See What’s Out There

One of the issues people have with Second Life is that it’s not so easy to use. You find yourself naked and alone and you have to figure out how to simply move around.

Mitch Kapor and our friends over at Kapor Enterprises have developed a new hands free interface for Second Life. Using a web camera that tracks your movements, you can basically lean and move as if you were on a Segway and move around Second Life. Have a look here at Handsfree3d.

The last session at the Convio Summit in Austin was well attended, and a fun way to finish the event on Friday. Called “Web 2.0 – New Outreach and Fundraising Techniques,” the topic of this workshop is something every nonprofit marketing manager and online communications professional wants to talk about. The presenters were Carie Lewis of the Humane Society, and Tim Fullerton of Oxfam America, who both gave great insight on what’s happening in the trenches – actual day-to-day examples of how nonprofits can work online communities to gain new supporters, coming directly from the people writing the blog posts, friending people on MySpace, and testing new strategies.

Carie opened with an intro to social media. She says social networks are “not just a bunch of lonely teenage boys.” 84% of people comment, 82% message others, and 39% create content. She notes that people really rely on social networks for influence on decision-making. To me, this confirms as viable the strategy of finding those community leaders who will carry your torch for you, and then messaging them with content to distribute to their friends. She acknowledged it can be very time consuming, and reiterated a suggestion See3 often makes to our clients: get interns and volunteers!

Both HSUS and Oxfam’s primary efforts are on what Carie calls “the big four”: MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr. I agree based on sheer traffic volume, the first 3 are no-brainers for any nonprofit to start. However, neither Carie nor Tim discussed social bookmarking or social news strategies in any depth, and Digg, Stumble Upon, and del.icio.us certainly have enough traffic to warrant a deep approach.

On MySpace: Both Oxfam and HSUS prove what we already know from Greenpeace and others – MySpace is a great place to get new advocates. How did they get so many friends? One at a time. When she started the MySpace page, Carie literally requested friends one by one. Tim started by seeing who was already talking about Oxfam. They recommend spending an hour per day building your network. Oxfam now has a very nice custom page. They both use the MySpace blog, which reminds us again to speak to the community where they are, don’t try and drag them over to your main blog. HSUS is now getting 200 friend requests/day. Of the people that friend them, 29% found their page via search, and 13% came from their website. If you are a small organization, you won’t get that traffic. But 36% discovered them through a friend’s profile. This shows the viral potential of raising awareness in the social networks. Tim says MySpace is not good for fundraising, although we have seen some examples of orgs running successful fundraising campaigns, such as Dollars for Darfur.

On Facebook: I think everyone agrees it’s very early. So far, the only real strategy to analyze besides creating groups is the Causes application. Tim says it’s great to see thousands of people join the Oxfam cause, but he does not know who those people are and has no way to follow up with them. Carie says HSUS has raised $20k through the Causes app, though I’m not finding that in my search of Causes. Regardless, very few orgs (though some) have raised real cash via the Causes app. Developing custom Facebook apps may be the way to go, as already discussed on this blog.

On YouTube: everyone loves video. Oxfam ran a campaign against Starbucks with a video being crucial to the resulting success. HSUS ran a video contest during the outcry over the Michael Vick story that received 22 submissions, over 43,000 views of the contest intro video (featuring Hulk Hogan), and garnered 2,000 new list members. They ran their contest on YouTube, but See3 has a private label, fully customizable video contest hosting, management, and marketing solution.

On blogging and blogger outreach: They both moderate every single comment on the blog (they recommend not to allow auto-posting), and someone responds personally to each comment. They also suggest: make it personal, using your real voice; don’t reprint press releases or other web stories; be concise (advice I am not following here ). There was a question from the audience on blogger outreach, from someone who got no traffic from buying an ad on a relevant blog, and got no love from the blogger either. Carie and Tim say customize and personalize each message to bloggers, warm them up, and sell your story. Carie suggests offering exclusivity on a news story in return for promotion, and reminds us to always ask them to link back to your blog. Shana Glickfield of Issue Dynamics Inc., a blogger and consultant on blogger relations, added that your first contact with a blogger should not be an ask. You should touch base with them prior to your campaign, send them swag and information of interest on an ongoing basis.

On Second Life: Tim and Carie both say stay away. I say wait for the MacArthur Foundation’s year-long exploration of the role of philanthropy in virtual worlds, and for significantly increased daily activity on Second Life, and in the meantime focus on video and other live action social media opportunities.

There is an entertaining article about Second Life in Good Magazine. The title is Get a Life: The Hollow Promise of the Internet’s Next Big Thing.

As I have written here in the past and as I tell audiences of nonprofit professionals on a regular basis, Second Life should be down (at the bottom) on the list of communications, fundraising and marketing priorities. There is no reason to be an early adopter in Second Life when I am certain you have what to do with your email program, your website, your use of video, and your activity on Facebook and other social networks. When you contrast the number of people engaging in online video — more than 80% of everyone online! — with the tiny community of active users on Second Life (peak time active users reach 40,000 in the whole virtual world), you can make an informed judgment about the likely return on your investment of time and money.

Here’s a quote from the article:

The paradox of a virtual world is that it adds human interaction to the online experience, while at the same time making sure you never have to actually interact with anyone. Now, instead of merely buying a book on a website, you can browse a virtual bookstore along side other virtual patrons, without ever leaving your home. This logic—that you’d want to give up both the speed of online shopping and the social experience of actually shopping, that you’d want to spend time in a bookstore but not actually go to one—is depressing, to say the least.

We are proud to say that the evaluations from our session at NTEN’s nonprofit national technology conference were amazing - even though the session was so packed we had 20 people sitting on the floor. Two-thirds of our panelists were in the top 10 of all evaluations (Steve Daigneault / Amnesty International and Tim Fullerton / OxFam America) and the overall evaluation of our session was very high.

Funny thing… the #1 presenter at the entire conference, based on evaluations, wasn’t even there! He was participating via SecondLife as an on-screen avatar. Barry Joseph from Global Kids did a presentation about “Games 4 Change” without even showing up. You can read more about it on Barry’s blog.

I wrote recently about the great little videos David Pogue does. He also works for CBS and just did a piece for them about SecondLife, which is something that I talk about in our consulting and seminars with nonprofits. Mr. Pogue does a nice job of showing us around. I think this is very very early and as a nonprofit you have a lot of basic things you have to be doing before you put resources into SecondLife. But I also think it’s for real. I think their decision to make it open source — allowing anyone to extend applications on it’s platform — is going to turn out to be a huge decision that will create a mechanism for rapid and exciting improvements.

Watch the video about second life that David did for CBS, and then know that nonprofits of all kinds are already there, raising (some small amounts of) money and awareness.

A message to David Pogue: David, I sent you an email about this, but I actually think you are more likely to see this post than find me in your in-box. Maybe a year ago, maybe more, you did a great little video about what you do to make videos. You showed us that your “staff” was a $15 tripod and your “studio” was your attic. You showed us how to attach a camera to a hotel lamp to make a traveling tripod, and your “secret” for those moving shots you do. That video is hard to find on the NYTimes site. I would love to put that video on DoGooderTV to show nonprofit organizations how easy it is to make videos of this type. We can credit it and link it any way you want. How ’bout it?

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.

Oy. I have been on the road a lot lately and have not written as much as I want, and I actually have what to say. For now, here are some tidbits:

In New York last week I met with the US Fund for UNICEF. These folks are doing the most important work there is – saving kids. On their website you see a simple calculation: 1 child + $17 = 1 adult. Wow. And when you know that so little money can have such a big impact, you take this very seriously. So I should not have been surprised when I saw a sign in their bathroom that said something like: “$180 could save the lives of more than 10 children. But instead, this is what we had to spend on a plumber for this bathroom. Please don’t throw things in the toilet.” You can donate right now and help them get over the guilt created by the stopped-up loo.

Porn in HD? Maybe not. The NY Times reports that the sex industry has some mixed feeling about high def porn. As all of us in technology know, porn has been a major force in pioneering and implementing new technology. High definition will probably not be an exception.

Second Life? How about a First Life. Nonprofits need to know and watch Second Life because it is becoming a significant outlet to reach people, and is therefore no different than MySpace or Facebook in that sense. But every time I talk to clients about this, they say, “Who has time?” Indeed. As if we don’t have enough to do in the real world, we need to create a fake one. The smart people at Social Signal did a good write up of Second Life for those who don’t know what it is. And once you know, check out this parody called Get a First Life.

Seth Godin writes about a contest from the International Thriller Writers (who knew?) where if you sign up for the newsletter you are entered to win a contest. The prize is signed books from thriller writers. This is worth pointing out because what makes it good is that those entering are only those you want to reach – because the prize is not an iPod, it’s related to the content of the organization.

Google just got a lot better. I use Google to follow my blogs and news by having a personalized Google home page. Yesterday they added a feature (AJAX) that allows you to click a little + next to one of the feed links and see the first paragraph of content, without leaving your Google page. It’s smart for the user and smart for Google.

There has been a lot of talk, and some new technology, that will bring online content to your TV. Because, really, isn’t a TV usually a better place to watch video than the small computer screen? There are lots of issues here, not the least of which is that short form content you need a much better way to navigate than you would have with a TV remote. I will write more about this soon. For now, I saw an ad recently that is pushing things in the other direction — improving the online viewing experience. Bose, the speaker people, have come out with a home theater type speaker product for your computer. I am not sure their products are better than much lower-priced ones, but boy these guys know something about marketing.