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Mobile Donations: Raise Money From Text Messages

Mobile Giving with PRx

Haven’t heard of mobile donations? You will. This technology is on the fast track for many nonprofits and political fundraising organizations as a way to access new donors. The value of mobile donations is their immediacy and ease-of-use. Donors simply text a keyword, such as “HOPE,” to a specified “short code” number, such as 12345, and a $5 or $10 donation is automatically charged to their mobile phone bill.

Prior to 2008, mobile donations were stymied due to the high fees charged by the telephone carriers. That changed last year when the Mobile Giving Foundation (MGF), a Washington-based nonprofit, came into the picture. The MGF has been able to broker deals with all the major phone carriers in the US to waive all fees for text message donations, allowing the nonprofits to collect 90 percent of the donation (10 percent goes to the MGF).

More than 150 nonprofits such as United Way, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, UNICEF, and the Red Cross, to name a few, have already jumped on board. Versign and the MGF predict that more than $5 million will be raised this year with mobile giving.

Mobile donations won’t help bring an immediate windfall to your organization. The donation levels are small (the current limit is $10) and nonprofits are limited to 5 text donations per month. But, the technology can serve as a way to open the door to a new demographic that you might not otherwise reach. And, it is especially good for targeting the technology savvy Gen Y and, to a lesser extent, Gen X generations. Check out these stats:

WHY GO MOBILE?

• 270 million mobile subscribers
• In 2008, 3.5 billion text messages (SMS) were sent every day—that averages to about 13 messages per day per American
• In 2008, the mobile industry racked up more than $32 billion in data-service revenue
• 68 percent of people 18-24, 37 percent of people 35-44 and 14 percent of those over 65 use text messaging
  (The main target group for mobile donations is really the 18-44 age group.)

The two most important pieces of information you can gather from your donors are: 1) an opt-in email address and 2) an opt-in mobile phone number. With this information, a nonprofit has the ability to go back to its donor base time and again with complementary messages that together strengthen the donation pitch. Mobile technology can help you to get both of these.

Think about this: President Obama successfully used the mobile platform to help get him to the White House. Obama’s people had the insight long ago to realize they could leverage the mobile channel to do much more than just solicit donations. They could also engage supporters, mobilize volunteers and propel voters to the polls. And a recent article in Mobile Market says that by 2012 mobile voting could become a reality. Click here for more.

When you encourage donors to opt–in to your mobile program, you are then able to send alerts, updates and news of events through SMS messages. These personalized messages will improve the relationship between the nonprofits and the donor, and help you to push through the cacophony of marketing messages they’re already receiving to actually get their attention!

There are limitations on who can register with the MGF for mobile giving. You must meet the following requirements:

• US Non-Profit Organization registered as a 501c3 with at least $500,000 in annual revenues
• 501c3 must be in good standing for at least one year
• Patriot Act Compliant
• Must provide Form 990, Letter of Determination (Form 1045), and other documents as required

Mobile marketing, of course, doesn’t end with mobile giving. There are many other options to consider for your mobile campaign, some of which I will talk more about in next week’s post. I’ll list a few companies here, and how they used the mobile platform:

• The Secret: Premium subscription content
• Armani Exchange: Mobile coupons and promotions
• High School Musical 3: Fan engagement
• Shopaholic: Promotion, sponsorship and ticket sales
• Kaiser Permanente: Build awareness during federal open enrollment period
• The Cancer Action Network: Mobile advocacy

The ins and outs of mobile donations can be tricky. You can’t deal directly with the MGF and must work with one of its recommend providers. You should also be considering your larger donor communications strategy and how mobile marketing fits into that, especially as an adjunct to direct mail, events and personal solicitation. PRx has years of experience in philanthropy management and donor outreach.

If you’d like to set up an introductory meeting with our team at PRx to discuss the many ways you can use a mobile platform to reach out to, engage and garner support from your customers, donors or constituents, email me at tawnya(at)prxinc.com or call 408.287.1700.

Exploring San Jose

As PRx’s in-house photographer I’ve had wonderful opportunities to photograph an array of events: from OSH’s School Garden Program launch, various Valley Medical Center events, to Copa Coca-Cola’s soccer tournament and beautiful hotels, such as Oceano in Half Moon Bay, the Cupertino Inn and the Grand Hotel in Sunnyvale.

Recently, we were given the opportunity to create a series of advertisements for the San Jose Redevelopment Agency. These ads are displayed in the large wall-mounted light-boxes in San Jose Airport’s baggage terminals and cover each business district of San Jose, highlighting the unique experiences each district has to offer both visitors and residents of San Jose.

My favorite part of this assignment was to discover areas of San Jose I have never really explored personally. I’ve lived in San Jose for 10 years (some of those were as a student at SJSU) and it wasn’t until this year that I checked out the Lick Observatory in Alum Rock. I’d often wondered what that white building was on top of the mountain in the distance!

I think my experience touches on the importance of advertisements like these. While a primary goal is to inform and entice visitors who are picking up their luggage at baggage claim to learn about our diverse city, it lets those who already live here know about spots they may have overlooked. Now all of us can know the thrill of seeing something new, with a visitor’s eyes, and all it takes is a glance up from the baggage carousel.

If You Build It, They Will Come

I had an “aha” moment this week. My mother, whose been fighting breast cancer for eight years, recently passed away. In her memory, I created a blog site, hoping that friends and family would share their thoughts and memories of her. Initially, I was hesitant, as may of her acquaintances are over 50 and don’t really use technology that much. And, they certainly aren’t involved in social networking. In fact, if I said “blog” to many of them, I’m sure I would get a lot of confused faces. Some don’t even have regular access to a computer or broadband connection.

Nevertheless, I went ahead and created the site, posted some pictures to Flickr, video to YouTube and then linked those back to the blog. I also uploaded audio and wrote several posts. I then let everyone know about it by telling a few of her key friends. We also posted the blog URL in the obituary we ran in the local newspaper.

In truth, I expected people to go and view the site, but not interact with it much. I thought the technology barrier might be too high. I was definitely wrong. We’ve had many leave their heart–felt comments, including several who knew my mother but didn’t know myself or my brother, and others posted their own photos to Flickr, which are now shared on the blog site as well.

The whole experience has been very enriching for me as I’ve been able to share and communicate with others who knew my mother in very different ways. Together, we created a small community online, even though most of the people in that community aren’t “first users” of technology or even regular users of the Internet.

There are two lessons I’ve take away from this experience:

First: Be careful about the assumptions you make regarding your audience. The social media space—in all is complexity—is a tool and if you build something that brings a community together, something that truly fills their needs, people will figure out how to use it.

Second: Offline tools like newspapers and word-of-mouth are an essential component when it comes to letting people know about your blog or community site; don’t assume that because their traditional tools of communication they’re not relevant to your online presence.

The Digital Divide: Is Rural America Benefitting from New Internet Technology?

I just returned from a week visiting my mother deep in Oregon’s farmland, where I was acutely reminded of the gross digital divide that exists in this country, a divide that ultimately puts limitations on the influence and reach of the internet and its associated digital universe. It’s always a bit of a shock to my system when I jump on the plane, drive two hours and land on my mother’s doorstep, only to remember that in her world, I don’t have access to a wireless network or broadband connection for miles.

I live in the dead center of Silicon Valley, where everything and everyone is wired. I work and write from that space, happily ignorant to the plight of many Americans in other parts of the country. Going home to visit my mother makes me realize that my writings about how the internet is revolutionizing communications applies to a specific demographic in this country: for the most part, those who are affluent, urban, healthy and young.

In truth, my mother isn’t that far away from the two main universities in Oregon (Oregon State and the University of Oregon) where she can find plenty of places that offer free access to the World Wide Web. Still, she would have to drive 40 minutes to get to any kind of public WiFi (not that her 7-year-old laptop has a wireless adaptor). She can’t afford DSL for her own home and so remains on dial up. (You can imagine how this hinders her ability to access certain web sites and social networks or even use the most basic online applications.)

You might think that she’s an anomaly—-perhaps one of these people that just doesn’t get technology. Not true. Five years ago (at the age of 53) she received an associate degree from a local community college . . . and she specialized in web site design and development. Unfortunately, her breast cancer (then in remission) returned shortly after, and she’s been on disability every since. Her condition has essentially kept her from using her degree, but she remains knowledgeable of the Internet and uses it whenever she can.

When I visit her, I end up having to drive at least 20 miles to access the nearest broadband connection or free wireless network. This is an inconvenience for me, and a downright obstacle for my mother. In rural America, her situation isn’t uncommon. The US Internet Industry Association, a trade group representing Internet companies and ISPs, just released a report that addresses broadband adoption in rural America (or lack of). http://www.usiia.org/ It points out that although many in rural areas have access to broadband via things like telephone or cable, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are going to be able to pay for it.

While deployment is advancing rapidly, adoption of broadband by consumers – even to those who have it readily available – lags . . .

Pew Internet data as recent as 2005 indicates that adoption of broadband stands at only 34 percent in rural America, as opposed to nearly double that rate in urban and suburban areas.
I would also argue that rural Americans don’t have the means (the hardware–the newer computers) to use broadband.

The way I see it, there are several big contributors to the digital divide: age, disability, education and income. And, until we find ways to give rural and poor Americans the same kind of access to the technology and broadband networks that we take for granted in places like Silicon Valley, that divide will stymie the effectiveness of the internet and its ability to help these people.

For her, all of the social networking sites and many of the web sites out there are simply off limits. Her hardware just can’t handle the files sizes. Try downloading a video from YouTube on a dial up. It’s not fun. It’s a nightmare just to book a plane ticket on Southwest when your connection is that slow.

As marketers, we should be supporting legislation (at state and local levels), policies and programs that encourage equal, open access to the Internet in urban, suburban and rural areas (at all socio-economic levels). Without it, entire segments of the US population will be missing in our efforts to reach out to them in a cost-efficient, effective manner. When government-supported groups and organizations (like libraries and community projects), nonprofits, health organizations, and the like are turning more and more to the Internet to disseminate their information; when having a voice in this country is increasingly dependent on having access to the Internet; when more and more vital information is being put online, how can we leave these people out?

PR Is NOT Dead

I was recently forwarded an email sales pitch written by Steven Phenix of Phenix Public Relations. In it, he states that PR is dead, and we had all better prepare ourselves for the coming recession by launching social media campaigns. Now I have to admit that this kind of messaging really gets up my nose, as it uses sensationalism and scare–mongering to frighten PR and marketing professionals into a sell. Here’s what Steven had to say:

Here’s a prediction: Forget stagflation, now we’re in for flackflation. And it’s going to smack into the PR industry like a ten ton meteor.

Woe be on to you, those that aren’t prepared for what is coming next. Recession, inflation and a dying mainstream media are the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse. If $100 a barrel oil prices is the fourth guy on horseback, then we will all be bicycling to client meetings. I predict that in less than five years public relations — as it’s practiced now — will cease to exist. Instead, PR will morph into almost exclusively a social media pure play.

What?! I pure social media play? What’s this guy smoking? Now, I’m in agreement with him that the time has come when social media has to be an integrated part of your overall marketing and PR plan, but to say that it’s going to replace all other channels is just ludicrous. Here’s a cases in point. One of the most successful social media campaigns that I’ve seen in the last two years (and one of the earliest) involves Vancity Credit Union in Vancouver, BC, which launched a social change blog site called Change Everything. William Azaroff, the thought-leader behind this highly successful project said in a recent Podcast interview that when the credit union launched the blog, they did so as part of an overall branding campaign that involved billboards, print ads, PR, etc. He then goes on to say that the unexpected success of the blog was directly connected to the fact that Vancity was running the Change Everything campaign on several “traditional” media platforms.

When it comes to social media, I predict a more conservative version of what Steven is saying.

As technology (this includes the social media space) lowers the barrier of entry to mass marketing for individuals and businesses, more entities are going to be fighting for the attention of consumers. In addition, as consumers become increasingly bombarded with advertising and PR messages on their computers, mobile phones, iPods and televisions as well as at the gas station, in stores, on airplanes, at the ATM machine, one the radio . . . the list goes on . . . they will become more impervious to the messages we are giving them.

What does this all mean? That it will become ever-more important for those who want to rise above the noise and fray to get access to large, mainstream media channels that can set them apart from the masses. Getting exposure on these platforms will then help to drive your social media campaign.

Think smartly about implementing a social media strategy, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Rather, your online strategy should be a component of your overall PR and marketing campaign–a campaign that uses multiple offline and online channels to get out your message.

And don’t forget that creativity plays a huge part in this. You can’t just put out any-old campaign (whether that be offline or online) and expect it to grab people’s attention. Now more than ever, campaigns have to be well thought out in terms of objectives and goals and what it’s going to take to grab the attention of your audience. I like what my colleague Brenna Bolger at PRx, a Silicon Valley public relations firm that’s been around since the 70s, had to say, “No matter what, it’s still all driven by creative thinking.”

So let’s stop the scare mongering in the name of driving business. Our clients our looking to us—-the industry experts who are suppose to be guiding the rest with sound thinking–to help them understand how and where they can start using online PR and marketing. It’s not doing anyone any good to simply jump on the bandwagon of social media and forget about all the rest.

The Sad State of the Newspaper Industry

It’s sad day in the Bay Area. Let what’s happening to newspapers here be a cautionary tale to the rest of the country. Right now one company, Denver-based MediaNews Group Inc., owns nearly all of the newspapers in this region, including the San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, Oakland Tribune, Santa Cruz Sentinel, Tri-Valley Herald, and San Mateo County Times. Just about the only major newspaper they don’t have their hands on is the San Francisco Chronicle, and quite frankly, there is some questionable association between The Chron and MediaNews. According to a recently published article in one of the Bay Area’s smaller newspapers, the Mountain View Voice:

The one remaining major Bay Area paper not a part of MediaNews is the Chronicle. However, the Hearst Corporation contributed $300 million to help finance the Knight Ridder/MediaNews deal (via middleman McClatchy Publishing Company) and in return received a 30 percent interest in non-Bay Area holdings of MediaNews. Hearst and MediaNews have been discussing consolidating and cooperating in various operations, but were put on hold pending an antitrust lawsuit filed by former San Francisco political consultant Clint Reilly. The suit, which challenged the unprecedented consolidation, was settled shortly before trial last spring.

Dan Fost, who spent nearly a decade as a Chronicle media columnist, decided to leave the paper in August to become a freelance journalist. He says the Chronicle staff never could figure out why Hearst would subsidize Singleton’s purchase of the Mercury News and Contra Costa Times, and wonders whether the Reilly lawsuit prevented a consolidation of the Chronicle into the same media empire.

The consequences of one media company owning essentially all the newspapers in a region are troublesome to say the least, and we are now deeply feeling the impact of that. There are, of course, major issues of what it means to news coverage when a newspaper doesn’t have to compete for its readers or advertisers, but what I want to talk about goes even beyond that.

Just this week, MediaNews announced that it is offering voluntary buyouts to all its employees in the Bay Area. Everyone has until March 3 to notify the company of their intentions. If not enough employees take the buyout, the publisher of MediaNews’ East Bay papers, John Armstrong, said that he will fire people. Now I’ve worked with many of the reporters in the East Bay, and in the last year, they’ve already experienced dramatic changes and cut backs in their newsrooms. I can’t imagine how they can cut back anymore. I’d certainly hate to be a reporter over there right now. They’re between a rock and a hard place. You can take the buyout by March 3, not knowing whether or not you would be fired anyway, or go ahead and take the risk of trying to hold onto your job, only to be fired in the end.

The impact of this goes beyond the individual stories of those who will be losing their jobs. To me, this is also a cautionary tale about what happens when one company controls too much of the market. That company’s decisions (good and bad) will have a profound, disproportional impact—economically and socially—on the region.

According to a recent article in Editor & Publisher (E&P), the trade publication for the newspaper industry, newspapers have done a piss-poor job of transitioning their properties online. The E&P article points out that in a comparison of online revenue as a percentage of total revenue for the top 10 public newspaper companies, only three passed the “’10% threshold’ i.e. at least 10% of their total revenue is derived from online.” When readers are moving online, how can it be that most newspapers still generate less than 10% of their total ad revenue online?

The article then points out that the worst performer is the MercuryNews.com, the online arm of the San Jose Mercury News, “which lost 30% of visitors” during the period of May-July 2006 compared to May-July 2007. Other newspapers are also losing online visitors, but not nearly as much as the Mercury News: “Gannett’s network of 100 sites fell 2%. NYTimes.com dropped 12% (it still had its pay TimesSelect still in operation then). LATimes.com was down 3%. USAToday.com declined 9%.”

Who knows what kind of bad decision-making is going on over at the Mercury News, but the sad truth is that those decisions, which have resulted in losses that have to be offset for the larger company. And what better way to do it than to cut jobs on your smaller newspapers? After all, with consolidation, one can just syndicate content throughout the region, right? Of course, there’s a cost to this: fewer reporters and resources to research, write and disseminate the news, means regional and local coverage suffer.

I also have to ask the question: who’s leading the online team over at the Mercury News? Is it a bunch of over-40 executives who don’t understand the mind-set of today’s computer generation that is Gen Y, Gen X and Gen Z? I’m 35, and I personally have worked with plenty of senior executives who don’t even respond to their own email, let alone understand how those 35 and under have integrated the internet into their lives.

Truth be told, all newspapers are having trouble figuring this one out, but when one company controls so much, and when that company’s biggest newspaper is the worst performer in the country when it comes to its online property, well, that has a huge impact on the region as a whole. When there is more competition in the market, at least each newspaper gets to make those senior management decisions on its own—both the strategy decisions that would help a newspaper transition online and the personnel decisions that are an inevitable result of that, i.e. who and how many people get fired.

[tags]publishing, newspapers, MediaNews Group, public relations, media consolidation, The Lancaster Group[/tags]

The path of a press release

I was in a meeting yesterday discussing how social media is changing the distribution method for press releases. It used to be that as PR people, we would write a press release and send it to our database of contacts (reporters, editors, writers) and/or send it out over the wire to a specific set of media channels.

We would then follow up with our contacts to make sure they received the release and pitch it again. If a story was written, we’d track via a news tracking service.

Well, things have changed. Here’s what I came up with on the white board as an overview of what it’s like today:

Yes, I know–confusing. I think it’s symbolic though of how complicated the new communications landscape is.

I’ve tried to sort this out to be a bit more readable. Take a look at my graphic below. Essentially, distributing a press release is done in the much the same way it’s always been. You still need to identify your key contacts (writers, editors, reporters and now bloggers) and follow-up.

The main difference is that now, there are additional social media tools we can use to increase the reach of the press releases. We also have new ways of tracking, re-purposing and sharing the stories that result from it. Not all of these tools will work for every press release we put out, but in an ideal world, an important release can generate some real buzz through several different social media channels. It’s definitely a long and winding path, and one that is difficult to follow.

CLICK HERE TO ENLARGE

Finally, what doesn’t come out in this graphic is the interactive nature of the social web. Once a release starts generating stories online, there’s also huge potential for people to comment on and interactive with those stories. This brings an added dimension to your ability to reach out and connect with your customers.

Social Media Strategy Needs Old Fashion PR Tactics

With so much happening in the social media space, some may be questioning the importance of traditional PR tactics today. After all, when people are going online for information, how many are going to actually see a story in the paper? Is that even something a business should strive for these days? In my opinion yes, getting that hit is still extremely important.

Let’s put it this way. Where’s the spark? If you’re going to light a fire, you need a spark. When you run a social media campaign—perhaps using tactics such as a blog or a profile/group on a social network site—you still need to find ways of initiating the conversation for your campaign. Do you really think people are going to spontaneously start talking about your product or service simply because you have something up on LinkedIn? What you need to get them talking, is a spark. That’s where good-old fashion PR comes in.

Yes, the landscape of communications is undergoing a seismic shift. More and more of us are going online to access our news. We’re interacting with it and sharing it with others like never before. Still, the main places we continue to go to for that news are those old-school media channels. That’s where the sparks for conversations start. The trusted, credible resources– larger news organizations like newspapers, business journals, trade magazines and radio and television—give us fodder for our social media campaigns.

It’s not that big media is being made irrelevant; it’s that it is being forced to change how it does business. And believe me, they are getting it. Steve Outing, who writes a column for Editor and Publisher recently said:

What newspaper people now need to understand is that not only are they publishing content to all the relevant platforms under their own brands, but they also need to adapt to publishing everywhere that they can under others’ brands: blogs, social networks, news aggregators, map mashup sites, community sites, business’ websites, personal websites, etc.

They have to embrace a profound change in media. What they produce can no longer exist as an island online, where they use marketing and hope to get people to come view the content that they produce, or sign up for e-mail, phone or RSS delivery. News organizations must develop strategies that pump out their content — in bits and pieces — to anyone who’s willing to run it.

http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/columns/stopthepresses_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003703433

What this means in the PR game is that old-school media outlets will continue to have relevance because even as their writers are producing stories for their main channels, they’re also starting to syndicate and push that content out to smaller social media channels. And, as people are talking and sharing online, many of the stories they’re talking about come directly from those larger news organizations.

So, the key to this game is to integrate new media with old media in any campaign you run, picking and choosing from each so that you can pull together a comprehensive program that’s going to be most effective in reaching your audience. Today, there’s even a new title for the individuals in agencies who manage this: communications planners. These are the lucky ones whose harrowing job it is to look across your entire communications infrastructure (old media and new; offline and online) and make sure it’s all working together toward one common goal, but more on that next week.

Facebook versus MySpace: Is it LA versus Silicon Valley?

I was reading a Fortune article by David Kirkpatrick published last fall about Facebook and MySpace, when it struck me that the differences between the two reflect the implied (and probably true) cultural and social differences between Northern and Southern California. To be more specific, I’m really talking about LA versus Silicon Valley (essentially the Bay Area). Is it just a coincidence that their headquarters are located in these respected areas as well, with MySpace employees/devotees sitting in Beverly Hills and Facebook’s in Palo Alto? Hmm, this is food for thought (if nothing else).

Here’s how Kirkpatrick described MySpace offices in his article:

MySpace’s Beverly Hill’s offices feel much like those of a studio or a record label, where well-dressed, trendy twenty-somethings queue up for bagels in the cafeteria at 10 A.M. and banter about last night’s party or concert. Movie posters line the fuchsia walls in the reception area. In the sofa-filled lounge that substitutes for an executive conference room, a table is covered with magazines: Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Daily Variety - nothing else. It’s probably the only major technology company with valet parking.

What gets MySpace people excited is finding a new band or locking in exclusive online rights to a hot TV show. “Our core competency,” says DeWolfe, “is finding the best content out there - from tier-A professional content down to emerging content - licensing it, and bringing it on MySpace.”

Versus his description of Facebook:

Facebook, meanwhile, has never licensed rights to a single song or video and probably never will. And for the record, its headquarters are on University Avenue in Palo Alto, ground zero for the technology industry, where the parties mostly happen when the employee Ultimate Frisbee team beats Google.

Otherwise people pretty much just work all night, writing software, tweaking features - and giving hardly a thought to MySpace.

You can read more of Kirkpatrick’s article by clicking here.

For anyone who lives in LA or the Bay Area, it’s easy to read between the lines. There’s definitely a strong cultural divide that’s embraced on both sides. Those in the Bay Area take pride in “not being LA” and I’m sure it probably the same for those in “LaLaland” (not my own).

LA is a place you go to “make it,” where anything is possible because of who you know—and the more you know, the better. The beauty of this is that a waiter can become a star overnight because of just one “connection” they’ve made. Take a look at MySpace, and you’ll see this same idea in action. Collecting friends on MySpace is a full-time job for some, and there have been several stories about artists being signed because of the number of friends/fans they’ve gathered on the site.

In the Bay Area, it’s not so much about how many you know, but the quality of the people you know. Are they connected to Stanford or Berkley? Do they have an inside track to Google? Do they know people at Digg? What VC firm are they funded by? On Facebook, it doesn’t seem so different—its not about acquiring big networks of unknown people you call “friends,” but being on the inside track of a particular set of networks centered around school, work, people you already know or professional/cultural/social groups.

MySpace is a loud, buzzing cacophony of in-your-face profiles with blinking graphics, music and videos that jump out at you, and customized pages that are unrestrained expressions of the people who populate them.

Facebook in contrast is understated, clean and its pages are focused more on utility than uncontrolled creative expression. Could this be a reflection of Hollywood versus Silicon Valley?

If so, does it matter? There’s certainly room for both. Advertisers who are targeting the MySpace audience/demographic will not necessarily be interested in Facebook and vice versa. (Though in some cases, there can be crossover.) With the increasing sophistication of ad networks that allow marketers and advertisers to slice and dice the online population down to the specific target and reach they want, the winners in the social network space will be those who understand who their customers are and how they want to be communicated to. Meaning, are your peops LA, Silicon Valley or perhaps a little bit of both?

What is this thing called Astroturfing? And, who cares?

I got to thinking about buzz words this morning. You know, things like social media, which is definitely a buzz word right now (even I use it), or conversational marketing. And of course, there’s one of my favorites: astroturfing. For those of you who don’t know what this is, here’s Wikipedia’s definition:

Astroturfing is a neologism for formal public relations campaigns in politics and advertising that seek to create the impression of being spontaneous, grassroots behavior. Hence the reference to the artificial grass AstroTurf.

I don’t know about you, but I had to look up neologism just to figure out what this meant. I guess the reason I find astroturfing so funny is that it has what I call (now, this is my own neologism) social-mediarrogance. As defined by me, this means:

The state or quality of being arrogant or of having overbearing pride in reference to any form of online communication, including but not limited to blogging in general, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Okay, so I don’t get hired at Webster’s, but you know what I mean. Come on, what’s the big deal about astroturfing? I mean, isn’t all marketing, advertising and PR artificial by its very existence? That’s the nature of the beast. So, why is it then that people are flipping out about it moving online?

I don’t see anyone making up a neologism for the fact that Oprah does stories—nay, entire episodes—around her advertisers. Do you remember Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty? The truth is, the internet is media and where there’s media, there’s going to be people, like me, who are trying to get stories out about their clients . . . just like in print, television and radio. It’s naive to think that it would be any other way. So, to the blog writers and others out their who suffer social mediarrogance, and complain when communications on the internet isn’t in it’s “purist” form, I say: what planet are you living on?