“Failure happens.”
However, Sarah doesn’t mope and pity in the eye of failure–instead she offers insights into why failure happens based on the text Marketing in Public Health. Sarah reviews four types of common failures when it comes to communications interventions:
I would like to call your attention to reason number 3–measurement and evaluation. Why? Because this can be one of the easiest to avoid and is also one of the most important elements in any social marketing campaign. Think about a project that you are currently working on–do you have an evaluation strategy for your communications? If not, some resources you may find helpful are provided below:
If you do have an evaluation strategy, I want to also challenge you and ask you two questions: What are you evaluating and why are evaluating it? Often, by asking these questions, you can avoid some of the other failure pit stops that Sarah mentioned. I know our team internally are asking ourselves these very questions on some great projects we are brewing up–and I look forward to continued thoughts from the team and from you. Because when it comes to “success” in social marketing, my head automatically thinks of desired behaviors, behavioral objectives and behavioral outcomes–what does your mind think of?
flickr credit: fireflythegreat
]]>1. @misslacey123: Lacey is the one who got me on Twitter. We are both Mizzou J-School alums who have re-located to the great DC. She mentioned it one day as her and her colleagues at PBS were starting to explore it. At first, I was a little skeptical. But obviously, Twitter’s functionality grew on me!
2. @bbravo: I’ve been a long-time fan of Britt’s Have Fun * Do Good blog and last fall joined in with her on the Changebloggers movement. So, I wasn’t too surprised to see that I started following Britt on Twitter from the get-go.
3. @NetSquared: NetSquared is a great resource for all socially-inclined organizations as they are “remixing the Web for social change through social tools.”
4. @osocio: This blog was the very first blog that I became a fan of and would read just about every day. Mark and his team do an excellent, excellent job at showcasing social advertising from around the world. Upon discovery of this blog, I talked about it all the time, showed it to my graduate classes, recruited others to check it out. And, this is back when Osocio went by Houtlust!
5. @TechSoup: TechSoup is a leader when it comes to non-profits and Technology. They and its members are a wealth of resources. When I first joined Twitter, I wanted to connect with the non-profit community. Since then, its expanded into the social change community, which also umbrellas the non-profit community.
6. @mikekujawski: I saw very early on that Mike was leading the way for social marketing amongst public sector organizations up in Canada and immediately admired his work and became inspired. This is because I could relate. He is a member of the “new wave” of social marketeers who are willing to go the distance for social good. Mike is one of the first, out of many, that I would continue to identify, encourage and admire.
7. @elliotthoffman–Elliot is an acquaintance from way back in high school. We were both in one of my good friends weddings and we both happen to enjoy technology. Reminded me of take-away #4, to follow-up and reconnect with those you haven’t checked in with lately.
8. @_FakeSteveJobs–Not quite sure what made me start following FakeSteveJobs, maybe I was hoping, along with others, that maybe, just maybe, it really was the RealSteveJobs. Having been outed and no updates since August 2007, I have now “unfollowed” this account.
9. @cnnbrk–One of my best friends I made in grad school was a CNN fanatic. She knew any breaking story before the rest of us and in the midst of class would update us with important information. Then, she showed me her secret: CNN email alerts. Becoming quite the fan-atic myself, I found them on Twitter. Given its friendly banter with @aplusk earlier this year, @cnnbrk is continues to stay relevant.
10. @penguinasana–Megan is the online community manager for TechSoup, so it was a natural decision to follow her given my interest in NetSquared and TechSoup. Admitedly though, I haven’t engaged in as much conversation as I’d like. So, Megan, if you’re listening, I look forward to connecting with you and the TechSoup team more. =)
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This exercise provided me with 4 key take-aways:
1. Remind yourself. Make sure you go through who you are following and who is following you to remind you of your friends, potential friends and fellow people who you might have things in common with. Notice I did not say, “Remind yourself of your audience.” Your followers should not be your audience, but more of an active hive that you leave and return to with information, resources, questions, and more.
2. Double check your stream for active participants. Since some people sign up for Twitter and then never use it or use it just to “push out” information, your list might need a slight refresh.
3. Evaluate your own use of Twitter. When you first started, you might have been more in an “experimental” phase or started for a different reason than why you currently use Twitter. Looking back at your intial follows/followers can provide some good reflective insight for thought.
4. Follow-up with people and connect in conversation. At one point you connected. It could be a former colleague, friend or co-worker. If you haven’t chatted it up in a while, get those DM’s and @ replies to work. You never know what new projects they may be working on, new interests you may have in common or opportunities for collaboration that might develop. Plus, life is too short and time is too precious, especially in the social media space.
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What about you? Who were your first First Twitter 10? Did they surprise you? And better yet–do we happen to have any of the same ten in common?
flickr credit: holeymoon
]]>1. SEO Website Grader (Thank you Dr. Stephen Dann for this amazing tool!)
This site allows you to receive a monthly report providing helpful and useful SEO information on any site of your choice, AND to compare it against competing sites. A great resource for any search engine optimization or interactive marketing plans. Warning: Hours of time will go by before you realize it!
2. Is your website Hott or Not….err, ok or ko?
Ok, we’re not in high school anymore, but don’t act like you’ve never checked out the infamous Hott or Not website or uploaded your friend’s picture to the site as a joke…
Well, now you can rate websites based on the design of their homepage with a 1-10 ranking and see the average rating other websites have received. To become a repeat visitor, register your website into the bank and see what other users rate it!
3. Blogpulse
Blogpulse is a Nielsen Buzzmetrics tool that allows one to create customized graphs based on keyword trends for chosen keywords. Other tools include featured keyword graphs based on popular keywords, conversation tracker which follows trackbacks and permalinks between blogs and blogger profiles that show the most recent posts, the sources used, numbers of times the bloggers is cited by fellow bloggers and a list of 10 related blogs. This is great for monitoring how the blogosphere views your brand, topic or organization and helps identify blog networks.
4. Ice Rocket
Ice Rocket is like a smaller version of Blogpulse and allows you to make keyword trend graphs, but only for the most recent three months, while Blogpulse lets you make a graph for the last 6 months.
5. Popular Viral Video Aggregate
Like PopURLS, only for videos, this site shows the most popular videos for YouTube, Metacafe, MySpace, Yahoo, ifilm, Break.com, Grounder and Google.
6. See Google’s top sites based on non-keyword metrics
This link takes out all the keyword data in Google and shows you what sites Google sees as the best ranked with the most traffic.
Alltop is a blog aggregate that provides the most recent 5 posts from the top 40 blogs, sorted by topic. Topics include social media, nonprofit, moms, life, dads, career, celebrities, games, SEO, Macintosh, Windows, Journalism, world news, photography and more!
8. PopURLs
PopURLS is an aggregate that provides the most popular links across the web including digg, del.icio.us, flickr, reddit, Truemors, YouTube, Google and Yahoo news, AOL Video, Mahalo, Twitter and more!
9. Hits Log
Hits Log is an SEO tool that allows you to discover your site’s Google Pank Rank and search engine rank. Though not as useful as Website grader, it may be easier for some to use.
As I hinted to in my last post, I think the evaluation step is maybe one of the most important steps a marketing plan can include, yet many lack. Doing evaluation, allows one to:
For best evaluation results, one should meet with a team, get outside feedback, talk to the client(s), key associates or other employees who had a hand in the project. Now, it the fun part. I want to introduce to you a great, but commonly unknown tool to add to your evaluation methods: the User Interface Test.
User Interface is a concept that describes how users interact with a website. If you’ve ever had any of the following questions, then conducting a User Interface test might be right up your alley:
If you find yourselves asking these questions and similar others, then a User Interface test could be right up your alley! To test your User Interface, you can use either quantitative or qualitative approaches. Four qualitative approaches are outlined below.
To create quantitative results, one can have testee fill out forms measuring various categories on a scale of 1-5 (customization, professionalism or tone, design, organization, usefulness, relevance, and interactivity.)
Hope this little research tidbit, and way of evaluating your website comes in hand.
]]>First, the term greenwashing is taken from the term whitewashing. Whitewashing means to hide, cover or conceal unpleasant facts or details, especially in a political context or to manipulate. According to the Greenwashing Index, Greenwashing is:
“It’s greenwashing when a company or organization spends more time and money claiming to be “green” through advertising and marketing than actually implementing business practices that minimize environmental impact. It’s whitewashing, but with a green brush.”
Knowing this information, enter in the Greenwashing Index, promoted by EnviroMedia Social Marketing and University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. The purpose of the Greenwashing Index is “to educate consumers about how to “read” an ad and encourage them to decide for themselves if what they’re seeing is greenwashing.” The index hopes to curb the growth of greenwashing and encourage real environmental responsibility and change.
The index measures and scores advertising claims based on the following five criteria:
To detect greenwashing, Sourcewatch offers the following tips:
As my previous post mentioned, the FTC began a workshop of hearings yesterday a year early about the growing buzz and concerns regarding green marketing. To listen to the FTC hearings about the, click here. The workshops could results in updating the FTC’s green guides, which outlines the FCC’s laws regarding environmental claims for advertiser, marketers and consumers. These guidelines were originally created in 1992. Though the green guides were updated in 1998, they haven’t been changed since.
Now the final piece: What does this mean to us….as social marketers?
Personally, I think evaluation tools are great, despite the lack of them and the lack of priority in evaluation processes. The evaluation step is one too many organization and marketing directors overlook or skip. I see the Greenwashing Index as another great evaluations tool for us, and I offer up the suggestion that perhaps we should have more such evaluation tools to help keep the private sector accountable and responsible. Doing such, I think, would increase our success in our social marketing endeavors.
More on evaluation procedures and steps in the next post. =)
]]>Get your smokey on. This is the tagline for a new campaign sponsored by the Ad Council, USDA Forest Service and the National Association of State Foresters.
It’s also the tagline for the first social marketing campaign highlighted in my campaigns series. I chose this campaign not only because of its relevance and timeliness, but also because of some of the social media promotional components integrated with the campaign.
Meet Smokey Bear: Born in 1944, a time when firefighters were serving in the war effort. Thus, fire prevention became a key wartime issue. In 1944, 22 million acres of land were lost with 9 out of 10 forest fires were accidental. Most of Smokey’s campaigns focused on specific fire-prevention behaviors with the message, “Only you can prevent forest fires.”
Smokey Bear’s Make-Over: Today, Smokey Bear wants others to “Get Your Smokey On,” encouraging others to take on Smokey’s characteristics of encouraging others to practice fire safety behavior and to even intervene if necessary.
Background Research: According to the Ad Council, an average of 6.5 million acres of U.S. land was burned by wildfires every year for the past 10 years. Research also shows that many Americans believe lightning starts most wildfires. However, 88% of wildfires nationwide are started by humans. The principle causes are campfires left unattended, trash burning on windy days, careless discarding of smoking materials and BBQ coals and operating equipment without spark arrestors.
Objective: To encourage the target audience to sign the “Get Your Smokey On” Wildfire Pledge,” where signers pledge to “Be smart whenever I go outdoors.” The pledge also outlines 9 points of safety behaviors and beliefs that the reader agrees to follow.
Audience: The primary audience are adults aged 18-35 who are causal campers, hikers and bikers.
Campaign Components
Evaluation: The Smokey Bear campaign has always been evaluated based by the reduction in the number of acres lost annually in fires and based upon the campaigns recognition. Smokey Bear is currently the most recognizable image in the U.S., after Santa Claus.
Creator: Made pro-bono by DraftFCB. In the close future, Smokey will also be featured in PSAs alongside Sleeping Beauty created in partnership with The Disney Company .
Social Marketing Rating: According to the social marketing wiki, this initiative meets the requirements for social marketing. However, on the wiki it is argued that it’s not very good social marketing stating that the online pledge mixes behavior and non-behavior objectives and is too long for readers to actually follow. It’s review goes on.
However, I think it’s a great awareness and promotional campaign. In terms of taking a complicated issue, research and statistics and communicating it, especially online. I think the campaign has two most powerful components: