Category: The New Web
Facebook Publishes Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing
Facebook messaged the 4,600 fans of the FacebookPages
Page with helpful hints on how to make your presence on Facebook go viral (by messaging all of your fans, for example).
Check out some key strategies from the most successful businesses on Pages, including:
- Regularly adding engaging and useful content
- Letting fans participate in the conversation
To read about some winning strategies—along with the nuts of bolts of how to create and manage a Page—here’s a link: Insider’s Guide to Viral Marketing
Get Down With Moses
Celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary with a new dance from Moses. Brought to you by Birthright Israel.
Chag Pesach Sameach
Shabbat Shalom from Jerusalem
More About Blogs
Implementing and maintaining a successful blog may be the most critical aspect of your online fundraising efforts. There are many reasons a non-profit should host a blog. For fundraising, there are a few basic reasons why blogging makes sense:
- Blog Readers are an Ideal Audience - The typical blog reader is young, wealthy, active, and influential. Blog readers are 11 percent more likely than the average Internet user to have incomes of or greater than $75,000. (Clickz.com)
- Continuous Communications Leads to Continuous Donation - Blogs offer the element of human interaction and constant communication needed to truly drive home your organization’s goals and objectives. Staff members will be more informed and motivated, and supporters will become lively, engaged, and ready to contribute.
read the complete article here
Online Fundraising In 2008: Can We Blink Yet?
The Internet may not have turned out to be everything charities (and the rest of the world) thought it would be 10 years ago. However, Harry Lynch, CFRE, chief executive officer of Sanky Communications in New York, reminds fundraisers that they shouldn’t forget what the Internet has become—especially for groups most likely to give.
“Back in ancient times—say around 1998—we all knew that the Internet was going to take over the world. Remember that? How obsolete and uncool was everything else, including every other fundraising medium and method, about to become?
It wasn’t to be, of course. Not even close, in fact. Yet even the naysayers, who have a decade’s worth of history and hindsight on their side, would do well to stop and take note of just how far we have come in just 10 short years.
The approximately 50-fold increase in the amount of money being raised online over the last decade is eye-popping. While the Internet may still represent less than 4 percent of the nearly $300 billion being donated annually in the United States, if the rates of growth hold up, well, you do the math.
Of course, there’s also the often-overlooked fact of who is now online. Fully one-third of people over 65 (READ: those most philanthropically inclined) are now active on the Internet. Plus, nearly three-quarters of those in the 50–64 age group (i.e. the folks making the most money) are going online regularly. That degree of Internet penetration among older adults is wildly ahead of what was projected just a few years ago.
There’s just no doubt about it: The future of online fundraising is clearly very bright—and very, very complicated.”
click here for the complete article.
The Tribe: a Social Networking Update
Back in December, I wrote about viral marketing and the preview launch of this site. At the time, I mentioned a conversation I had a few weeks before with Carlton Evans, Marketing Director for The Tribe and how by using only a viral marketing campaign they won film festival awards and reached success on iTunes.
Being curious four months later, I decided to check-in and see how this word-of-mouth, a.k.a. ‘viral’ phenomenon has proceeded. You can judge for yourself:
- The Tribe hit the number 1 position on iTunes most downloaded film list
- Reached over 150 thousand people
- Won 11 awards including Grand Jury and Audience prizes
- Screened at over 80 film festivals plus over 100 additional public screenings
- Translated into 6 different languages
- Acquired by over 100 universities and other institutes of higher learning including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and UC Berkeley along with countless JCC’s and Synagogues
Pretty impressive results! Meanwhile stay tuned; next week we’ll talk about 4 Conferences, 3 Continents.
Shabbat Shalom from Jerusalem.
about viral marketing: Viral marketing depends on a high pass-along rate from person to person. If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of friends, the overall growth snowballs very quickly. If the pass-along numbers get too low, the overall growth quickly fizzles.
An Embarrassed Facebook Backtracks
In an about face and under pressure, facebook has given in and allowed users in communities such as Maale Adumim and Ariel to list themselves as living in Israel and not Palestine!
According to a story just posted by Reuter’s…
“Complaints by Jewish settlers angry at Facebook for listing them as residents of “Palestine” prompted the popular social networking Web site to allow users to switch themselves back to Israel.
Facebook users living in Maale Adumim, Ariel and other large Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank protested when the site automatically listed their hometowns as being in “Palestine.” A group of settlers accused the California-based company of having a political agenda.”
continue reading here
Purim Solidarity Rally for Israel
LOG ON TO THE BIGGEST EVER SOLIDARITY RALLY FOR ISRAEL
Participate without leaving home
This Thursday, March 20th, the eve of Purim, help us make history in solidarity with Israel. Show up no matter where you are.
Together4Israel.org, along with many worldwide partners, is putting together the largest ever online rally in support of those living under fire in Israel. To attend all you need to do is go to www.together4israel.org to watch a live broadcast of solidarity rallies from around the world.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
11:00 pm Israel Time
9 p.m. GMT / 5 p.m. EDT / 4 p.m. CDT / 3 p.m. MDT / 2 p.m. PDT
Stretching across 7 continents and featuring as speakers Alan Dershowitz, Natan Sharansky, John Voight, Irwin Cotler and more–along with a special live performance by Matisyahu
Creating awareness for, and solidarity with, the People of Israel is the first step to build a stronger Israel for tomorrow.
p.s. This is Social Networking At Its’ Best.
RSVP now at www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39638330696 and invite your friends to do the same.
Even Shabbat Is Going 2.0
Since launching the acclaimed Shabbat Across America Program in 1997, the National Jewish Outreach Program has brought hundreds of thousands of Jews together for an annual fun-filled Friday night event. In an unrivaled display of Jewish unity, approximately 700 synagogues across the continent simultaneously open their doors to practicing and non-practicing Jews alike, so they may join together to experience and rejoice in a traditional Shabbat service and festive meal.
Designed to teach a generation of unaffiliated Jews about the beauty and significance of the Jewish Sabbath, Shabbat Across America/Canada is the first nationally orchestrated program to appeal to members of all major Jewish denominations.
This year, the newest Shabbat Across American locations will be virtual, as NJOP turns the tables on an age-old tradition. Modeled after popular social networking sites like Facebook, SAA2.0 puts Shabbat back on the table for a community of young adults who are eager to identify with Judaism in a virtual world.
Taking advantage of the opportunities the web has to offer, SAA2.0 provides Judaism without borders to a generation that does not like to be constrained. Jews can connect to Judaism on a personal level, creating the peer-to-peer Shabbat experience they desire. Participants can enjoy the concept of Shabbat no matter their affiliation or level of knowledge and observance by becoming one of the sites “chosen people” and at the “real” Shabbat tables taken offline.
A marriage of 21st Century technology and the centuries-old tradition of Shabbat, SAA2.0 is redefining the Shabbat table and reexamining Friday night dinner.
Shabbat Across America 2.0…Premiering Friday night, March 7th
Anti-Semitism 2.0 a.k.a. The Facebook Dilemma
Social networking does come with drawbacks.
A lead story in today’s Jewish Week begins…
“Old-guard groups seen slow in recognizing viral threat from Facebook, YouTube.
More than 35,000 people have joined the Facebook group “Israel is not a country! … Delist it from Facebook as a country!”
Two weeks ago in the JPost we have the President of Israel, Shimon Peres, urging young people to fight anti-Semitism using Facebook.
And from today’s JPost, “Israel loses Monopoly on capital as Hasboro makes Jerusalem stateless.
The battle for Jerusalem took a new direction this week, when a reference to Israel was removed from an on-line poll to select the cities to be featured in the international version of the popular Monopoly board game.”
The common thread, besides anti-Semitism (according to the Jewish Week article), “Web 2.0 applications such as Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia and Google Earth thrive on communities in which users generate and share information in the form of videos, photos and blog posts, which are subject to vague terms of service and seemingly arbitrary censorship.
“This phenomena is spreading anti-Semitism and acceptability of anti-Semitism in new and increasingly effective ways,” says Andre Oboler, a Legacy Heritage Fellow who runs ZionismOnTheWeb.org and is a post-doctoral fellow studying online public diplomacy at Bar-Ilan University.
“Now in the Web 2.0 world, the social acceptability of anti-Semitism can be spread, public resistance lowered and hate networks rapidly established,” Oboler said.
What’s worse, Oboler contends, Jewish organizations are behind the times and are not devoting the resources necessary to stop the hate virus from spreading.
Many at the helm of these large organizations have yet to sign up for a Facebook account, don’t spend much time on YouTube and aren’t all that sure what Google Earth is.
“Community leaders tend to be the sort of people who are too busy to spend time looking at YouTube videos,” Oboler says. “They are very, very focused on old media, which is a bit strange, since a lot of people their age are online.”
We’ve been saying for a while, social media, and particularly video (in 2008), are here to stay. There is also no question that like all marketing efforts,
Social networking does come with drawbacks; but, we need to learn to utilize these tools for our community’s benefit. To be able to properly asses what is happening, we all need to tune in and pay attention.
I doubt there are many senior communal professionals who do not read some combination of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post on a daily basis. They (we all) need to add Facebook and YouTube.
If social media is technically challenging, or you are afraid of your kids finding you on Facebook, find an intern to regularly monitor these sites for you.
It’s that important.
While you’re at it, read the complete Jewish Week and JPost articles.
Developing A Pool Of Free Fundraisers Online
The proliferation of the Internet is creating a new type of constituent that carries a different set of behaviors and opens a door to a larger group of potential fundraisers. Nonprofits know that the most engaged constituents can become some of the most successful fundraisers for the organization.
According to Debbie Snyder, vice president professional services for Kintera in San Diego, the trick is capturing these online constituents, converting them to supporters, then converting the supporters to donors before finally converting donors to fundraisers. Avid Internet users are also more likely to share information with others online and the number of ways in which they can do it has grown substantially in recent years. There are a number of online resources to help an organization encourage online participation from its constituent base.
The first obvious tool is social networking. It has been all the rage lately and gotten a lot of publicity. It’s easy, free, and people are doing it. Social networking may not be a gold mine of donations, but it is a successful way for organizations to educate the public about its mission and cause.
click here for more