Charity as a Marketing Program

I spent the weekend working out what I think is going to be a very effective marketing program for a music venue in Michigan. Their goals are straightforward:

1. 1. Butts in seats
2. 2. develop an opt-in platform for the future.

The promotion will tie into an upcoming concert and will use Twitter, PR and traditional marketing outlets to encourage the public to donate a large volume of small donations to a cause – preferably something local. Mobile text can be used to collect donations, and Twitter’s API allows for collections through applications like TipJoy. Rather than big donors, the focus is on spreading a message virally to collect $1 here, $5 there.

I have high hopes that it will not only raise significant money for the cause, but it seems like it has all the elements in place to go viral pretty quickly.

Let’s hope the client sees it too.

Fundraising on Twitter

Came across an interesting opportunity to help the American Cancer Society tap into the power of Twitter networks to ramp up fundraising at events.

Events now can have several hundred people to raise money, but the footprint doesn’t extend far beyond that. Twitter and its viral nature, can magnify that audience to thousands very quickly.

Also came across several applications that support online micropayments for donations. One in particular, Tipjoy, looks like it was originally created for blogging, but has really promising applications for charities. By bundling donations, it enables donations as small as $1 without losing it all in processing fees. Basically, Tipjoy takes 3% off the top and the charity keeps the rest.

Kudos to AT&T Mobile for service

This isn’t earth shattering, but I recently renewed the contract on my family’s mobile phones with AT&T.

Part of that process, of course, was filling out and mailing in all the rebate forms on the phones.

AT&T just sent me a text message saying that they’d received the documents and were processing the check.

Nicely done, AT&T.

Successful, spontaneous Tweet Up

Spent the weekend at the American Marketing Association Leadership Summit. This is a training program for the chapter officers – part inspiration, part training. I’ve been to this before from the IH perspective and the experience was entirely different. Before, it was a chore. This was inspirational. Awesome.

Just for giggles, at a cocktail reception on the first night, George Couris (Chicago AMA President) and I started goofing around with ideas to set Chicago AMA apart at the conference. We worked it out over the dinner and keynote portion of the evening and launched the first Chicago AMA TweetUp, and the results were great.

A few lessons before I describe what we did and how it worked. First, it took 45 minutes to come up with a successful, Twitter-based marketing program. It was creative. It was fun.

It was a glorious mess of improvization the entire way through.

We launched the program without having an event destination in mind, and in fact it was 5pm on Saturday before I’d even settled on the methodology to get followers to the event.

The goal: Get a significant number of attendees to a “secret” event on Saturday night by promoting it virally through Twitter. Can we pull it off in just one day?

The tools: First, the #chiama hashtag – which we’d invented about two weeks before at a Chicago AMA board meeting. We had five or six people from the chapter at the event that night, a total of four available during the day Saturday, and only me for the evening because everyone else already had plans.

The program: A Wine Tasting at Vintner’s Cellar Winery  presented as a treasure hunt. We’d spend the day on Saturday building an audience through teasers. Something was coming. It was going to be cool. That’s all they knew. (That’s because that’s all we knew too.)

By the cocktail reception at 5:45, we said we’d start dropping hints and directions to the event.

The Results: Out of an event that had maybe 300-400 people show up, we had a TweetUp with 35 attendees.

We got 10% of a conference to show up to an event that we pulled out of our asses 24 hours before.

Analysis: Wow. The biggest key to this was to rapidly recruit influential ambassadors. Of those on the Twitter feed, the most effective was @marybethonline. She has begun Tweeting with the #amasummit hashtag and we started promoting and using both hashtags. That expanded our audience greatly.

It grew virally from there. As the day progressed, more and more people already knew about it. Some would mention it to me first – “hey, you’re the Twitter guy! Where are we going?” People were posting to the #chiama Twitter stream with questions, promotions. They were reTweeting it.  

When I first encountered Twitter six months ago, I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever seen. I’ve been slow getting it, but I’m starting to see this platform’s enormous potential.

I’ll never be bored at a conference again!

Live Twitter works wonders

I ran an event earlier this week for the Chicago American Marketing Association at one of Second City’s theaters. There were a lot of new ideas we were trying out, but I think one of the most successful was the event’s live Twitter feed.

We wanted a lot of audience-speaker interaction, so among other things we created a hashtag for the event (#smdama) and encouraged audience members to Twitter.

The feed was projected on a screen on stage (with some other information occasionally as well) and successfully drew several questions from the audience that the speakers handled on stage. There was some back-and-forth interaction with the Twitter feed as well.

Best of all, on a personal note, is that I seem to have picked up 20 new followers on Twitter from the event.

All around, good idea well executed. Yay us!

Mobile is personal

The more I look into it, the more excited I get about the potential for mobile to reach out on a personal, one-to-one level. There are hundreds of small, social service organizations out there, for example, who need to reach people on a personal level. Phones have been the traditional way to do it, but mobile text seems so much … safer I guess.

To take an extreme example, think of something like a depression or suicide hotline. I’ve never been either, but I can imagine how difficult it must be to reach out for help. You call an 800 number, but have no idea whatsoever who you’re going to talk to. Text is safer. You can interact a few times before you decide its save to switch to a phone call.

Snakes on a Plane Baby

Just set up a meeting with Varitalk, the tech company behind the Snakes on a Plane viral campaign. I always thought it was a brilliant execution and I’m very excited to be able to work with them on a project.

Hopefully, this will be part of the US Army campaign.

Review of mobile opportunities 2009

Mobile Marketer published a very useful review of opportunities by sector in today’s issue of the newsletter: http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/opinion/editorials/2328.html.

It’s a bit of a grab bag and presents mobile as the one-size-fits all cure to a slow economy, psoriasis and other common ailments, but there are a lot of good ideas as well.

One item mentioned in almost all the categories is that companies should have a dedicated shortcode. For large, established brands that is absolutely true, but a shortcode is a pricey thing to hold if there isn’t a concrete plan for what to do with it. Even for large, established brands, the monthly fees are going to show up on someone’s budget cutting list unless there’s a plan in place.

The plan, of course, is the problem. Way too many organizations are dabbling and experimenting with mobile as if it’s some unique new tool that operates in isolation. That’s a big miss. It’s like when the website was put in the hands of IT people because it was a technology thing.

This is a communications tool and it should be managed as such. It is but one point of entry and one business tool. Some customers will come in via mobile and buy offline. Others will do the opposite and still others will do both.

Hard to tell the players sometimes

The marketing agency world is all about illusion. You can be sitting at a table full of eager representatives from an agency and never know that they’re all contractors and hired guns sharing a business card design.

The mobile world is shaping up like that times ten. There are technology platforms to run the campaigns, and then there are probably hundreds of “agencies” built using those platforms. Sometimes the platform is itself an agency. Sometimes they private label it to another group to perform the normal agency functions.

You can get away with that while mobile is so new and it’s all experimental, but at some point its going to have to sort out between the serious players and the rest.

Short answer, hurry.

Stella McCartney mobile campaign

http://lp.mydas.mobi/custom/stella/iphone/index.php 

Well the creative is all young girls with lollipops – subtle.

I wonder how much these campaigns are limited by the reliance on smart phones or iPhone. My blackberry can’t view the ad. Granted, I’m not exactly the target audience here, but I would think any campaign should have versions available. The fanciest version for the iPhone crowd, then a lower-tech version for people whose phones can’t handle it.

The campaign is supposed to have a viral component, but a lot of people will be excluded due to technology issues. That seems like a waste.

I wonder if a game would be a good execution for something like this. Present a picture of a model wearing an outfit badly put together – mismatch colors or whatever. The game is to identify the fashion errors and correct them with Stella McCartney products. Have some kind of leader board or something.

That would be far more viral. I may be missing something because I’m viewing it on a laptop, not an iPhone, but I didn’t see anything that would make me want to send it to someone.

Then again, I’m not a girl.