M+R Strategic Services just released a report outlining the strategies and best practices from the Obama new media campaign and how those practices should be applied to nonprofits and their online marketing and fundraising efforts. It’s a great read. Here’s the lead in paragraph:

The best news for nonprofits? The most successful new media strategies for the
campaign were all things that can – and should – be replicated by nonprofit
organizations. Build an email list. Send high-quality, engaging emails to those
constituents. Make them a part of the story. Run a program that is data-driven,
and use analytics to improve that program. Use authentic organizational content –
video, text and images – to tell a compelling story. Use email and phone calls to ask
online volunteers to participate in offline programs.

The report contained a few key concepts that I always impress upon my nonprofit clients, including:

1. Be disciplined to create a strategy, consistent message, and stay on message – sending certain messages to certain segments for a reason. Measure. Rinse. Tweak. Repeat.
2. Give your online marketing staff them the autonomy to make good decisions regardless of the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) in the room. Did you know that the Obama campaign had a 81-person new media team that grew to nearly 170 people by the end of the campaign?
3. Hire talented, trained staff (I would argue that this also means you actually need to pay for their talent. The number of nonprofit openings for online marketing staff with extremely low salaries I think demonstrates that many nonprofits don’t “get” that hiring talented online marketing staff is worth it.  From the report: Chief Technology Officer Michael Slaby had this piece of advice:

You need more new media people than you think you do, and they are worth more than you think they are.

4. Be authentic, and keep the focus on your supporters, let them interact with you. If your budget is supported by them, you won’t be able to do the work your organization works on without them.
5. Content is important. You won’t be able to build an online audience without good content.
6. Build your email list through website optimization and testing. (page 13-14 of the report). EVERY nonprofit needs to understand HOW important website optimization and testing is, and needs to make it an organizational priority.
7. Timing. “Timing is more important than perfection” – Arun Chaudhary, New Media Road Director. I could not agree more. This applies to email, launching an ad campaign, posting on social media sites, putting up a blog posts. Posting or sending during certain times of day will have a much higher success rate than others. I always cringe when I see nonprofits posting a blog post or sending a email at midnight on Thursday night just because that was when it was “done” instead of waiting for the best time window and scheduling it to go out the next day.

All in all, great stuff and every nonprofit marketer should thoroughly read the report and absorb it’s findings. You can download the full report here

Corporate Online Marketing Best Practices Applied to Nonprofit Challenges.

I think this also demonstrates what I’ve been saying to folks all along. Corporate best practices around online marketing should be applied to nonprofit challenges. The tactics are the same, the message is just different and nonprofits have an advantage in that their supporters can be used to spread the word about their mission in social media more effectively than Coca Cola fans ever will. If you look at where the staff for the Obama campaign came from – it was largely corporate online marketing experience.

If you are a nonprofit online marketer, you should follow the for-profit marketers that have the extra resources and capacity to really test new strategies in the online space and follow blogs like SearchEngineLand.com rather than non-profit only forums. You will be a better marketer for it.

I had a great time on a panel yesterday about social media organized by the DC Chapter of the American Marketing Association. I pulled together slides of useful online marketing tools and wanted to share them here. It was tons of fun getting folks excited about social media and web measurement.

I’m on an AMA panel this week about social media. The panel is unbelievably diverse, so it should be an interesting conversation and lunch is served!

Here’s the info:
What do a university medical center, a woodworking tools manufacturer, and an environmental nonprofit organization have in common? They’re all using social media to great effect…and they’re all ready to tell us more about it.

Be on hand as three articulate and energetic innovators–Ed Bennett from the University of Maryland Medical Center, Ted Hall from ShopBot Tools, and Katherine Watier from Environmental Working Group–join serial entrepreneur Casey Golden, founder and president of Small Act Network, in a stimulating and informative panel discussion. As always, it’s a wonderful networking opportunity and a great lunch!

WHAT: Executive Marketing Roundtable, sponsored by the American Marketing Assn.

TITLE: Putting Social Media in the Mix—How to Choose It, When to Use It

DATE: Thursday, June 25

TIME: 11:30 am – 2:00 pm

PLACE: Morrison & Foerster, 2000 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Sixth Floor

COST: $50 Members
$65 Non-members

To register or find out more: http://www.amadc.org/events/event_calendar.html#0625

Register now online—limited seating!

Senior Marketing Executives Only, Please.

I wanted to share the news! Previously, nonprofits were not able to link back to their website call to action page in YouTube – only display a Google Checkout button for donations or their main website URL.

Now you can create a call to action overlay for particular videos which will link back to your particular call to action page.

Here are the instructions from YouTube:

Just go to the “Edit Video” section of your video, then
fill out the fields in the section marked “Call to Action overlay.”
Then insert:
* A short headline
* Ad text
* Destination URL
* An image
…and you’re set to go. Now the Call to Action overlay will appear
whenever someone watches that video.

Every nonprofit that has a video running on YouTube that is related to an active campaign, should turn on this feature.

For all of you still trying to convince your bosses that social networking is something you should be involved in, feel free to reference the latest research from Neilsen Online which shows that people are now spending more time checking social networking sites and blogs than reading email.

I had a great time this morning leading a training session for Leadership Alexandria’s alumnus related to online marketing, local search and social media for non-profits and businesses.

Here’s the online marketing presentation from today’s training.

I wanted to share with everyone the buzz monitoring tools I’ve discovered and think are useful. This list assumes that you’ve set up Google and Yahoo Alerts and are looking for the next step.

Keotag – lets you search various social media sites (delicious, facebook, etc) by tags.

Yahoo Pipes

Back Type - to follow and monitor comments

Social Mention – searches across a variety of social media sources, including Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Flickr, Digg, YouTube. You can also set up RSS feeds and email alerts.

Serph – a search engine that searches across various sites.  The major social media sites that Serph uses are: Technorati, Digg, YouTube, Flickr, Google Blog Search, Bloglines, and Newsvine.

BuzzFeed.com – They say: We feature the kind of things you’d want to pass along to your friends: an outrageous video that’s about to go viral, an obscure subculture breaking into the mainstream, a juicy bit of gossip that everyone at the office will be talking about tomorrow, or an ordinary guy having his glorious 15-minutes of fame. And when you read BuzzFeed, you’ll always know the movies, music, and products that are on the rise and worth your time.

And last but not least, EgoSurf. This one just makes me smile. My blog received 2563 Ego points for my name, while my website recieved 2157 points. The ego meter graphic is one of the most amusing aspects.

I’ve noticed a trend of search folks who like to rap and figured I would start a collection. Let me know if you find other funny/dorky SEM raps.

GAAC Rap
Here’s Paul Chastain from Just1 a Google Analytics Authorized Consulting company out of Idaho.

And of course the PPC Rap song from PopLabs

Here’s an SEO Rap video:

Here’s one on link building:

Here’s one on social media addiction:

And for something slightly different, here’s a Search Engine Rap Battle between Google and MSN. I think this one is my favorite.:

And here’s a Search Engine battle between Google and Yahoo:

I particularly like the SEOs who decide to create a rap video to jump on the bandwagon, but clearly can’t rap at all….check out this one. Totally painful:

In case anyone is interested….

Anyone with an idea for an online citizen media project in a
marginalized community anywhere in the world is welcome to apply for a grant of up to $5000 from Rising Voices, a project of Global Voices Online. The application process is short and sweet. Deadline on January 18! See link for more info…

http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/apply/

Thought these Flash videos about social media were neat. They cover how HP used bloggers in their marketing plan, how Facebook Connect works, how to use Twitter as  a Tool, and how to create your own social network.