Social media strategy for cause-based campaigning

I’ve been around the block a bit with this old thing we call the internet. Since 1996 I’ve been helping clients to make themselves heard online and It’s not always been about making money. I may have a bunch of financial services clients on my CV alongside big consumer brands, but more recently my work has been leaning towards the third sector.

Currently I’m freelancing for the Scottish Government and getting a good understanding of the public sector. Prior to this I was Web Communications Director of The Graphics Company, a design agency focussed on the Third Sector. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t eschewed the commercial sector, rather I’ve added a new layer of understanding to what I can offer both groups.

With that bit of context, I’ve been thinking about cause-based campaigning using social media. It’s an area where it’s clear that a little bit of SM savvy would yield great results. The problem is that, for the most part, campaigners have not got on board.

There are a lot of good people involved in campaigning. Often people with a solid background in politics or social marketing. Often people who have had dramatic results in the past and don’t see any reason to fix something that aint broke. That’s fair enough but the goalposts have moved. There is not an unlimited number of supporters out there and it’s supporters who are the real currency of any cause-based campaign. If other, equally worthwhile but similar campaigns do get onboard the Social Media train then that supporter pool gets at best diluted but at worst it’s drained.

So what are the quick wins for campaigners wanting to make the most out of Social Networks?

Get listed

It’s the obvious first step, and to be fair it’s the step that pretty much all of them have already taken. Get yourself a Twitter account, set up a Facebook fan page. These are the bare minimum. Once you’ve done this set up a YouTube channel, a flickr account and a good, old fashioned blog.

Get busy

You can’t just build your presence and expect people to magically flock there. Simply listing your Twitter page and inviting people to become fans  will only bring you the audience that you already have. The ones who you are already getting the message to.

You have to find new supporters and this takes work. You need to utilise all the channels you have available. In the first instance get a video up on YouTube. Find a celebrity supporter or film some voxpops, it’s easy with the technology you have on your computer these days so there’s no excuse not to do it. Don’t wory about productions standards. It’s YouTube!

Take some photos. Take your digital camera to one of your rallies. Snap some volunteers at work or just capture the pile of correspondence on your desk. It’s all interesting. Tag it up and release it onto flickr.

Then write about it. Tell your existing supporters how the campaign is going. Give some behind the scenes gen on what’sbeen going on. Speak about the broader context of what you’re tying to achieve.

All of these things give more ways for people to find their way to your cause at the same time as adding real value. The more content you put out there, the more conversations you will stir up. It’s these conversations which will grow your supporter base online.

Get influencers

Use Twitter Search to find out who is talking in your area (both geographically and metaphorically). Start following a few of the more interesting chats that you see. Chances are that you’ll begin to see a couple of names cropping up more than others. Keep an eye on these tweeps and one or two of them will emerge as influencers. People  who can help form opinions. Engage with these people. Get them onside and they may help promote you to their own list of followers.

Get social

Having said all that, the traditional model of campaigning does have one great advantage over much of the social media activity on the web: real human interaction. Getting out there and meeting people, letting them know what’s going on and where to get their hands on all your carefully crafted content is what it’s all about.

I’ve stuck to the big Social Media sites here. There are other ones that you may find relevant depending on you target audience. If you’re aiming at kids or musicians then by all means include Myspace. Also, there are other channels that shouldn’t be ignored. Email is tried, tested and easy to measure for instance and should already be part of your strategy while iPhone apps are less established but bring their own possibilities. I guess you need to do a bit of reasearch…

Social Media vs Marketing Strategy

[tweetmeme source=”barrydewar” alias=”http://ow.ly/1QQKt” only_single=false]It’s very exciting to be involved with social media at the moment. Everyone is talking about it and marketeers are actually beginning to see the benefit. But remember, it’s only effective as part of a properly thought out marketing strategy.

• You’ve still got to have a product.

Whether that be your services, your advice or your gadget, if you’re going crazy on Facebook/Twitter/Insert-Other without a product then all you’re doing is peddling hot air (your feet will burn but you’ll get nowhere).

• You’ve still got to have an audience.

You have to stop and think about who needs to hear what you’ve got to say. Who would you like to interact with to promote your product or improve your services. If you can’t define that audience then you’ll end up trying to convince school age Bebo kids that they need some of your SMO juice and they won’t be having it.

• You’ve still got to have goals.

Without goals you’re aimless and there’s nothing you can measure progress against. How can you tell that your strategy is working if you don’t set goals? You can set up as many Facebook fan sites as you like but if you’re happy with trying to get as many fans as you can when, in reality, you’re real goal is to sell more of your services, then you are failing.

Social marketing has it’s place. In some cases it’s your key brand channel. That’s certainly true of people who are trying to convince you of how useful social media can be to your organisation. But in most cases it’s simply an open channel. One where your customers can get your ear. One where you can build a bit of trust so that they are receptive to your ultimate goal which is to give up some cash so you can pay your bills.

Hell. In some cases it’s of no use at all. Don’t try a YouTube campaign targeting public sector employees for instance because 90% aren’t going to be able to access it due to over-zealous security restrictions.

So, in short. Think about your product, audience and goals first. Then, start to look at how you might achieve them. If one of those methods looks like it might be a bit of social media, then yay. Otherwise, stick with your poster campaign and branded mugs.

5 examples of when Social Media is NOT the correct strategy

When you want to slag off the home of your biggest client.

When you’re having an erotic exchange with a page 3 girl that you don’t want your wife to find out about.

When you’re on jury duty.

When you’re on a secret trip to a war zone.

When you’ve been offered a job with a company who will definitely be SM savvy.

Are websites dead?

OK, let’s get the whole smell of new paint out of the way. This is a new blog where I’ll be sharing my thoughts and advice on Digital Communications and Social Media. OK?

Good.

So onto the actual content then. At the risk of repeating myself, are websites dead?

2010 was widely predicted to be the year that Social Media takes off. Well, we’re almost 2 months in now and those predictions are being borne out. The stats from the big players make impressive reading:

• Facebook currently has 400m active users globally. Last summer they had “just” 250m.
• Twitter users are tweeting 50m times a day. That’s a staggering 1500% up on 2008!
• LinkedIn has in excess of 50m members worldwide, 1m up from a year ago.

The revolution is really gathering pace and is gaining so much momentum that it’s even making the mighty Google wobble. Facebook is making serious inroads into the search market by driving more traffic to major portals than Google.

So with the social media space becoming the virtual home for many, and users getting much of their content in the form of feeds, websites as we knew them in the noughties are becoming increasingly redundant. Simply buying a domain name and having a digital agency craft you a beautiful looking set of pages is beginning to look like a waste of money.

The add-ons which we’ve been encouraging clients to incorporate, however, have taken on far more importance. The news feed, the blog and the forum, these staples of the web 2.0 revolution, have grown up and are threatening to overthrow the sites on which they sit. The content which they generate is indexed and accessed in many more ways than ever before. As I sit here, my humble iGoogle homepage saves me from visiting 8 websites in order to mine the info that I want. I have mounted my feeds from blogs, news sites and social media alongside news updates from websites I like.

Now, I’m a geek (and not a card carrying one by any means), and I fully appreciate that I do not represent the average user but the point is that Facebook is rapidly incorporating this content as well. As organisations cotton on to social media we are seeing them feed their content directly to their target audience, right there where they hang out with 400m other people.

So, are wbsites dead? I guess that for the bigger brands there’s a benefit from having a site which offers some custom built bells and whistles. But for those smaller operations, the bread and butter for your average SME web development agency, the benefits are fuzzy. Better maybe that they concentrate on some carefully created SMO objects. Maybe a clever viral on YouTube,  a Facebook presence and a properly thought out Twitter strategy are a better place to focus your energies. By all means, feel free to support it with a clear and concise website, but remember that it’s the engagement and the conversation that is going to give you the edge.