See What’s Out There

Nancy Schwartz, from the Getting Attention blog, asked the question that all of our clients are thinking about. “How do we, as nonprofit communicators, engage audiences who are overloaded with marketing messages and images?”

Seth Godin has become the 24th most popular blogger (out of 57 million+ blogs) on the back of the idea that traditional advertising is a dead end. For Godin, the only thing that matters is being “remarkable” and, therefore, having people tell their friends about you. He imagines driving in the country and seeing cow after cow, how boring. When you come across the purple cow, that’s what you start talking about to everyone you meet.

As I mentioned in a previous post, Wired Magazine had an article that called the $65 billion television advertising industry “a spiraling vortex of ruin.” What they were referring to is the lack of impact that traditional top-down advertising has. The New York Times recently had an article about the proliferation of advertising in non-traditional places, such as the tray tables and barf bags on airplanes, and coffee cup sleeves. My view of this is that it is the death throws of an industry that wants to seem relevant to their clients, when in fact they have no idea what they are doing.

What replaces this traditional advertising? Word-of-mouth on steroids. This is where the web comes in. The internet has enabled information to travel faster than ever. So whether you are selling a product, or the lie that Barak Obama was raised a Muslim, it takes only a few seconds or hours or days for it to travel all over, from one in-box to the next, one blog to the next, one online forum to the next, etc. The dynamic today is that ideas travel this way first, then get picked up by the mainstream press.

In my presentations on this issue I talk about four interlocking trends that help you get your bearings in this new world:

1. The decline of traditional advertising due mostly to audience fragmentation and new technologies (such as Tivo)
2. The rise of opt-in or permission marketing (the ads you see are the ones you choose to see)
3. Broadband is really, finally, here
4. Every consumer of information is a publisher – AKA, Web 2.0 (Tools such as MyBlogLog make the simple act of reading into an act of publishing.)

In this new world, the successful nonprofit organizations are going to be the ones that do three things:

1. Document what’s remarkable about what they do - of course using lots of reusable and portable (online) video
2. Create virtual toolkits so that others can use this material to market your remarkableness to their own communities. (Think of this like you are P&G providing CVS with the cardboard stand and signs and advertising copy so CVS can promote the P&G product with little effort. Except you can save the printing costs.)
3. Expand the network of those publishing using your toolkits to include a wide range of staff, Board members and other stakeholders.

I want to say a little more on this last point. The HR strategy of nonprofit organizations needs to change to reflect the blurring of lines between “inside” and “outside” people. It used to be that the only ones who needed to communicate where the folks in a fundraising or communications job. In this world where everyone online is a publisher, every employee has the potential to be an outside person without ever leaving the office. Organizations need to begin to evaluate communications skills differently for every position. A small increase in the number of people strategically communicating the organizational message to influential communities online will have exponential impact on the spread of the organization’s message. Read that again. Hire communicators! (Buy stock in liberal arts education.)

The scary thing about this new world of friends telling friends is that you can’t fake it anymore. You really need to have things that are interesting, innovative and important. People will see through the marketing BS, and your message will be dead on arrival. On the other hand, the promise of this world is that small and under-funded organizations will be able to compete in this marketplace of remarkableness in a way they could never compete in the world of advertising. TV was unreachable to 99% of organizations. In a world where TV advertising doesn’t matter so much, nonprofits have the opportunity to play with the big guys and to get attention beyond what was ever possible before.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 10:11 pm and is filed under Nonprofits, Web Tech, secondlife. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.