Will Marlow

"My purpose in reading has ever secretly been not to come and judge but to come and steal." - John Updike

Some of you know that photography is one of my hobbies (any of the photos you see on this blog are ones that I've taken).  I try to be selective about the photos that I share on Flickr, which I use essentially as a photojournal.  But until a few weeks ago, I did not "brand" my Flickr feed in any meaningful way, and this almost cost me a missed opportunity for promoting my business and this blog.

I want to credit Jason Calacanis (who is half entrepreneur, half media powerhouse), for giving me the idea to brand my Flickr feed.  Jason always includes links to his Twitter feed, his business and his weekly podcasts  in the description of his photos on Flickr.

So I copied him to see how much traffic I would get.  Immediately after doing this, a great food blog called Pretty Food & Drink decided to use one of my Flickr photos (above) in one of their posts, and it attracted over 1000 comments, as well as many click-throughs to my original Flickr photo.

If I hadn't put a link to my blog (or business, or school, or charity) in the description of the Flickr photo, all of those new visitors would have hit a brick wall when they saw the photo.  They may have liked it, or hated it, but most of them would not have had any option to get to know me better.  Now, I have some new subscribers who may have found me in a very roundabout way, but I'm glad to have them here.

This illustrates one reason why it's important to periodically audit your website and social media presence to make sure you aren't missing any opportunities to accomplish your goals.  In my case, I care about my subscribers.  In your case, you may care about donors, volunteers, or customers.  Whatever opportunities you're looking for, you need to make sure you aren't missing any easy ones, because once they're gone, they don't come back.   

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Will Marlow is a digital strategist/online marketing consultant.  He's the co-creator of  AlumniFidelity, which is a Web 2.0 fundraising platform for colleges, nonprofits and secondary schools.   He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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Dear universities,

Many of you want to use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to supplement your arsenal of fundraising tools, and that's great.  The challenge is that social media platforms are different from almost all other types of communication tools.  In order to pull value in from social media platforms, you need to push value out to your intended audience.

Here's how you should do it: first, forget about fundraising.  Instead, focus on the students, prospective students and alums who need your help.  Specifically, use Twitter and Facebook to give them information that will help them succeed in their classes, find internships, connect with fellow alums, find jobs, and stay in touch with one another.  Use these platforms to announce the achievements of people in your community.  Use Flickr and YouTube to post videos of homecoming, sports events, reunions, and undergrads having a great time succeeding on campus.  Use social media platforms to make announcements whenever any of your grads are mentioned positively in newspapers or blogs.  Write posts that show how proud you are of your community.

In short, don't focus on using social media platforms to do fundraising.  Instead, focus on using social media platforms to deliver value.  Then, when you are fundraising, point to your social media presence as one of the many ways that you enhance the lives of the alumni without spending money on glossy direct mail.  This will not hurt your fundraising prospects.

Hint: a major reason to go with this strategy is that prospective students, current students, and recent grads are the quickest cohorts to connect with you on social media platforms, but each cohort is generally slower to connect than the last.  This has nothing to do with how web-savvy the users are.  It's simply because prospective students need the most information from you, because they need to decide if your school is the best fit for them; current students are willing to connect with you, because you can deliver them information that will help them succeed while on campus; and recent grads are similarly interested in connecting, because they need your help to find mentors and jobs.  The slowest cohort of all to connect with you on social media?  That would be the donors themselves, who need the least from you.  The way to get them involved is to show them how much value you're delivering to their fellow alums who need help.

Sincerely,
Will Marlow
Internet Advisor, Social Media Strategist and Fundraising Consultant

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Will Marlow is a digital strategist/online marketing consultant.  He's the co-creator of  AlumniFidelity, which is a Web 2.0 fundraising platform for colleges, nonprofits and secondary schools.   He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

*I took the photo above on Saturday, August 21, 2010 at an event to help the recently homeless in Fairfax, Virginia, which was put on by FACETS, a great charity where my wife works.

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I was just speaking to an executive at a university Annual Fund who told me that she wanted to use social media platforms to drive more traffic to her website. 

If you can relate to this desire, I need to stop you right there.  You need to understand something: you don't want more traffic.  More traffic by itself has zero value.  You want: more donors, more volunteers, more customers, and more satisfied "readers" who visit your site regularly to read your new content.  If you optimize your website so that every year you get more donors, more volunteers, and more happy subscribers, you'll win promotions, raises, praise and other good things.  If you optimize your website simply to generate generic traffic, pretty soon you'll be asking yourself why you wasted your resources to do that.

Did you like reading this blog post?  Sign up to get my new blog posts delivered by email by clicking here.

Will Marlow is a digital strategist/online marketing consultant.  He's the co-creator of  AlumniFidelity, which is a Web 2.0 fundraising platform for colleges, nonprofits and secondary schools.   He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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If you produce a brilliant 30 second TV commercial, and people love it, you can always pay for more 30 second spots to show your commercial again and again.  But if you produce an amazing social media marketing campaign with YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, like Old Spice did, you don't need to repeatedly buy airtime.  The Old Spice videos have been seen over 128 million times on Youtube.  

However, there is a much more important point here, which is this: Old Spice controls its Twitter feed, its YouTube channel, and its Facebook profile.  The campaign generated over 100,000 Twitter followers for Old Spice, and over 100,000 YouTube subscribers, and over 785,000 Facebook Fans for Old Spice.  These social media properties will pay dividends to Old Spice for years to come.

Even if you don't hit a viral homerun like Old spice did, you can still steadily grow your social media properties.  With social marketing, you don't buy from a media company.  You are a media company.

Did you like reading this blog post?  Sign up to get my new blog posts delivered by email by clicking here.

Will Marlow is a digital strategist/online marketing consultant.  He's the co-creator of  AlumniFidelity, which is a Web 2.0 fundraising platform for colleges, nonprofits and secondary schools.   He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

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I received an invitation yesterday to attend a barbecue from an old friend from college.  He just returned from a "Birthright Israel" trip, which is a Jewish-Israeli charity that pays (over $400 million over the last ten years) to bring Jewish people who live in other countries to visit Israel for 10 day trips.

I just learned that upon return from the trip, Birthright Israel will reimburse the travelers for the costs associated with a welcome home party for themselves and as many guests as they wish to invite.  All the traveler needs to do is take a photograph of all the guests with the food and drinks, and they will be reimbursed. 

From a word of mouth marketing perspective, this is very, very smart.  If you are spending a huge amount of money on one key, necessary activity that is responsible for most of your costs, you need to continually ask yourself: how can I derive more value from that activity?  For example, if you have a fundraising event or a reunion once a year, but you don't arrange for a photographer (or if you don't position disposable digital cameras at strategic locations for the guests to use), then you lose out on gaining lots of permanent assets that you could use to promote next year's event.  You're already paying for the cost of the event - if you pay a little more, you can exponentially increase impact.

Or, if you are doing anything that is truly remarkable (in other words, something that people like to talk about, such as traveling), but you aren't encouraging people to talk to their friends in a number of ways about it (both offline at a party, or online on Twitter and Facebook), you're missing out on very important opportunities.

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Your only marketing challenge is to make it really easy for your customers, friends and fans to talk about you.  The state of Montana, where I'm on my honeymoon right now, fits into this category.  Anyone who happens to drive through Montana notices its beauty, and some people (like me) feel compelled to take photographs and share them with other people.  Therefore, from a marketing perspective, the state of Montana has a simple challenge: encourage and allow visitors to share their experiences with their friends by maintaining an active Facebook page, encouraging photography competitions, sponsoring Artist-in-Residence programs, etc., all of which are done here.

Life is easy when you are naturally remarkable.  For the rest of us, we need to do everything Montana does (i.e., enable our customers, friends and fans to talk about us in a variety of ways), but we also need to work really, really hard to be remarkable.

PS - You can check out some more of my photos from Montana, including beautiful waterfalls, mountains, and a black bear that was about 40 feet away from me, on Flickr here.  

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In addition to writing this blog, I also have a large social media presence on Twitter and Google Buzz.  Through a survey that I did awhile back, and through simple observation, I can say that my social media presence is responsible for driving a very large portion of my blog readership.  (As a new blogger, and as a blogger who lacked a pre-existing subscriber base, social media platforms have been invaluable to me for finding readers and subscribers.)

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A lot of people think that all the different social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc.) are more complicated than they really are.   Every social media platform, however, has one thing in common: they all make publishing possible.  That is the key to the social media revolution.

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"If you see a stylus, it means they failed." - Steve Jobs discussing Microsoft's next smartphone. 

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It used to be that a website was like a brick wall.  You would visit the website for your school, or a charity, or a business, and you saw a bunch of information on the webpage that someone from that organization posted, and that was it.  You couldn’t get any further than the brick wall.  (Early on, some websites posted real email addresses and bios of people who you could interact with from the organization, but that is basically like installing peepholes in the brick wall.)

The smartest people who run websites today are tearing down the brick wall completely, and replacing it with glass rotating doors that you can see through and walk through.  How do you do that?

• If you run a theater website and someone buys tickets for one of your shows, you shouldn’t just give them a dead receipt (i.e., a brick wall) you should give them a page that lets them write a short testimonial about how much they are looking forward to the show, and link them to a page where other fans have done the same thing.
• If you run a nonprofit and someone registers to be a volunteer at your next event, let them also signup to recruit two additional volunteers, and don’t force them to do it without help.  Give them tools to send email, import contacts, connect to their Facebook and Twitter account, and let them trigger their own reminders well in advance of the event.
• If someone makes a donation to your school or nonprofit, give them the opportunity to create a personal fundraising page (like the type that AlumniFidelity enables) that allows them to become a fundraiser, and not just a one-time donor. 
• Rather than showing only official photography on your website, make sure that there is a method for submitting photographs that your fans take at events, or launch parties, or from old events that may have taken place years ago.  You should make it easy for anyone to subscribe (and also to unsubscribe) to receive updates when new photos and videos are posted.  

The point is, the next generation of Internet marketing for all organizations is this: when a fan/customer/donor stops engaging with you, it should be because they are satisfied that they have done everything that they want to do with you.  The worst thing you can do is to put up a brick wall that prevents an energetic fan of yours from doing more to carry your goals forward.

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