Preface: Back in the day, I was an art school kid learning graphic design. We worked on Macs. Macs were easy to use.
Philosophical review: Apple, those revolutionaries, made the cell phone user friendly. They took the crappy, crappy experience that was using a cell phone—on par with that most hated and poorly designed UI, the office photocopier—and made it doable. (So doable I recommend the iPhone to people one and two generations above me, so they can send a freakin’ picture through SMS and be done with it).
The iPad was created from the UI up, and that’s how it should be. The user at the centre of the experience. They’re correcting the UI mistakes of the past, destroying the lock in of 90′s OS conventions.
This is why Apple survived the unbelievable market share domination of Microsoft.
Gearhead review: This is going to be eleventy hundred times more convenient to drag around conferences than my server…er, laptop.
Facebook. I used to love you, but I had to kill you.
Whether there’s a Facebook exodus come May 31 or not, I have really sobered up to the whole MySpace/Friendster/’it was the style at the time’ social network fad issue. I didn’t believe in it until now. I mean, I knew intellectually that once upon a time MySpace got cool and then uncool, but was sure that could never happen to Facebook. They have half a billion users, for pity’s sake. Like 1/16th of the earth. What could happen to bugger that up?
Facebook’s recent PR shitstorm has largely played out among the digerati, and my sense is that the Average User will continue tending their Farmville real estate come the end of May, oblivious to arcane issues of private data and opt-outs and personalization. That may come to pass, but my faith has been badly shaken.
Like a spooked investor, I see the danger of putting all your eggs in one basket. Building a large Facebook following—instead of a more robust social strategy—could be an unfortunate resource sinkhole, should the bubble burst and the massive social network hustle itself right out of business.
Let’s be proactive and pretend, for a minute, that Facebook is on its last legs as a home for brands.
What’s a marketer to do? Here are some ideas for staying afloat in an uncertain social future.
Diversify your assets
If your core contribution is viral content, spread it out. Use Facebook to point fans to content and foster discussion there, but use YouTube and your own blog/site to host the original stuff. If you’ve just been riding the wave so far and not really developing your own content to share, get busy.
Make real friends & find out where else they hang out
You should already be doing this, but be sure to engage your active Facebook commenters to the point where you feel you really know each other. Google ‘em and follow them on Twitter or on their own blogs. Make the relationship bigger than Facebook, which will help make it deeper anyway. Should a new network arise to take FB’s place, these will be the people you’ll refriend.
Host an IRL event pronto
Get your social scene out and mingling for real as soon as possible. If you’re a non-profit, stage a volunteer event. If you’re a small business, invite people over for a (insert product here) tasting or a workshop. Move the virtual to real life now. This capitalizes on the work you’ve done so far. The point of meeting these people online was to take them to the next level of interaction with your business anyway.
Insource the connections you’ve made
Got an email newsletter, a mailing list, an inhouse CRM strategy? Migrate your new bffs to your own platform. Bring them into the fold. Throw them a discount if you can, and try to attach them to your brand’s inner circle. If you’ve got your own communication strategy running parallel, now would be a good time to solidify subscribers drawn from your FB fans. Invite them personally.
I’ve always liked Salvation Army’s advertising. It’s stark, a bit shocking, makes you uncomfortable. It’s about poverty.
Fundraising advertising needs to conjure up a pretty powerful scenario to be effective. Something like:
What if you were out getting a bagel at lunch, walked under a bridge and someone lived there? There you are, talking on your iPhone, strolling through somebody’s bedroom. Confronted by your own comparative wealth. You’d probably feel moved to make a “donation” right there.
During a fundraising campaign, advertising tries to recreate that feeling. Salvation Army is trying to bring you into that moment, and remind you there’s a way to help.
The potential donor must then sustain that generous urge until they can get themselves to an envelope, or a hotline, or dig out their credit card and start typin’. A lot to ask of a piece of advertising.
Generation X and the Millennials don’t want to go through the trouble of entering a 16-digit credit card number to make a $25 donation.
Melissa Brown, associate director of research at the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University
This became crystal clear when $1 000 000/day was raised through texting in the week after the Haiti earthquake.
Charitable giving is a dopamine bonanza, and the speed with which mobile can deliver the hit makes it extra rewarding. We give because it feels great, but we need instant gratification.
Mobile usage in Canada is at least 22 million (2008), or about 65% of the population, with no doubt increases in the years since and to come. This represents a huge opportunity for non-profits to have a conversation with donors at the right time and in the right place. When need strikes, the solution can be presented quickly—a win win for everyone.
Ideas for transforming giving with the mobile web:
Mobile reporting from disaster areas on Twitter. Include a text-to-give number for immediate relief & relay the results.
Foursquare check-ins at volunteer or fundraising events. Connect with a sponsor who will donate 25¢ for every check-in.
iPhone App-guided tours of your work with simple examples of the benefit a $5 donation can make, and the ability to make that donation. Seeing the connection between good work and a few dollars in the flesh can be very compelling.
Requests for donation of Twitter and Facebook status with text-to-give info when need is great.
Early adoption of the mobile web can get attention for your cause if it’s creative and picked up by the social media marketing community. More than that, it provides a better experience for donors who want to engage with your org. Have a mobile site created that streamlines an informative donation process for them. Attention is so scarce that anything less is a roadblock to giving.
So, part of the idea behind technological #singularity is that it might be possible to build a machine that’s smarter than people. Then all heck breaks loose, and humans do not necessarily come out on top.
“Theoretically, if a machine built by humans could bring to bear greater problem-solving and inventive skills than humans, then it could design a yet more capable machine. If built, this more capable machine then could design a machine of even greater capability.” Machines get smarter and smarter, outpacing humans until they’re the boss of us.
Preface: Back in the day, I was an art school kid learning graphic design. We worked on Macs. Macs were easy to use.
