blogging, forty-six percent report social media is very important to their fundraising strategy and the majority monitor their online reputation.
Indeed, something like three quarters of those nonprofits studied were using some form of social media - including, podcasts, social networking, video blogging and wikis.
Continue reading the story.
Posted By Victoria Kerr @ 2:08 PM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)
Technorati Tags: social+media, | nonprofits |
November 19, 2007
Simon van Wyk recently chatted with podcasting queen Susan Bratton who's the co-founder and CEO of the highly successful Personal Life Media, Inc. a podcast publishing company producing 15 weekly audio shows and companion blogs on personal growth, relationships, longevity and spirituality for people on the leading edge of culture. Their discussion covers social media and using podcasts in marketing.
Download the podcast.
Posted By Victoria Kerr @ 1:46 PM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)
Technorati Tags: social+media, | podcasting |
August 29, 2007
A story in yesterday's Wall Street Journal discusses how online social networking is being embraced in the business world.
The story says that many of the new professional social networking sites are free to members with revenue coming "from advertising or charging outside businesses access to data and member discussions”. The story cites Sermo.com, a social-networking site for doctors which charges $100,000 to $150,000 a year to non-medical companies which use it to research such things as how doctors feel about new drugs.
"Members say they don't mind that their conversations are accessible to others, particularly since their identities are concealed. In this, Sermo is different from many other sites. Doctors are generally more interested in getting treatment advice and access to other doctors' experiences than in networking for new business partners. As a result, the site doesn't require users to use their real names, although Sermo itself verifies and holds the identities of everyone who registers."
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Posted By Victoria Kerr @ 1:03 PM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)
Technorati Tags: social+networking |
July 5, 2007
Have you ever seen a Wim Wenders movie. They are boring and incomprehensible. Even Bono a friend of Wim's said "Nice guy but he makes boring movies." If you talk to movie buffs they all say Wim Wenders movies are "Important". Mmmmm
Why the Wim Wenders analogy? Well I think Second Life falls into the same category. So few people truly get the point that is has to be important.
Here are my issues with Second Life.
1. Remember 1997 when a few chat serices started and instead of using straight IRC you could interact in a 3D world with a custom created avatar. It was cool for a week and then you realised IRC was more interesting and this stuff just got in the way. There are a lot of registed users of Second Life but low levels of real engagement. It seems to me the numbers of regular users drops dramatically, last time I looked there was around 2,000,000 world wide and a handful in Australia. There are nearly 9 million Australians registered to play sport, thats an important number, the second life numbers are not.
2. Lot's of organisations have built marketing areas on SL. I am pretty sure the only value of these marketing areas is the PR value and the fact that in the rush to get these areas online many small businesses have sprung up delivering these services. They are all, it seems, giving the work away and large organisations are getting to experiment at a cost that matches the biscuits budget. So why not see what happens? You can't lose but once this initial rush is over I'm not sure who cares. And have you tried a virtual Coke - exciting stuff - drink a real one!
3. You can run seminars and symposiums in Second Life . But why going to a seminar or meeting as an avatar is a good idea is beyond me. People have been running these types of meetings for years using a range of tools. Webcasting, Netmeeting, IRC - these are important and they have shaped the internet and our usage and expectations. Second Life just makes this harder to get too.
4. You can meet people and make new friends - you can do this on dating sites, you can use Flickr, Facebook, Yahoo Groups, My Space for this. These sites have huge numbers of highly engaged users. They have all been important because they all deliver a critical mass of users, they are useful as well as entertaining. While I might not see Second Life as entertaining I accept some people might, but it's not useful and that's always been the Internet kiss of death.
5. It's for young people they get it. It'I did a market study of three, my kids. The youngest said Second Life was boring because "all you could do was fly around and build shit". MMOGs are important, they aggregate a huge audience, they have driven a huge industry around content and advertising they are fun and they have spawned a real world community.
6. It's had a lot of TV coverage so it must be important. I am sure this is just because they don't get it either. Yes, there are some people making money off the side of SL but who really cares. eBay has helped hundreds of thousands of people build online businesses, Google adwords and adsense has helped many bloggers generate a real income. Second Life is just a distraction. The fact that people are having sex on SL seems to have attracted a lot of interest. Cybersex was a big thing ten years ago. TV, radio and press covered the topic many times and a few people had their 15 minutes of fame. Cybersex was at least fun once or twice, the third you could not escape the fact you were typing smut into a computer. SL is one step worse. It's just plain silly, there is no imagination or fantasy - one day these people will be old enough to meet real women and cancel the subscription.
So I'm a sceptic. Eventually it'll be another speed hump in the history of the internet.
Posted By Simon van Wyk @ 10:52 AM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)
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September 25, 2006
Whilst the US Office of National Drug Control Policy should be applauded for including YouTube as a communications channel to reach young people, there's no surprises that its films which were created for the safe televison environment haven't exactly been taking off with YouTube users.
Interestingly though, Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project predicts that switched on critics of U.S. drug policies will quickly create spoofs and parodies of these films, distribute them on YouTube and watch them really take off.
Posted By @ 4:31 PM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)
Technorati Tags: youtube |
September 18, 2006
Recognising that younger consumers are spending much of their time connected to social networking sites like MySpace and YouTube seems to be behind the brave thinking at ING Direct in promoting is Orange Mortgage to younger, connected, first time buyers in the US.
The financial services company has seeded short and humorous video clips depicting the frustrating side of renting on YouTube. The clips link to a dedicated website called MoveOutMoveUp.com which features content, more video clips and games and effectively communicates that owning a home is more feasible than you may think. The use of these new media channels and marketing tactics is deftly aligned with the media tastes and lifestyle choices of this younger target audience.
Posted By @ 12:50 PM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)
September 8, 2006
Watch out for a brand new online entertainment channel in the YouTube genre, where people can upload the usual consumer generated media type stuff and be endlessly entertained. Anheuser-Busch which brews Budweiser, has reportedly invested something like US$30 million in its Bud.TV project, which will launch in February next year and aims to connect with the world's growing online community.
The company's press release says that the company recognises that adults are spending more time online looking for entertainment to fit their lifestyles, and that this new online entertainment channel will help reach and engage with them.
Posted By @ 10:21 AM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)
September 7, 2006
The hot news in the music industry this week is that MySpace is planning to sell music - allowing bands both known and unknown, to sell their songs online, for whatever price they want. With the social networking site's reach (over 100 million registered users), the MySpace music store may well provide a serious challenger to Apple's iTunes.
Bands (about 3 million are signed up to MySpace) are already finding that MySpace is an effective way to promote their music and reach an ever extending audience. Those 100 million users are spending serious time connected on the site, and when the music store opens, it may well provide the hottest launching pad for the next big things.
Posted By @ 11:03 AM Permalink / Comments (0) / Trackbacks (0)
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