See What’s Out There

New Orleans, March 21, 2008 - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Humane Society of the USA has just won best overall video in the 2nd Annual DoGooderTV Nonprofit Video Awards, sponsored by See3 Communications and NTEN - the Nonprofit Technology Network.

Their video, called Overlooked: The Lives of Animals Raised for Food won best video out of the 160 entries to this year’s contest. Other category winners included Greenpeace International, ASPCA and Center for Constitutional Rights which won for their video George Bush Hates Santa.

More than 5000 people voted in the contest.

All of the winning videos can be seen at DoGooderTV, home of nonprofit video.

The 160 entered videos were then judged by a panel of experts in video and nonprofits, including Jeff Pulver, founder of the Video on the Net conference, Danny Alpert, Executive Producer of See3 Communications and award-winning documentary filmmaker, and Suzanne Muchin, Principal, ROI Ventures, a Chicago-based organization helping social entrepreneurs create scalable enterprises.

Here is video of Michael Hoffman, CEO of See3 Communications, giving out the awards at the final lunch at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans.

Witness, who pioneered using video for human rights, points us to video from Tibet. It is not easy getting video out and it certainly has to be dangerous even to shoot it.

This is part of a movement toward transparency. New technologies have the potential to expose not only human rights abuses, but things like downer cows being abused in US slaughterhouses, just to use a recent example.

You can learn more about this video at The Hub, which is Witness’ site for human right video. It was probably show on a cell phone, which is why the quality isn’t great. But as you can imagine cell phone cameras will be much harder to stop.

Allan Benamer over at the Non-Profit Tech Blog has a podcast with Tara Kirchner, the Senior Marketing Manager of Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo! If you don’t know about Flickr, it’s a popular photo sharing site that can be used by nonprofits. They just announced a program to give nonprofits some free “pro” accounts.

So what can nonprofits do with Flickr? Well, check out what our friends at the Humane Society of the United States are doing. The concept is simple: you choose a photo of a baby seal, create a caption for it, and upload it directly to their Flickr account (using Flickr’s interface that is built into the Humane Society’s site). They have a celebrity judge and a seals prize pack up for grabs for the best.

Why do this? It’s fun. It gives your supporters something to do other than give money. It helps educate people about an issue. It gives people a good feeling and they associate that feeling with your organization. It gives you search engine mojo - because all the Flickr goodness is indexed heavily. It brings in new people who first hear about you through a funny (viral) photo.

You can see the Humane Society Seal Photo caption contest here.

And all of the entries can be seen here.

Here’s one I liked right away:

At See3, we have been adding clients for social media marketing services for the past year. This is all about audience identification and message distribution. Finding your online niche and getting those influencers to engage and then influence their friends.

There are lots of organizations with just a toe in the water, others that are swimming away and some that are fully clothed, looking at the pool and wondering what it’s all about.

To measure this space by the job openings we can see some traction here. It seems that it’s hourly I am getting an email telling me that there is a job opening for an Online Marketing Director or an Online Community Manager, or an Internet Marketing Specialist or some other name that basically means the same thing.

The organizations that are hiring for these positions are the ones who are going full speed ahead. Humane Society, for example, is a leader in using social networking to spread their message. And so it is no surprise that they are hiring. They are seeing the return on investment from using social media tools — and video — and so they are beefing up their operations.

If you are not thinking about how to plan and staff your online strategy — which is becoming more lucrative AND more time consuming every day — you need to be.