This morning, I read an email with an interesting question from my colleague Jo:

I don’t get this.

http://summerofsocialgood.com/

It looks like this is a huge, well-funded, well-organized program.  It also shows that someone (say… Mashable) is really, really invested in showing that you can do fundraising with social media.

But aren’t they going about it backwards?  I thought “social media for social good” meant rallying people on social media who care about your particular cause, not rallying people who care a lot about social media and then challenging them to support “social good” in general…

They’ve got the big name organizations, but the campaign’s not about them at all.  Or am I missing something?

Very astute question. What is going on here? What is Summer for Social Good really about?

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Looking for advice on how to elevate your Adwords campaign to the next level? With a little heavy lifting upfront and some ongoing maintenance, I’ll show you how to rise above your competitors’ listings and attract new prospects you didn’t even know existed.

Let’s start with keyword selection. When identifying keywords to target, a common mistake is to focus on words that your website already ranks well for in organic search results, like the name of your organization. Instead, think of new potential audiences that might be interested in your organization and write down a few key search terms for each. Then, enter each of these terms into a free keyword suggestion tool, like the one that comes with Google Adwords, to identify additional related terms. You will soon have hundreds of words added to your list.

Many are unaware that they can assign different ‘match types’ to keywords and end up using only the default broad matching. Broad matching shows your ad even when your keywords make up only a portion of someone’s search. This leads to more impressions. Exact matching only shows an ad when a search term matches it exactly. Because Google gives preference to exact matches over broad matches, you should use these for keywords that you value highly. Bidding more for these exact match phrases will also help. Make sure to also set your high-value terms to broad matching. That way your ad will also be displayed for longer terms you may not have thought of. Later, when you analyze your keyword search reporting results, you can determine which of these longer terms were valuable and place them in their own exact matching bucket to give them more weight.

Another common mistake is lumping keywords into a single ad group. Instead, create multiple ad groups where each one represents a unique audience. Place similar keywords in each and incorporate the ones you value the most into the ads because they will appear bolded and draw more attention. Also make sure to create multiple ads which are fairly different from one another. Google can rotate them and tell you which one is getting better results. Afterwards you can modify the winning ad to get even better returns.

Finally, many non-profits use Google Grants to run their campaigns. This generous program  provides non-profits with up to $300 per day in free ads which should be more than enough to meet your needs. It’s easy to apply and Google will usually give you the OK. Just make sure to leave yourself enough time because it can take up to 6 months to hear back.

Michael Cervino was interviewed by Triplepundit for their “Philanthropy In Five” series. Read what he has to say about why we do what we do at Beaconfire, and what role philanthropy plays both in the work we do for our clients, as well as in our own business model.

By popular request, here is info about all the cool events in The Beacon during SxSW. Flyers will be available in the lounge for you to pick up so you don’t miss a second of the fun.

Also note there will be a featured organization in residence in The Beacon all day long sat-mon. Come lounge with a conscience with these featured non profits at The Beacon and find out how you can change the world!

Saturday March 14th
Lunch for a Cause
Blackbaud Internet Solutions is sponsoring lunch in The Beacon for people who donate their lunch money the Capitol Area Food Bank of Texas, a partner of Feeding America. If you can’t make it at lunchtime, come by their table anytime to help hungry Texas families.

Sunday March 15th
Entrepreneurs Ending Global Poverty
What if in one day, you could change the lives of hundreds in the poorest countries and help end poverty? OptINnow .orgwill be at The Beacon all day to show you how you can. Your Mission, Sxsw: Fund as many entrepreneurs as possible by 5pm!

Monday March 16th
SXSW Smiles
Operation Smile wants to know what makes YOU smile! Come by their table in The Beacon to find out how you can spread smiles around the world (and around sxsw), and be entered in a drawing for a one-of-a-kind gift. You can start smiling right now to get in the sxsw spirit!

In just over a week, the worlds hippest, smartest, network-iest people in technology will be converging upon Austin for South by Southwest interactive (known as SxSW-i to those in the know) and Beaconfire will be there in full force. Not only are we sponsoring THE coolest spot for non profits to hang out in (The Beacon – Lounge with a Conscience, Room 19A 4th floor) BUT you can meet the (in)famous Michael Cervino, Ali Cherry, Jo Miles, and yours truly (Eve Simon) there. What more can you ask for?

To get updates on all the cool things happening in The Beacon, including events from Blackbaud Internet solutions, Free Range Studios, NTEN, Operation Smile, Feeding America and Opportunity International, follow @TheBeaconsxsw on Twitter all week.

We hope to meet many of you in Austin next week, so please seek us out to say hi. For those not able to make the trip, we will be blogging between March 13-17, so hopefully you’ll feel like you’re there with us.

On November 4th, 2009 Obama the candidate became Obama the President-elect. True believers, we called this a watershed moment in U.S history, change we can believe in, even called it a miracle. But for those of us in the design world, we recognized it as something no less significant: The complete success of Obama the Brand.

I’d like to say I was prescient enough to know Obama would emerge victorious the second I saw his campaign’s logo, but you would call me a black-turtleneck-wearing-
abstinithe-sipping-the-revolution-will-be-designed-hippie.

But I really did.

Why? Because short of the ubiquitous American brands of our generation (Coke, Harley Davidson, Nike, Chevrolet) there has not been one as seamlessly versatile, and consistently leveraged without breaking a sweat, as the O.

Much has been said about the unique choice of font (Yay, Gotham) and the multi-channel appeal to a variety of audiences, but I propose one more reason for it’s success: The unspoken sense of hope the “Obama rising” visual has conveyed to a world thirsty for inspiration. When a brand becomes more than just a graphic, but invokes a sense of “what could be if you just believe”, there is truly no stopping it.

Inspired by a post on Occum’s Razor, I recently applied for and received access to Google’s new Ad Planner (it took about a week for my application to be processed, so if you’re intrigued, don’t delay – apply right now. It’s okay – I can wait…). Test driving the tool, I found three things:

1. It’s immensely cool for a marketer, voter targeting guru, or demographics aficionado
2. It’s yet another example of how awesome Google is for giving us tools like this for free
3. It will make some privacy advocates likely go bonkers, as happened with some other Google innovations

Here’s the reader’s digest version: the Ad Planner leverages Google’s gigantic barrel o’ data to help users understand what sites people browse, based on a variety of demographic information and their other online behavior. It then helps you to build a list of sites to run advertising on, and even provides the ability to export your target list in MediaVisor (so that’s where that DoubleClick acquisition went).

The long version, as always, is a lot more complicated – the tool is very powerful, and not just for advertisers. Follow me below the fold to learn more…

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I was just putting together a Google AdWords buy for a client, using the AdWords Offline Editor (which is a fantastic tool that I recommend for anyone in the SEM biz), and as I ran a check to make sure my ads were valid, I got this message:

Google’s policy goes on to ban the use of more than one exclamation point anywhere, repeated question marks, and, best of all, SMS shorthand like “U” for “you.” These sorts of things are my pet peeve, and I’m glad to see that Google’s running a “stupid filter.”

Compare that to the practices of many banner ad servers: the more annoying the better. Case in point (animation removed for everyone’s sanity):

Does this signal a generational shift in the culture of advertisers? Google Ads are designed to work be as relevant to your content as possible, and Google works with their advertisers to increase clickthroughs, creating a sort of reverse revenue share with their content scores.

Banner ads, on the other hand, are often irrelevant to the story, and don’t really ad value to the reader – they’re the cost of doing business for a free internet. Yet for all the different ad blocking software out there, I haven’t seen this kind of zeal for blocking adwords (though if you really want to, here’s a client-side way).

As both an advertiser and an internet user, I’m hoping we’ll see the web move in a more SEM-style direction here. Providing value to your users rather than annoying them into looking seems to be a solid strategy for everyone, and I hope the market will come to reflect that.

Since Google bought YouTube, they’ve made several attempts to monotize their content. They floated the idea of premercials, but users revolted, noting that most YouTube videos were so short, it wasn’t worth watching a 30-second ad to watch a 15-second clip of a cat riding a skateboard. Google also maintains the copious banner ads that appear on the site, but adblockers often make short work of them. And while AdWords appear from time to time, they’ll likely have to wait for some sort of content recognition to be effective. A little money comes in from gigantic advertisers, but one thing Google has always shown itself to be adept at is reaching the little guy.

YouTube’s latest monotization attempt comes in the form of ads  that pop up at the bottom of the video during play (pdf). While users can click to remove them, they appear randomly and are built into the player, so adblockers can’t find them (yet). And while everyone acknowledges that YouTube needs monotization from somewhere to remain free (they’ve probably got the biggest bandwidth and storage bill on the internet), a new Ipsos study shows a gap between users who accept ads in TV shows streamed online and those who would accept the same for YouTube.

Ars Technica theorizes that this is because users are already used to seeing ads in their TV, while they aren’t used to it with their YouTube, but I suspect that it’s because users understand that while someone has to pay for that episode of Heroes to be produced, and are willing to subsidize it, they also understand that the popup that’s appearing on someone’s YouTube video is likely not going toward a revenue share with the creator, and they don’t see YouTube’s hosting as a value add to the point that they would put up with interruptions.

For non-profits, though, these popup ads raise an interesting question: what’s going to appear in the middle of your video? Is your ad asking people to protest a company’s action going to see that company’s ad appear? Will Congressional candidates be attacked for ads that appear in their video, the same way they’ve been attacked for the places their ads appear? I suspect this loss of message control may scare some non-profits away from YouTube and toward other services, like BrightCove, where they have more control over their content.

RSS feeds are great. Tech-savvy users love them because they can receive site content and other information without wasting time checking for updates. Site owners love them because they mean that more users will consume their content (on that note, consider subscribing to the Beaconfire Wire feed). Unfortunately, this kind of convenience means that you’re missing one critical thing: everything else on your site that you use to upsell people once they arrive for your content.

That’s why non-profits who have a significant RSS readership should consider ways to advertise their other services in their feed to push people to donate, take action, or join the email list. While visitors to your site will already be pushed this way by a strong information architecture, most feeds are pure content.

Several services exist to let you make more of your feed, by placing ads or links back to your site in your feed. Feedburner is perhaps the most popular, because it’s already widely used for other things. On the Beaconfire Wire, we use Feedburner to get stats on our feed and to add a few other neat features. And, as I wrote last year, it’s completely free. One feature independent bloggers will find useful is that it integrates with AdSense, allowing you to monotize your blog in another way. For non-profits who have specific links to include (like “Make a Contribution” and “Sign the Petition”), you can add custom “FeedFlares” at the bottom of each post so you don’t miss a chance to bring in more donors or activists.

So what if you’ve been advertising on the web in traditional ways, and want to diversify? Consider using a service like Pheedo to serve ads in a variety of content networks. Pheedo came to my attention in my NY Times feed, and they claim to have a pretty diverse network. Rates vary depending on the network you want to buy in – for sub-$5,000 purchases, you’re limited to buying in a network rather than choosing a specific feed or feeds, which makes it more difficult to segment your audiance – the site indicates that advertisers can make segmentation choices on a variety of criteria, but this may be restricted to larger buys. Update (5.28.08) – As Bill from Pheedo notes in the comments, advertisers can specify which segments of the network ads will appear in.

While RSS giveth, it also taketh away. New ways to promote your organization allow non-profits to expand their efforts to this space to take advantage of changing user habits. And as RSS becomes more ubiquitous, we’ll hopefully see an expansion of ways for non-profits to take advantage of it.

A recent post on the Official Google Blog provided an interesting look into how ads are stacked up on the right side of your Google searches (and on the content network):

In the general case, where ad qualities differ, the price an advertiser pays for a click will depend on its Quality Score relative to the quality of the ad below it in the auction. Roughly speaking, an ad that has twice the quality of another ad will tend to get about twice as many clicks, and will only have to pay half as much per click as the competing ad.

This is an important departure from what some consider the conventional wisdom with regard to search engine marketing: that the way to get a lot of views and clicks is to bid high for each word and work hard to convert on the flipside. Rather, this suggests that since ads with a higher quality score will win more often and cost less per click, it’s more important that you provide a high quality ad on a few of the most relevant keywords than to cast a wide net to keywords that are only tangentially related and lower your overall quality scores.

I’ll go into some tips on how to boost your quality score, and, by extension, the effectiveness of your SEM program, below the fold…

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Since coming back for South by Southwest, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about sponsored posts by bloggers. There were several events there that made me think about the topic, from Jeff Jarvis and others lampooning clumsy astroturfing to meeting the folks at Izea who run a pay per post service with a strict ethics code to attending a session on SEO for social media that mentioned that paid blogs can quickly bump up your Google rank for a new campaign. And I think that we’re finally reaching the point where the idea of blogging for money may be finding the right equilibrium to work.

The key requirement that bloggers and the rest of the social web seems to be asking for is disclosure. They don’t mind if you’re paid to shill for a product, just that you point out that you’re doing so. This is little different from the long-standing practice on political blogs of requesting that users disclose if they’re paid by a campaign when posting and commenting – it helps users understand the context and take the remarks with the appropriate amount of salt.

I look at some of the ways to provide this disclose, as well as why non-profits should consider paid posting, after the jump…

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It’s 10:00 pm, do you know where your AdWords are (pointing)? No, not another campaign ad, but a question that non-profits should be asking themselves in light of a new Google policy regard AdWords and redirects. According to their help center (emphasis mine),

Based on feedback from both our advertisers and users, and consistent with our efforts to present relevant results, we’ll no longer allow certain exceptions to our display URL policy. These include, but aren’t limited to, redirects and vanity URLs. In line with our existing policy, we’ll continue to require that your ad’s display URL matches its destination URL (the URL of your landing page). This policy will be strictly enforced for new ads, regardless of previous exceptions.

What this boils down to is that you can no longer send users to a different domain than the one you use in the display URL. This means, for users of many popular CRM systems, that you’ll have to display the name of your CRM instead of your organization in the your ad, if your donation or advocacy page is located there.

While it may be bad for non-profits, it’s overall a sensible policy. What likely happened is one too many ads pretended to be useful information like you’d find in organic search, only to turn around and be a business site. For example an ad for “XBox start on fire again?” with a display URL that says Microsoft would seem to be a public service announcement that would tell you what to do about it (hint: it involves a fire extinguisher). But what if that link went to Best Buy instead so you could buy a replacement? Google is doing what’s best for their users.

One way around this restriction is to send users to a landing page first instead of directly going to your advocacy or fundraising pages. This will also let you create a reinforcement of the text of your ad and help users get to the right page next. While you want to minimize the number of clicks to completion to minimize drop-off, a well written and formatted landing page can keep people from bouncing off and increase conversions.

The new AdWord rules are going to require some creative responses by non-profits and other marketers, but it’s worth examining carefully how you’ll build your ads. With the display URL comprising one quarter of your AdWord, you can’t afford not to have this vital reinforcement of your brand. I’ll be interested to see how major CRMs to help them make their ads effective. For more on the policy, and answers to your questions about it, check out the AdWords Google Group.

The New York Times has inspired me to coin a new motto:

What Would You Do Offline?

Not though an editorial, a news story, or a blog post, rather they inspired this with their homepage ad usage.

While it’s not present today, earlier this week, and at various times past, their homepage was adorned with a gigantic "Mac vs PC" ad that used both a banner and a skyscraper in tandem. While various people have opined on the ad content, including a much-dugg story on Gizmodo indicating that those weren’t really reviews to several posts praising the creativity of the ads to a post indicating that the ads tend to crash some browsers, I haven’t seen any commentary on with regard to the Times and other publications that ran the ad.

In short, I was amazed that the Times was willing to give up so significant a percentage of their above the fold homepage for this ad – would they really do the same with their offline edition?

I explore this phenomenon, and how it applies to NPOs, below the fold.

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Google ads are just the latest front in the escalating online war fought between the campaigns this election season. While adwords were still maturing last cycle, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how they’ve evolved in an era of search engine marketing consultants and near ubiquity of online advertising.

First, the ground rules: last month, Google posted on their policy blog about their guidelines for political ads:

• Editorial Guidelines. Like all AdWords ads, political ads must follow our editorial and content policies (including our trademark policies)…

• Fairness. We permit political advertisements regardless of the political views they represent, and apply our policies equally…
• No attacks on an individual’s personal life. Stating disagreement with or campaigning against a candidate[...] is generally permissible. However, political ads must not include accusations or attacks relating to an individual’s personal life, nor can they advocate against a protected group.
• Donations. If you’re soliciting political donations, your ad’s landing page must clearly state that the donations are non-tax-deductible.
• No misleading ads. As with all AdWords advertisements, political ads should not mislead users.

These policies seem remarkable even-minded and fair, as people have come to expect from Google. With these guidelines in mind, follow me below the fold for an analysis of the search engine marketing strategies of the 2008 presidential campaigns…

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The White House is famous for hiding unpopular policy announcements on Fridays when no one is paying attention. In this holiday week, it looks like two major developments are going on at Facebook that could see ramifications going far into the future, but which were probably scheduled to coincide with universities’ Thanksgiving break.

The first is the launch and response to Facebook Beacon (no relation to us, or so they would probably claim). Beacon integrates your site with Facebook and posts messages to your feed to say that you interacted with that site, so hopefully your friends will as well. The catch?

That it pops up a little notifier in the bottom right of the screen, telling you that a story will be posted on your feed unless you opt out within a few seconds. This bug already exists on such sites as Blockbuster and Fandango, and MoveOn has a quick demonstration of how it works right here.

More on the reaction, as well as a more positive new change, below the fold…

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Amy’s recent post on Facebook’s new social ads got me thinking about ways that non-profits could leverage these new ads to microtarget possible donors or members (incidentally, the social ads system confirms my theory of a couple months back that the infuriating fluff stories were a way to bolster interest filling out, which is the basis of how these ads do their targeting).

The system is  perhaps the ultimate affordable segmentation engine. While direct mail houses can segment out people to a very fine degree, it becomes prohibitively more expensive the more variations of a mailing you have to print to reach them all. What’s more, non-profits can’t go in and fine-tune their specifications in real time to see exactly who they’re hitting with each message.

Facebook social ads bring microtargeting to a whole new level. Let’s say that Beaconfire was looking for a Tech Lead (we are, incidentally – check our job listings for more!). I’ll walk through the process of creating the universe, and how you can do the same, below the fold.

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The other day, I was browsing Digg and came upon WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com. This site blocks Firefox users because of the prevalence of the AdBlock plugin, which, as the name implies, blocks ads and deprives sites of revenue, either directly in pay-per-click or pay-per-conversion arrangements or indirectly by lowering hit counts in pay-per-impression situations.

The site raised strong reactions from Digg users, who were almost universally opposed and had angry words (many of them misspelled) for the site’s creator. In a way, they ironically confirmed many of the arguments that the author makes in his article "Firefox – a New Religion."

The site raised the ethical question in my mind of who’s really at fault here: people depriving content creators from ad revenue, webmasters who monotize every pixel of screen space to the detriment of their content, or advertisers who create more and more obnoxious ads in an arms race for eyeballs?

I’ll explore each below the fold…

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Facebook says their newly launched Social Ads will help you ‘reach the exact audience you want with targeted relevant ads.’ I’ve been toying around with this the last couple days and think Social ads are definitely worth a closer look. The ads come together in four easy steps.  This is how it works…

Get Started - You select whether your ad will direct to a Facebook page or your organization / campaign website.

Chose Audience – Determine who you want to reach.  Rich segmentation opportunities abound.  You can chose to reach out to Facebook users by several key parameters such as geographic location (down to city-level), gender, age, education (including schools attended), interests and political views.

As you manipulate the criteria within the Chose Audience Screen, the number of individuals your ad is targeted to reach adjusts in real-time.

Create Ad - Create a title, drop in some ad copy and upload an image.

Set Budget - Ads are pay as you go for the duration of your campaign. You set a daily budget and bid on placement by impression or click.

The payment minimums are around $5 / day the ad runs and the scenario goes like this…

For any available ad inventory, Facebook selects the best ad to run based on the cost per click or impression and ad performance.

If you choose a Pay for Clicks (CPC) model, you will also bid on how much you are willing to pay for each click on your ad. Facebook will display your ad in the Ad Space, News Feed, or both. The amount you are charged will never exceed your daily budget.

If you choose a Pay for Views (CPM) model, you will also bid on how much you are willing to pay for every thousand impressions of your ad. You will need to select if you want your ad to appear in News Feed or the Ad Space. The amount you are charged will never exceed your daily budget.

And then you launch. PRESTO!

You can find the link to Facebook Social Ads in the footer under Advertisers. When you try it out, let me know how it goes.

Microsoft’s $240 million purchase for a 1.6% equity stake in Facebook had everyone buzzing recently (read more). While that’s a lot of money to you and I, it’s probably a drop in the bucket for Microsoft and well worth keeping Google out of the picture (if you’re Microsoft anyway). Microsoft had already struck a deal with Facebook (in 2006) to sell display ads on Facebook. With the new deal, Microsoft has also won the rights to sell ads on international versions of Facebook through 2011. While the international advertising spend online isn’t as high as the US, it’s not insignificant either. Research firm eMarketer reports that advertisers plan to spend $900 million advertising on social-networking sites in the U.S., compared with $335 million overseas. So Microsoft also stands to gain some piece of that pie.

While the deal represents a nice infusion of capital to invest in technology and people, it’s a double-edge sword on the people side. The Wall Street Journal expects the deal to raise the valuation on Facebook stock options, which may make it more difficult to recruit new key talent. Given that Facebook wants to double their workforce in the next year, how much of a hurdle will this turn out to be?