About Me 0071: Making Money Online With

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Non-profit organizations and passionate individuals have found a slew of creative ways to leverage social media and the class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet to make the world a better place. Online campaigns help provide clean drinking water, food and malaria-preventing bed nets to people who need them.

Creative uses of the web are helping to provide and enhance education. These four projects, for instance, found innovative ways to help build schools through digital campaigns.

1. Epic Change

Epic Change has become a model for raising money using social media. Since 2008, its annual TweetsGiving has asked people to tweet about what they’re thankful for while making a donation. The strategy was so successful that #tweetsgiving became a trending topic on Twitter during the first year’s campaign.

Starting out, the benefactor of TweetsGiving was a school in Tanzania that was founded by Mama Lucky Kamptoni, a passionate local woman who started the school using money she earned from her poultry business (now there are two more benefactors). Epic Change wanted to help her rebuild and expand the school.

The organization also launched To Mama With Love, a website where users can make a donation by creating a “heart space” for a mother they care about. The “heart space” is a collection of photos, videos and words dedicated to that mother. Other people who care about that mother are invited to donate in her honor.

From one of the classrooms that was built using donations from these campaigns, the students now tweet and connect with the rest of the world.

“So often, we hear the stories of children in the so-called ‘developing’ world from the perspective of the media, non-profits or friends who have traveled or volunteered,” explains the Epic Change Blog. “What happens now – when these students can share their own stories, and build relationships with the rest of the world, for themselves? How will the world be different when these children, who live so geographically far away, move into our virtual backyard? What difference will it make in their lives to know that their voices will be heard?”

2. Stillerstrong

When Ben Sitller launched the Stillerstrong campaign on YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube, Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter and a branded website, he did it with a video that poked fun at Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong campaign. It was hard to tell if he was kidding.

But the campaign, which sells Stillerstrong headbands and accepts donations by text message and credit card, has raised about $300,000 to help provide temporary schools for Haitians displaced by January’s earthquake. At the time the campaign was announced, the organization and its partners Causecast and the Global Philanthropy Group were expecting each school to cost between $45,000 and $55,000.

3. TwitChange

Instead of auctioning off celebrity memorabilia to support a charity, TwitChange hosts eBay auctions for celebrity Twitter interaction. The donation’s bidders put down to have a celebrity follow them, retweet their tweet, or mention them in an update. The proceeds go to aHomeInHaiti.org, which will use them to build a home and school for children with disabilities in Haiti.

The first auction in September raised $531,640.25. The website instructs us to “stay tuned for the celebrity tweet auction coming this holiday season.”

4. University of the People

Less of a “campaign” than a full-blown effort to democratize education, University of the People provides tuition-free higher education through an online campus.

Since launching last year, the university has accepted about 700 students from 100 different countries to its three- to four-year programs for business and computer science. Recently the university opened computer centers in Haiti so that students with limited Internet access could enroll in its courses.

“I do believe that if we take the millions of people around the world who could not afford going to university and teach them tuition free, we’re not only changing their lives, and their family’s lives, we also change their communities, their countries,” founder Shai Shai Reshef says. “And if we have a lot of them, we will change the world for a better world.”

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More Social Good Resources from Mashable:

- How Online Classrooms Are Helping Haiti Rebuild Its Education System/> - Why Social Media Is Reinventing Activism/> - 5 Creative Social Good Campaigns for the Holiday Season/> - 4 Real Challenges to Crowdsourcing for Social Good/> - 9 Creative Social Good Campaigns Worth Recognizing

Image courtesy of iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, urbancow

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I'm exploring the site now. First impressions:

1. Promoted Tweets: "When you promote a Tweet, only the most relevant users see it—put simply, that's users that follow similar accounts to yours." OK - so Twitter has some kind of (proprietary) segmenting algorithm. Does that mean "If I'm promoting tweets about RC Cola, users following Coke and Pepsi will see it, but someone who isn't following either of them won't?" What about someone who's following a celebrity that Coke or Pepsi sponsors? I guess if I were a brand, I'd want something a little more specific than that. On Facebook, I can say, "Only 18-35 year old males who are fans of any NBA team will see ads for my basketball shoes." What's the equivalent on Twitter?

2. Promoted Trends: Yeah, Carri's right about this one *and* there's another hitch. The way this has been described, a trend has to *already* be a Trending Topic before you can promote it. That means the brand has to sit at a console, watching Twitter, or have a script watching the world-wide, local and regional trending topics. When a new trend is "born", the brand has to decide if it's relevant, compose a tweet, then hit the "Promote" button.

I've seen Promoted Trends, so they must either have had a strong clue that it was going to make it into the Trending Topics ahead of time, like a sports event or TV show, or they were camped out on a console. I know the W+K people had a whole control center for the Old Spice campaign, complete with home-brew analytics, creative and legal teams working in real time, and so on. In any event, this seems to me to be a big-brand tool only, in conjunction with mass media and real-time campaign management and lots of data integration.

There are a few other issues with Promoted Trends. Every user can choose to see "World Wide" Trending Topics, or trends from certain cities or regions. If you're promoting a Boston restaurant, I'd think you'd only want to show the Promoted button to people who were viewing Boston trending topics. Another issue is spammers. When the list of trending topics updates, there are spambots that latch on to multiple topics - if I viewed "Boston Celtics" during a basketball game, sure, I'd see a Promoted Tweet for the restaurant at the top, but right after than I'd see a bunch of garbage. Twitter needs to filter the spam out of Trending Topics before Promoted Trends will be effective. I think it's an easy piece of code to write - just ignore any tweet that matches more than one trending topic.

3. Promoted Accounts: As far as I'm concerned, I don't know that I'd buy a promoted account if Twitter was filtering who saw it. I don't think Twitter's "Who To Follow" algorithms are that good yet. For example, I followed a math teacher in the UK recently who tweeted something interesting. For *days* after that, Twitter's Who To Follow list was mostly math teachers in the UK! Either they all follow each other or Twitter is looking at the profiles. If I bought a Promoted Account I'd want to either know how many people would see it and how they were selected, or I'd just want everyone to see it. And If I only pay per follower and not per view, I think I'd insist on knowing how they were segmented - I wouldn't want to have to spend my own resources qualifying followers.

4. Analytics: I'm really glad Twitter is providing those only for advertisers, because they're going to be tweaking the algorithms for months, and that costs money. Again, though, you really need to be a big brand before you can dedicate a real-time Twitter team to a campaign.

Bottom line: even with all the issues, I think it's going to be successful for campaigns like the Old Spice campaign, major league sports, mass market movies and television shows. It's working for Conan O' Brian, it worked for Old Spice, it probably worked for Best Buy and some of the movies that used it.

But for smaller businesses, with, say, a single person at a dashboard for a local business in one of the cities where Twitter captures Trending Topics, it's going to be a bit like day trading. Eventually, you'll learn how to do it, how to follow trends, promote them, compose a tweet stream that "resonates", etc., but there won't be much "science" in it. Spammers will figure out how to game it and "black hat Twitter resonance optimizers" will appear on the scene as if by magic.

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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Making Money Online With