A New Game
by Michael HoffmanFriday, December 29th, 2006
There has been a lot written about how marketing is changing. You can no longer rely on advertising to convince people that what you are selling — whether it’s a car, a detergent or a charity — is any good. People are being turned-on and tuning-in to products, services and philanthropy because of what they are hearing from their friends. The web has accelerated this process dramatically, and fragmented traditional marketing sources. It is just so easy to forward that email that says this group is great, or to blog about why you gave money to this charity or to add to your MySpace page photos of your participation in the walk-a-thon.
The internet also allows you to aggregate an audience, no matter how narrow your focus. The “long tail” concept says that niches, put together, can rival the mainstream. Marc Sirkin, a nonprofit blogger, wrote a very interesting analysis about cancer organizations. What he found with a little research is that organizations that are smaller, with a more narrow disease focus, are growing much faster than the big cancer orgs. Together, they are beginning to take a significant overall market share in cancer giving. One of his take-aways is that the large organizations better personalize their focus so that they can seem relevant to individuals with particular interests. (They can do it now with the sophisticated web tools.) Read the whole post, The Long Tail of Cancer Organizations.
