Member-to-Member

Case Study: Facebook Causes Increases My Personal Fundraising ROI 220%

I recently got older. Rather than get depressed however, I found reason to celebrate my encroaching mortality with Facebook Causes. The reason I'm writing about it is because Causes' new birthday application enabled me to garner social profit for myself and financial gain for those I'd like to help in a unique way. By evolving their cause marketing platform from an "invite your friends" model to a "run your own fundraising campaign" model, they personally helped me increase my Causes fundraising ROI by 220% and helped me raise $160 for my chosen cause, Educate Tomorrow. Based on my rather general assumptions detailed below, by creating a social marketing tool that let me build my own fundraising campaign, Facebook Causes could raise their donations revenue by as much as 93% (or $18 million).

Case Study: U.S. Air Force Social & Traditional PR

The social media consultant's mantra lately has been "social media needs to be integrated with traditional marketing channels". While this seems self evident and I've written about it before, last week I found a great example from the U.S. Air Force I wanted to share because it provides a straightforward, best practice example of how an organization can use a single event to spark separate communications through traditional and social channels, targeting unique audiences to accomplish independent goals. The subject is the Department of Defense's decision to allow media attendance as the remains of those killed overseas are brought home to Dover Air Force Base in Maryland.

In the two different excerpts at the end of this post you'll see that the official press release from the Department of Defense Public Affairs office is directed at journalists with information of relevance to them about the new policy. It is crisp, official and factual, designed to announce what had become a controversial decision and provide information about the new rules. The blog post, by contrast, is targeted at the Air Force's Airmen employees and the general public, written by a named individual and addressing the behind-the-scenes changes that are taking place in how the Air Force communicates with the public. It is personal, humble and heartfelt, effectively putting the human spin on a challenging subject.

What is notable to me about these two examples is that while both communications sidestep the controversial aspects of the policy itself, each is effective in reaching its unique audience in a way the other channel would not be able to duplicate.

The Value of 'Real World' Value - Social Network Lessons from the Association Sector

Good news! Successful social networking among trade and professional associations demonstrate that fundamental principals of business are thriving and that despite my periodic doubts, people still value value. Even better, if you're me, after studying several specific initiatives and talking to lots of people I have uncovered what I think is the pithy success formula for social networking success: enable something virtually which cannot be fully achieved in the real world, and ensure that it has 'real world value' to your participant base. We talk a lot about social networking lacking ROI, but where it delivers real world value, there is strong potential for ROI.

I follow the association sector's adoption and use of social media because I think the association sector is the perfect petri dish for B2B social media adoption since association members already value their strong and multilayered business communities in the real world, many of which are ripe for migration or expansion online. To explore this further, I attended the ASAE & The Center's annual conference in San Diego last month in order to get the pulse of how social media is working in this sector. I paid special attention to how these new strategies were integrated into their marketing efforts. My takeaway is that the sector's involvement is still largely experimental but that social media and networking is growing among associations overall and that there are several very noteworthy implementations that have a lot to teach us.

Who Says You Must Blog to Protect Your Good Name? A Case Study

In recent weeks, I've noticed a new theme amongst the social media digerati that goes something like "how do we get the rest of the world to understand the promise of social media? How do we get all those laggard companies blogging and tweeting with us?" I've always cautioned my clients not to jump too far ahead of their customers and stakeholders in adopting any technology, and though I do believe that all companies should factor social media into their outreach and marketing strategies, it is far from appropriate for every company in every situation to use social media as a primary tool. Here's an example of where caution is warranted: the situation facing CACI in their response to allegations that their employees were involved in the Abu Ghraib torture scandals in 2004.

Last week I attended an Executive Biz book signing for the book Our Good Name which documents CACI's response to what Chairman of CACI's Board, Jack London, insists are false accusations against the defense contractor. The book is voluminous and detailed and London's defense at the event was impassioned.Shashi Bellamkonda from Network Solutions was there also and blogged about it. Check out his video from the event (note: I took the picture of him with Dr. London).

Explaining the situation in 2004 when the story first broke, Dr. London portrayed the company as on the defense against a media juggernaut that forced them into a public relations response strategy he characterizes in the book as "Whack-a-Mole". Four years after the fact, despite the book and the company's PR defense strategy to prove its innocence, legal and media allegations persist.

At the book signing several of us asked Dr. London about the company's decision in '04-'05 to pursue a traditional PR strategy of defending the company, specifically their decision not to blog about it or confront bloggers in public fora, opting for private communications which attempted to set the record straight. Dr. London's response was insightful. In essence he said that the company chose not to engage in public (including social media) dialog because it did not want to legitimize bloggers and journalists who it perceived were jumping on the attention-getting bandwagon of a hot story based on incorrect information.