This week’s assignment in Using Social + Digital Media asked us to reinterpret a Slideshare presentation about our client (in my case, charity: water), using the presentation software Prezi.
I searched Slideshare and found this presentation about charity: water’s online engagement efforts:
From the beginning of the forward section, written by Brian Solis, to the end of the last chapter, Michael Brito’s “Smart Business, Social Business” doesn’t disappoint. In fact, it should be required reading for anyone in the communication field at any sort of organization. Solis’s “Engage!” (which I wrote about earlier this year) was about the importance of getting on the field, “Smart Business, Social Business” is the playbook.
Not everyone works for Coca-Cola or Starbucks, with their 44 million and 30 million Facebook friends, respectively, but everyone can use this book and the tools and concepts that Brito explains. From the standpoint of a student reading this as one of a three texts for the semester, I found this to be the most useful of the trio. Brito’s ability to give a succinct and detailed “30,000-foot” description of technologies and concepts, and then hover at 10 feet giving real-world examples is incredibly helpful.
(Eds. Note: The book isn’t particularly long, but it is incredibly in-depth. To discuss every chapter and how it relates to a client would take far more than the 1,000 words that I try to cap these posts at, so instead, I’ll focus on a few specific pieces of the book as they relate to my semester’s client, charity: water)
Coca-Cola and other big brands that have been around for decades may have had a long road to becoming “social businesses,” but new organizations that came into existence in the past five-to-ten years, in the midst of the Facebook explosion, were born into the era of social business. If Coca-Cola is your parents, then charity: water is your child.
Nothing is more important for children then setting boundaries or policies for appropriate behavior, which is why the chapter on establishing a governance model and social media policy struck me as one of the most important. charity: water is a young company with young, tech-savvy employees. From the stat of the company in 2006, it has embraced social media tools like Twitter and Facebook, and has encouraged (it seems) their staff to do the same.
(I noted in an earlier post, charity: water was the first charity to 1 million followers on Twitter. Additionally, I refer to them as a “company” at times because that is the way they model their business – this recent TechCrunch interview with founder and CEO Scott Harrison explains why).
The charity: water staff bios page lists many employees’ Twitter handles. The last thing they (or any brand) want(s) is to put their staff on display as brand ambassadors, only to have them create an embarrassing situation for the brand; thus, the need for a strong social media policy that “[empowers] employees to engage externally,” but also “protects the organization by all means possible” (Brito, p. 64).
The second highlight that I’ll cover in this post is the chapter on establishing a measurement philosophy.
Any communication professional will tell you that you cannot underestimate the importance of measuring success and being able to detect failure and make adjustments before it happens. For a small organization, it can be as simple as showing the high conversion of Facebook friends into email subscribers in order to illustrate the importance of an extra staff member dedicated to social marketing.
For a larger, more socially savvy organization like charity: water, it could mean establishing benchmarks of success for larger campaigns and having a process in place to respond to digital inquiries across all platforms. In this case, for charity: water, as a charity organization whose donation funding stream could be interrupted by one loud, disgruntled influencer, the best way to avoid these situations is to have a process in place to engage all advocates and monitor conversations (Brito, pp. 115-116).
Much like “Engage!” and “The Long Tail,” which I read earlier in the semester, in “Smart Business, Social Business” Brito picked a handful of organizations that are incredibly adept and on the front lines of social business-hood (Cisco, Intel, Dell), and he goes back to the well consistently, but to prove a point: they execute these tactics at a higher level than anyone else.
This is the last book we’re reading this semester in the Using Social and Digital Media course at Johns Hopkins University, and the best was definitely saved for last. There are a lot of great individual pieces to pull out of the first two we read, but this one does the best job of molding everything together to create the ultimate user manual to successfully implement a digital plan at an organization of any size.
Now, please excuse me, I need to get to work, I have digital plan to write.
This week’s assignment for my Using Social + Digital Media class at JHU was to create a short video about my client, charity: water. This was a really fun assignment, in fact, I wish all grad school assignments could all be this fun and entertaining. I am sort of a novice Final Cut Pro editor and am lucky enough to have access to the full suite, so any time I get the chance to work in the platform I get pretty excited….here’s what I pulled together:
(If you click in and watch the video on YouTube, you will see additional metadata to help optimize for search.)
I primarily used assets compiled from downloads of existing charity: water videos on their Vimeo page. One of the awesome things about charity: water is the great photography and videography they use on their website, blog, and multimedia pieces.
I chose two songs for this piece: The Cinematic Orchestra, “That Home,” and the amazing single Freelance Whales, “Generator, 1st Floor,” by Freelance Whales (this is a live version from SXSW 2010.) I thought the mixture of somber and upbeat conveyed the tone of the video, in two phases, really. The first half–more somber in tone–lays out the real world problem: almost one billion people lack access to clean drinking water. The second half–considerably more upbeat–tells viewers that charity: water is working to change the problem and uses positive imagery of women, children, and families with access to clean water in areas helped by charity: water.
It is by no means perfect. The sound mix is a bit rough, I haven’t spent much time–or any time, actually–using Soundtrack Pro, but it is passable. I am a big fan of constructive criticism, and would love to hear what you think in the comment section.
Cheers!
I picked up the latest copy of WIRED last week en route to Los Angeles.
I’ve been a fan of WIRED for years, never a subscriber, but I’m always drawn to the print issue when perusing the magazines at my local bookstore or in an airport when bopping around the States (and sometimes the world). So I was excited to learn I would be reading “The Long Tail,” a New York Times bestseller, by WIRED editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, as one of my texts for a graduate class at Johns Hopkins.
The Wikipedia definition of “The Long Tail,” a business concept popularized by Anderson in a 2004 WIRED article, is riddled with terms like “probability distribution,” and “Gaussian distribution,” and words like “mean,” and “skewering,” so we won’t go all official here.
In layman’s terms, the concept is pretty simple to understand: brick-and-mortar stores, like, say, Barnes & Noble Booksellers, only have so much shelf space available to hold the “Twilight Saga,” “Fifty Shades of Grey,” Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography of Steve Jobs, and other books that sell a large number of copies.
The in-store inventory makes up what percentage of all books ever produced? Less than one percent. However, book stores tend to carry the most popular books that will sell the most copies per week, month, quarter. But what about the other books that might only sell one copy in the same time period? Surely there is demand for all those books, right? This is the concept of “the long tail.” Business have realized that there is significant profits to be made by selling small amounts of a lot of things (almost exclusively online) to compliment the large amount of sales of a few items in brick-and-mortar locations.
Hundreds of thousands of books that will never see the shelf in a brick-and-mortar bookstore but you can buy them online and be reading in 24 hours. (photo: Harvard Online Bookstore Warehouse)
The graphic below is one often used to describe the theory visually. The far left, in green, represents the high-volume of sales of a small number of items. You see the long tail developing in the middle and to the right – this represents the large number of items that sell a smaller volume of units over time.
The Long Tail (photo: Wikipedia)
(A perfect real-world application of the theory: when I went to order books for my classes, there was one I was hoping to buy that day, which meant needing to visit my neighborhood B&N. When I stopped on my way home from work that evening I was told, “We don’t have that book in any of the local stores, but we can order it for you and have it delivered to you.”)
I had heard the term “the long tail,” but never took the time to learn the theory behind it, so I was glad to be reading Anderson’s book. I was really interested at the beginning, but I quickly grew tired of repetition – same theory, different company applying it.
I don’t want you to go leave this post with a sense that I did not enjoy the book, I did. In fact, from the beginning I was thinking about how a charity or fundraising organization might apply this theory and started thinking about my client for this semester, charity: water.
The long tail can, in a way, be applied to any organization trying to raise money to accomplish a goal. Follow me here: there is a limited number of places a organization can go to raise money. There is a smaller amount of incredibly wealthy people who, with a few strokes of the almighty pen, can underwrite a charity’s annual budget. On the flip side, there are a huge number of people of average wealth, who individually cannot donate huge amounts, but when combined together can make a huge impact.
The long tail graph above applies the exact same way in this case, and charity: water is a perfect example of this. It was almost as if founder and president Scott Harrison was reading this book when he threw a birthday party and started raising money for clean water wells back in the mid-2000s. What charity: water has been able to do is downplay the need for the large dollar donors and, instead applying the long tail method and putting power in the hands of the small-dollar donor, asking them to take ownership of a fundraising campaign, and take on the responsibility of making a difference. The organization’s fundraising arm, Mycharity: water, asks regular Joes to start campaigns, most of which raise a small amount of money.
My charity: water fundraising homepage
I was trying to think of other organizations that do a great job of empowering their supporters to take the same level of ownership over a fundraising campaign that charity: water does and immediately one example came to mind. This organization, launched in 2007, relied on a huge number of small-dollar donations to make small contributions that when combined made a huge difference, eventually raising nearly one billion dollars. The man at the head of that organization is now the President of the United States.
(Full disclosure, I worked as a staffer on the Obama for America presidential campaign in 2008.)
I apologize for the long delay between posts. A few weeks of traveling for work and a huge amount of work for grad school have set back my update schedule. But as Russell Casse said in Independence Day, “Hello boys. I’m baaaack.”
So something happened about two weeks ago and I’ve been formulating a blog post about it in my mind ever since. charity: water, one of my favorite charities, and if you read my first post you know is the focus of a semester-long project for my Using Social and Digital Media class at Hopkins, was sued for fraud by one of their donors. The suit wasn’t so much what interested me as much as the response to the suit that charity: water issued.
One of the reasons I have admired this organization for years is their high degree of transparency in everything they do. Want to know where your donations are going? They’ll show you. How much of their funding goes to overhead costs? Their annual reports cover all those bases. Wonder what happens when a drilling expedition goes awry? They’ll show you…then they’ll go back until they’re successful.
The instance of the lawsuit was no different. Want to know why we were sued and what steps we’re taking to make sure issues like this don’t happen again? Let us tell you.
charity: water founder and President Scott Harrison issued a letter over their website that did all of those things and more: it started out by explaining the campaign that eventually led to the lawsuit, then explained the lawsuit, and ended with a list f things the organization has done and will do to avoid the problems that led to the lawsuit in the first place.
I am not going to go into the specifics of it, because, frankly, it doesn’t sound like the lawsuit holds water (admittedly, I am somewhat biased here. Also helps that charity: water is a trusted organization in my eyes and the eyes of charity watchdogs Charity Navigator). But what I do want to point out is the drastic difference in response by charity: water as opposed to a for-profit company like Pop Chips, who recently ran into a crisis of their own with a controversial viral video ad featuring Ashton Kutcher dressed as a Bollywood star.
When the Pop Chips video hit the internet it created quite a buzz. Broadcast and print news outlets covered the incident with a critical tongue. What’s worst, though, is that it took Pop Chips CEO Keith Belling nearly a week to respond and when he did, he did so in a 66-word blog post that was quickly buried on their company blog.
charity: water – quick response. Great SEO (a search of terms like “charity water lawsuit” brought back results all leading to the charity: water website – they got out ahead of the story and made sure they controlled what supporters and critics were finding on page 1 of their Google and Bing searches). They also responded where they knew a large number of people would see it.
In contrast, Pop Chips: waited days to respond (when a news cycle is 15 minutes long, days is an eternity). They had a horrible optimization strategy — a search of “Pop Chips Ad” brought back nothing by negative press page after page on both Google and Bing searches. And they responded on their company blog with a short post that was immediately buried by other posts. Any crisis management plan you read today will tell you to respond in the arena where the attack took place. In this case, they should have posted a video to YouTube with the CEO apologizing, and then titled and tagged the video as closely to the controversial ad as possible. This way anyone searching YouTube for “Pop Chips Ad” would have likely seen the apology higher up on the first page of the search.
It doesn’t matter if you run a non-profit organization or a for-profit business. Many of the elements of crisis management are the same. In my mind, transparency is King. We should all take a page out of the charity: water playbook (and burn the Pop Chips game plan).
Thanks for reading. As always, I welcome comments and thoughts as I’ve inevitably overlooked something worth mentioning here.
If you just finished reading Brian Solis’s “Engage!” it would be easy to imagine Benjamin Franklin’s famous political drawing “Join, or Die,” depicting a snake cut up in to pieces redrawn some 258 years later and retitled “Engage, or die!”
Solis would have you believe, and correctly so, that if you do not properly join the pieces of your digital puzzle, you are destined for digital death. In the redrawn version (adapted above by my great friend Katherine), each section of the snake no longer represents a colony, but a space in the digital landscape. (We learned from Solis’s Conversation Prism that there are far more then eight pieces in the digital landscape, but as we learned from “Engage!” not all of the pieces fit into each scenario.)
Some history behind Franklin’s original drawing in the context of today’s digital world: There was an old superstition that a snake severed into pieces would regenerate if the pieces were brought back together before sunset. While Franklin was making a clear statement about the importance of colonial unity against British authoritarianism, the same principle could be applied to today’s digital landscape: Join the pieces together to build cohesiveness, or be crushed by others who already have. Same goes for your clients’ online existence, according to Solis.
The conversational style of “Engage!” made it both a quick and…engaging…read. I am conflicted, though, and I cannot exactly put my finger on why. On one hand, the book does a fantastic job of explaining trends and technology, and providing tangible examples of real-world clients implementing them. He lays out what he calls rules of engagement, talks about the importance of brands, and gives a lot of great helpful hints. On the other hand, Solis makes it sound so damn easy: read this book, pick the pieces of the Prism that apply to your business, implement them well, and PRESTO! You’ll be successful. I have found it to be much more difficult than that.
It is entirely possible that my uneasiness of this book stems from my work. I don’t work in the for-profit industry, the target audience of “Engage!” (subtitled: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web). I work for a large global health non-profit organization, and while many of the tools Solis describes are free, there is a great cost that comes with implementing strategy and keeping content coordinated and fresh.
We deal with major budgetary constraints that create capacity issues. For instance, our limited marketing budget means we cannot hire staff or purchase increasingly expensive monitoring and measurement tools (Radian6, one of the preeminent tools in social media measurement, no longer costs $50/month like it did a few years ago, it now runs hundreds of dollars a month—there are free tools available, but I haven’t found one that does a great, even good, job of comprehensive measurement).
As I read, I was trying to envision how my client, charity: water (lower case is intentional), also a non-profit, would have implemented the tactics laid out by Solis. In my opinion, New Media Uniersity 901 (Chapter 12) is the most important chapter in Engage! For a non-profit organization whose success is contingent upon private fundraising there is an incredible importance in being able to define a brand persona (p. 103) that potential donors can gravitate to.
Each of the pieces of the Brand Reflection Cycle that Solis introduces helps to paint that picture. charity: water has an incredibly compelling story and a mission that is easily digestible – clean water for the one billion people that don’t currently have access to it. Being able to tell the story is tantamount to their success – and empowering their passionate staff to help is a great assist. It seems that an organization that successfully addresses these factors and answers the questions—what is unique about our brand? What is our mission? Give people a reason to connect and share—has done the difficult part. The narrative path to success exists, it is just a matter of coordinating the outreach effort.
As a consumer of charitable stories and charitable giver, I think about the characteristics of a charity that I would want to donate to: Does it have a mission I believe in? Are they transparent about their work and business model? Do they inspire me to want to tell other people about them? I do not have a great deal of money to donate, so I weigh these and other factors when deciding what causes to donate to to. I consider myself a brand ambassador for charity: water, I have followed them for years and mention them as an example of a forward-thinking organization to anyone interested. I tweet about them, share their content across my own personal networks, and forward their emails to friends when I get them. I do these things because they have done a fantastic job of establishing an online identity that is easy to care about.
So should you read “Engage!”? Yes. Overall, it is definitely a worthwhile read and I would encourage anyone in the field who has not read it to do so. Much of what Solis writes about has become common knowledge if you’re in the field, or pay attention to trends within it, but he adds great context and real-world examples that make it incredibly easy to digest.
One thing I would love to see is Solis switch gears and write a non-profit “new web” playbook for non-profit organizations. He is clearly one of the most respected minds in digital media—I have subscribed to his blog feed for years—issue a new version of his book targeted at non-profit groups trying to effectively employ new media campaign.
Leave me a comment and let me know what you thought about “Engage!” or about this post. I look forward to our conversation.
the digital altruist 