I don’t think I’ve ever worked with an organization quite like Epic Change. Founder Stacey Monk believes that “intention makes a powerful difference.” Epic Change is really all about intention: intention to build, fund, and support a school that literally changes children’s lives. Intention to listen. Intention to include everyone who wants to be part of the organization, and let everyone own this thing called Epic Change.

Epic Change is an example of an organization that really gets the idea of following its members, and intentional listening. Allison Fine recently wrote about this concept of “followership.” The bottom line, as Allison puts it is to “follow or become irrelevant.” If your organization isn’t willing to listen and include its followers, then it may well become irrelevant. As I have written before, Epic Change is anything but. Stacey and co-director Sanjay Patel invite anyone who is “heartfully-connected” (Stacey’s words) to become part of every online campaign, from planning through execution. They have three signature events: To Mama With Love, LalaLove, and now, Epic Thanks. Followers’ ideas are listened to seriously and included in the final product. In turn, Sanjay and Stacey also bounce their ideas off of the group and ask for feedback, always listening and always respectfully incorporating ideas. What is Epic Thanks is truly a result of great followership.

One example of followership is the gratitude dance idea. Sanjay Patel posted a video of the dance within the Epic Thanks planning group. Within minutes, the conversation within the planning group evolved from “I’m so not dancing” (me) to “what if we had a dance-off ?” (Stacey) to” let’s make a thank-you dance video if we hit our target amount!” And of course Stacey replies, “Let me see what we could build to host the video…may be able to get something up tomorrow…” Later that day, Stacey writes that she’s already filmed Leah, Gideon, and Mama Lucy (from the school) dancing…ready for their final thank-you dance video.

I cannot think of a better example of followership than Epic Change.

This Thanksgiving season, as in years past, Epic Change is raising money to support the Shepherds School in Arusha, Tanzania. The past three years, Epic Change has supported the school through a worldwide gratitude event called Tweetsgiving. It raised thousands of dollars to build and support the Shepherds Junior School, a primary school. Now the kids who had nowhere to go for an education are hoping that their dreams of becoming lawyers, doctors, and astronauts will continue with a secondary school education. The kids that started in 5th grade three years ago are ready for secondary school, but there is no secondary school in Arusha that will nurture and support these dreams. I met two of these students, Leah and Gideon, when they came to Boston two weeks ago with Mama Lucy (excuse the fuzzy photo of us at the bowling alley, but it’s the best image we have). If I do nothing else, I want them to have a chance to make their dreams come true.

So here’s my promise: I’ll dance if I reach my fundrasing goal of $100 for Epic Thanks. Please consider donating any amount, even $1 towards a worthwhile cause. And an organization that supports followership, intention, and children’s dreams.

I’m a terrible dancer, so this could get interesting… (But not as bad as Matt, apparently. See video below.)

Image courtesy of Anssi Koskinen, Flickr Creative Commons

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of social media ROI, and how to measure it. However, the more I think about it, the more it comes down to this: can we measure effective engagement with stakeholders, and how we move them to action?

Within social media, the ROI is actually Return on Engagement (ROE).

All other activities are those leading to ROE.

The ROI discussion needs to focus on defining meaningful engagement, how that happens, and comparing the return on engagement from campaign to campaign or from ask to ask. Amy Sample Ward writes, “is ROI limiting our community impact?” I think it is. Understanding and defining ROE is a much better measurement of the health of your online community and the long-term the success of your online strategy.

Recently, I participated in the To Mama With Love Mother’s Day fundraising campaign for Epic Change. This campaign raised over $30,000 in just five days. almost doubling last year’s success. Stacey Monk, Epic Change’s founder, asked why this year’s campaign was so much more successful than last year’s. ROE provides an easy answer: there was a much larger core group of highly engaged stakeholders who felt ownership planning and executing the campaign.

The planning group was inclusionary, transparent, stakeholder-owned, and accessible. Stacey formed a private planning group and invited anyone willing to commit to helping To Mama With Love raise funds and awareness, and she asked those people to extend the invitation to their friends. I was a member of the group and we were given a lot of opportunities to own the campaign. Ultimately, this was the group that acted: we blogged about it, personally asked friends to give, tweeted it, and propelled it forward. I suspect that Stacey Monk invested a lot of her time over the past year creating a “tribe” of Epic Change stakeholders, which paid off during this campaign. In this case, you can measure the outcome: $30,627.

Brandon Murphy, of 22Squared, a digital agency, created an incredibly interesting case study documenting the real value of social media, which is…Return on Engagement. 22Squared contends that really social digital media should focuses on objectives such as advocacy, trust, loyalty, and influence instead of reach, awareness, and simple engagement.

22Squared analyzed the social media activities of 100 popular corporate brand, and those effects on consumers. They defined four types of online consumer activities: engage, contribute, participate, and create. Comparing the impact of the actions of consumers from each of the four action categories with each other, they found: Those who participated and created generated 2.5 times more conversations than the lower-involvement “engage” group. They also influenced four times as many purchases as those brands using social media without higher-involvement participatory engagement.

Thinking back to To Mama With Love: the planning group involved all four types of action: we engaged, contributed, participated, and created. We blogged about it, tweeted it, and created heartspaces. Also, any website visitor who wanted to make a donation to To Mama With Love had to, at the very minimum, engage by making a donation, and then create by making a heartspace. TMWL set itself up to create real return on engagement. Those who participated most likely tweeted and posted updates to their social spaces about the event, too.

Thinking about Return on Engagement, instead of Return on Investment, changes the approach to social media. Instead of focusing on followers, think about how to create an engaged group of stakeholders, and what online activities will create that engagement. When designing your next social media strategy or campaign, integrate and encourage high ROE activities to yield more successful outcomes.

I’m presenting a free online webinar entitled, “What’s the ROI? Measuring the ROI of Social Media” on May 18 at 3pm EST. These are some of the things I’ll be talking about, along with another case study and information about what to measure. In the meanwhile, I’ll continue to think about ROE, and look forward to your thoughts on it as well.

Resources:

Amy Sample Ward’s social media metrics template is a great engagement metrics tracking starting point, and her blog post on DIY Community Engagement Metrics.

Today is the official launch of To Mama With Love, a collaborative online art project that honors moms across the globe and raises funds to invest in remarkable women who are transforming our world. To Mama With Love is an initiative of Epic Change, the folks behind Tweetsgiving. The To Mama With Love event is May 3 – 8, 2011. To Mama With love is…about creating and spreading love.  Participants create socially shareable “heartspaces” that include words, videos, photos & investments in honor of mamas they love. The changemakers are four incredible women who have created schools and shelters for children who face poverty, illiteracy, and lack of opportunity in Nepal, Afghanistan, and Tanzania.

This is a cause I believe in tremendously, and it aligns with my vision of creating a just world of opportunity. My mother was one of the 1970s-era equal rights activists who marched, protested, fought for an equal rights constitutional amendment, attended a world conference on women, and put her money where her mouth was to fund Emily’s List. I’m honoring my mother, Susan Silverman Askanase, in my heartspace.

I’m pledging $50 now, and up to another $50 to match my readers’ Epic Change donations

Epic Change’s goal this year is to raise at least $65,000 to invest in Mama Lucy’s secondary school in Tanzania, Renu & Maggie’s schools in Kathmandu & Surkhet, Nepal, and Suraya’s women’s shelter in Afghanistan. Please leave a comment on this blog post, with a link to your heartspace, so that I can match up to $50 in your donations to Epic Change.

Though I love my mother, and always want to honor her on Mother’s Day:

I participate in To Mama With Love because Epic Change founder Stacey Monk has created one of the most incredible online campaigns in which I’ve ever had the honor of participating

Epic Change, has taken every principle of great community organizing and integrated it into To Mama With Love. Epic Change is also an organization that embodies the culture of social media, which is the culture of inclusion. If you want to run a successful social media fundraising campaign, you can’t do better than to follow their lead:

1. Cultivate a community of stakeholders. Stacey Monk, Epic Change’s founder, is a gardener. She has spent years planting seeds of love and cultivating a community of giving. She cultivates the “magic middle” of stakeholders, activists, and influencers who would genuinely care about a cause such as Epic Change’s.

2. Nurture leaders. This year, Epic Change created a private Facebook Group to discuss the campaign before launch. Stacey invited people into the group that she’s been cultivating for years (and who have shown interest in Epic Change. Then she nurtured them:

• She asked people to introduce themselves within the group
• She asked for volunteers to help with tasks (proofing the press release, developing a Twitter list, inputting a database list, etc.)
• She asked people to invite their friends into the group, and welcomed those friends as they joined
  
• Stacey created questions within the private group to bring out our expertise: a win-win for all

3. Create campaigns with your stakeholders. Stacey consistently asked the group for help refining the campaign. She asked questions such as: should we send the blogger invitations during the weekend or not, should she redesign the home page in a certain way, and when should people tweet? She listened, and followed the group’s consensus.

4. Be transparent and inclusive. Campaign documents are posted for all to view and comment upon. Questions are encouraged, and comments are invited.

5. Design commitment. Before joining the group (or upon joining), we were asked to commit to at least one “mission,” which we committed to through a form. Missions included: invite five others to join the group, commit to writing a blog post, commit to donating money during the campaign, create a heartspace, send emails, and “nudge an influencer.” Stacey sends out mission reminders and asked us to post which missions we completed to the private Facebook Group.

6. Recognize those who are giving. The To Mama With Love website recognizes the bloggers, donors, and the volunteers that helped to plan the event very publicly. This is the very the community that Epic Change has spent the time cultivating.

One other thing: when I volunteered to help out with Epic Change’s Tweetsgiving 2010 campaign, Stacey Monk personally called me at home to thank me the night before the launch. In doing so, she instantly created a more personal, stronger offline connection out of our online connection, strengthening the connection.

When you are involved with Epic Change, you feel honored to be part of her “big circle of love,” because it is such an unique, supportive community of stakeholders. Stacey has created a family you want to be part of, one that supports each other and offers collaboration and encouragement…en route to changing the world.

Thank YOU for creating Epic Change and spreading epic amounts of love.

Epic Change is one woman’s quest to change the world permanently…through gratitude. Stacey Monk is a changemaker, a fountain of gratitude, and an incredible connector. She founded Epic Change in 2007 to amplify the voices of grassroots changemakers and social entrepreneurs. Since then, Epic Change has been raising money through gratitude, one tweet at a time.

She did it all through the lens of gratitude. In 2008, Epic Change created Tweetsgiving, ecouraging the Twitterati to tweet what they are grateful for, and connect that to a donation for as little as $10 to build a boarding school in Tanzania. That raised $11,000 in 48 hours. Tweetsgiving 2009 raised $30,000 from 657 donors. This past Mother’s Day, Epic Change’s collaborative artspace, To Mama With Love, raised $16,000 from 329 online, spurred on by twitterers, bloggers, and facebook users.

Tweetsgiving 2010 is called Epic Thanks. The campaign utilizes gratitude cards, online evangelists, and community organizing.

Epic Thanks is also one of the great online fundraising campaigns of 2010.

Epic Thanks is a worldwide celebration of gratitude that began November 23. The idea is so simple it’s incredible: bring the thankfulness back to Thanksgiving. Show the gratitude in our hearts, share it, and transform the world. This Tweetsgiving, Epic Change has selected three changemaker organizations to recieve the donations: Mama Lucy’s school in Tanzania, Subhash Ghimire’s Peace School in Nepal, and Mike Halley’s Halley’s K-9s for Veterans.

You only have to visit www.epicthanks.org to see gratitude on display. This campaign site makes you smile, and it’s easy to express  gratitude on the site. Who doesn’t want to donate out of gratitude?

I personally love the Gratitude Cards. They are fun, beautifully designed, easily shareable, and a great donation incentive. Stacey explains: “This year, when you create one of these postcards on the site, you’ll be asked to give before you send the postcard. People can give from $10 to ‘a gajillion dollars.’ If someone wants to give a gajillion dollars, then we’ll figure out how to do that.”

Stacey tells me:

“In my dream world 10,000 people will create postcards and post them.”

To understand the mechanics of how Stacey Monk, Sanjay Patel and the incredible Epic Change volunteer team made this happen, you only have to understand Stacey:  that intersection of intention, determination, gratefulness, and community.

Early on, the Epic Change team reached out to almost 100 supporters personally, asking them to host a local Epic Thanks fundraiser, and/or become an online campaign evangelist. Every volunteer committed to completing at least one Epic Thanks activity, such as donating money, asking five friends to donate, writing blog posts, etc. (Disclosure – I completed the form and one of the things I agreed to do was write a blog post about Epic Thanks. Another was to donate.)

Volunteers were invited into a closed discussion group. Stacey got the group rolling by asking us to introduce ourselves and talk about what we are grateful for. As the event date grew nearer, we discussed what we are each doing to promote the event, encourage donations. Stacey is our cheerleader. Bringing supporters into the planning and implementation jump-started this year’s Epic Thanks right out of the door with abundant tweets and gratitude cards. That’s community organizing at its best.

Last year, I was also invited to participate in the online volunteer group, and I was curious what is different about this year’s group. Stacey answers:

“Our planning group this year is much bigger than previously and more geographically dispersed. We wanted people who are heartfully-connected rather than people who would lend us their name. Intention makes a powerful difference. Influencers are bombarded by a million different requests and don’t have the opportunity to get deeply connected to something that they are personally sharing. ” And that’s what this group really is – everyone is incredibly generous, and heartfully-connected to Epic Change.

As I write this, 118 grateful souls have invested $5,876 in the dreams of three incredible changemakers. Thus far #EpicThanks has been tweeted 1,483 times! Stacey Monk’s fundraising goal is $1 million. Let’s tweet gratitude and re-tweet it often.

Intention makes a powerful difference

I hope you’ll participate in Epic Thanks in one way or another, and donate. I have.

Today, YouTube announced that every single YouTube channel now comes equipped with a moderator feature. It’s an incredibly exciting step to see YouTube becoming fully social. The moderator feature allows any channel to ask for ideas, questions, or suggestions from the community..right from your YouTube channel. Users may vote the crowdsourced ideas up or down. By integrating Google moderator, YouTube has brought real time engagement features into play and made it 100% more engaging.

Here is how it works: Every YouTube channel incorporates Google Moderator. All you have to do is enable moderator on the channel, and ask a question of your users. Here are some screen shots of how to enable moderator on your channel. First, click on the Modules tab of your channel.

After you’ve checked “Moderator,” a drop-down menu appears, as seen in this screen shot:

And here is an example of the feature at work on the Foodwishes channel. Foodwishes is running a contest asking users to submit a summer recipe they want to see to prepared on the channel. The recipe with the highest number of votes will be the chosen.

Basically, YouTube is giving its users the power to crowdsource ideas and suggestions, and use the wisdom of the crowd to vote for the top ideas. I think the voting feature is fantastic. This could be a very economical way for a nonprofit organization to run a contest, promotion, or campaign.

I also think that YouTube is giving Facebook a run for its money with this new feature. It’s always been difficult for Facebook Page administrators to crowdsource ideas using Facebook: if you ask for ideas using a wall post, then the ideas will come in over time, and aren’t collected in one place. If you want to run a crowdsourced contest or special offer on Facebook, you must create a custom landing tab and application.

Look out Facebook…here comes YouTube

If you are already using video, today’s announcement should encourage you to think about using YouTube as the new address to crowdsource for engagement and answers instead of Facebook.

Video is a personal medium. Involving someone through a personal request on video is much more compelling than writing a blog post about a need or creating a Cause. I can envision charity:water inviting stakeholders to ask questions when they drill for wells using YouTube’s moderator function, or Epic Change encouraging YouTube users to “nominate a favorite Mama” using this feature. Combine the moderator feature with the YouTube Nonprofit Program, and perhaps YouTube will become the favored action center instead of Facebook Causes.

I’ll wager that the YouTube moderator feature is a game changer. It will bring more nonprofit organizations into YouTube, enable organizations to reach and engage with new stakeholders, and become a platform to create interesting and exciting new social media campaigns. It’s simple, immediate (real time voting and interaction), personal, and most of all, engaging. It brings the bottom up and the stakeholders in.

Now, it’s up to you. How will you integrate this feature into your overall social media strategy?

This week I was shown an example of great social network fundraising. Epic Change launched an online fundraising event called To Mama With Love. It is a “collaborative art project that honors moms across the globe and raises funds to invest in one remarkable mama who dreams of building a home for children in her village.”

To Mama With Love takes Mother’s Day away from greeting card companies and merchants, and reminds us that the meaning of Mother’s Day is gratitude and honoring a mother.

What is so innovative about To Mama With Love is that it’s an engagement strategy. To Mama With Love encourages you to create a “heartspace” dedicated to a mother you want to honor, and decorate it with photos, film, words, and art. It personally engages the donor, and guess what? It also extends reach by touching someone else through the engagement. In other words, if I honor my friend or my own mother, I’ve touched that person. Maybe then the person that I honor will honor another mother, in turn.

Epic Change has created a new fundraising model that, at its essence is:

- A conversation (in this case about gratitude and mothers), but not about needed funds.

- About giving in more ways than from your pocket.

- A movement (in this case, connecting me with everyone else honoring a mom)

- Personal engagement

A conversation and a movement: what is brilliant about To Mama With Love, is that it is not about any single gesture of love – it means to be bigger. My gesture of love will not create homes for children. To Mama With Love globally links together all of the moms that have inspired this gratitude (in a beautiful visual graphic image on the website). As soon as I saw this, I knew I wanted to honor my mom in this way for Mother’s Day.

This is a screen shot of the global graphic. Every dot is a mama that has a heartspace.

Personal engagement:  If I want to honor my mama with a “heartspace” on the site, I can’t do that without first donating money to the cause (build housing on the school grounds for the kids at Mama Lucy’s school). After that, I will be able to create a “heartspace” for a mama, decorate it with art, video, photos, words. I can share it using an e-card, email link, or on the website.

A screen shot of the giving process:

Now that I’ve given to Mama Lucy’s school, this is what I get back:

Giving in more ways than from my pocket: I’ve participated in a global art project that is bigger than my heartspace, and honoring my own mom. I’ve given money in my mother’s honor to make the world better for a group of kids. I’m part of a new vision of Mother’s Day. I feel really good inside, too

After creating a heartspace, I can share it socially through facebook, twitter, email, etc. I can add a badge to my website, add a twibbon to my twitter or facebook avatar, and Organic Beauty Now will generously give $1 per tweet (up to USD $2,000) when your tweet includes #ToMamaWithLove and/or www.ToMamaWithLove.org. In other words, there’s a whole host of ways I could become a cause evangelist for To Mama With Love.

Lastly, it’s important to note that this event is a good horizontal extension of Epic Change’s fundraising strategy to raise funds.It’s a nice extension of the branded Tweetsgiving fundraiser, but doesn’t take away from the Tweetsgiving event. To Mama With Love puts the gratitude back into Mother’s Day, relating to Tweetsgiving‘s idea to “put the thanks back into thanksgiving.” Both events raise funds for Mama Lucy’s school in Arusha, Tanzania, create conversations, and integrate the recipients (Mama Lucy and the Twitterkids) into the events.

I’ve written before about best practices in social network fundraising. To Mama With Love embodies the best of these practices. In every way, Epic Change keeps the ideas of community, connectedness, and social network fundraising at the forefront. With To MamaWith Love, Epic Change continues to innovate and inspire social network fundraising. If you want to tweet this post, won’t you include the hashtag #tomamawithlove?

To Mama With Love is not an online fundraiser. It’s a heart-raiser.

For more information, visit http://www.tomamawithlove.org. Mother’s Day is May 9, 2010.

Feel free to view my heartspace there in honor of my mom, Susan Askanase: http://www.tomamawithlove.org/heartspaces/2059.

(If you want to read more about the back story, see Stacey Monk’s video interview on blackbaud.tv here.)

I was struck by this article that the brand itself is the second-most trusted source for information about a brand on a social networking site. Wow. Does that strike you as wild?

It does…and it doesn’t. While we know that, foremost, consumers trust online peers’ recommendations about brands and products (second only to friends and family), what strikes me about these survey results is the proven value of social media. Social network activities by an organization – when implemented well – create trust, enthusiasm, and credibility. That can translate into moving fans to action. That’s ROI.

While most brands initially hopped onto the social media bandwagon to generate sales, enough companies are communicating effectively and passionately using social media that they are creating a credibility scale for others to meet. You know who I’m talking about – the brands that are genuine, real connectors with stakeholders, and are transparent. These are the brands at the top of the credibility scale, and the ones that are still in it for a quick customer are at the bottom.

A report by Lightspeed Research about what US consumers want from brands online states that the top demand is “to improve their knowledge.” Specifically, consumers want brands to offer relevant news and analysis, new ideas and thinking, useful applications that consumers can download, and to create a space where consumers can interact directly with the company or staff. This type of content moves a company way up on the credibility scale.

Brand consumers want real value from social media, and real conversation.

This is what puts a brand or organization at the top of the credibility scale.

I imagine the credibility scale to look something like this (comments and improvements welcome!):

Nonprofit organizations: social network users are definitely looking to you for credible information about your organization and the cause. And they want to connect with your staff in an online space, in a real way. How can you reach the top of the credibility scale?

Here are a few ideas for nonprofits reaching for the top of the scale:

• More transparency about the successes, failure/challenges, and realities of the organization. Fans are looking to you for the real deal. Give it to them.
• Integrate more stakeholder content into the website, and the social media. Is there a way to vote or “thumb up” content? How can you use social voting to show how popular a concept or campaign is? How can you better integrate your social fans’ thoughts into your online spaces?
• Stream into the website how social media fans are referencing your work: create a social bookmarking feed of stakeholder-tagged content about organization, create a scroll of your tweets, showcase a Q&A on the website that comes directly from fan interaction on the social sites.
• Double-up your efforts to connect online with your fans: spend more time chatting with them, listening to them, and offering value to them.
• Ensure that the content you offer has value to your stakeholders, as mentioned above. Don’t think “here’s an article about what we just did.” Think “here’s an article about what we did, but we want to know how to improve it to better serve you.”
• Offer added value in the online spaces that you don’t offer elsewhere. Great examples: Seafood Watch offers added value with its iPhone app, BullyingUK displays user-created posters on Flickr, and Epic Change highlights the Twitter Kids’ tweetstream.

If there is an argument for social media improving brand credibility, which is a great ROI, then these survey results seem to verify to be the argument. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the brand credibility scale, and social network brand credibility in general.

Image courtesy of bartmaguire

This week is the wonderful Tweetsgiving event. I love that it gives me an opportunity to express my gratitude and also benefit a great organization and cause.  As I pondered exactly how I would express gratitude, I began to think about how I would do it in the context of a social media conversation. The beauty of social media is that expressions of  thanks and appreciation are built right into the medium.

Each social media platform has its own unique form of allowing users to express gratitude, and we are given “virtual karma points” for saying thanks to our social network.

Twitter

Retweet someone’s comment: Sometimes I retweet people I follow because it’s great info for my network. Sometimes I retweet people because I feel like I haven’t recognized their general contribution to my twitterverse in a while – and it’s good information. A retweet is recognition of someone’s value to you. That’s a form of thanks.

Tweet someone’s article/blog post/informative essay: they’ve said something really interesting and you’re recognizing it publicly.

Add a person to your Twitter List: I’m so incredibly honored that some people have put me on their list, and made that list public. If you have created groups using TweetDeck, or CoTweet, or another Twitter client, why not make those groups public now through your lists? Let everyone else know how awesome these Twitterers are.

Public recognition via #FollowFriday: The #FollowFriday (or #ff) participation is declining, and I think it’s a result of both fatigue and the rise of Twitter lists. However, the #ff recommendations I’ve received have warmed my heart tremendously and I am extremely grateful for them.

Give a shout out: Why not just tell someone how grateful you are to know them or what you learn from them? Here’s a tweet I sent out 6 days ago.

Facebook

You can “like” an update, news story, or just about anything else. It tells people “hey, I appreciate you putting that up.”

You can become a fan of a Page, Cause or Group. But more importantly, you can write on the wall of these places and thank them for the good work they do.

You can also thank people for joining your Cause or Page or Group. They are now stakeholders, and they love to be thanked. Here’s a “thank you” I received for joining the  Buy Local cause:

Reddit

You actually earn “karma points” for adding stories, voting on stories and commenting on stories in Reddit, which is a way of encouraging you to show your appreciation of others’ posted stories.

StumbleUpon

If you like a story, “stumble” it! As a blogger, it’s an incredibly wonderful thing to have one of my stories “stumbled.” It sends a lot of new folks to my site, and more than anything else, I know stumbling is not a task undertaken lightly. Stumbling a story means it is really, truly worthwhile. I am so appreciative of every stumbler. Do the same for someone else and show your gratitude for a great piece of information.

Linkedin

The very best way to express gratitude on Linkedin? Recommend someone. It takes less than five minutes and adds weight and credibility to their profile. If a connection performs a great service for you (your mechanic, your advisor, your real estate agent), write them a recommendation. I received one completely out of the blue last week and I still smile thinking about what a treat that was to receive it! All you have to do is click “recommend this person.” Do it today!

Blogging

If you have a blogroll, adding blogs that offer value to others is a deep honor to them, and public recognition of your appreciation of their blogging efforts.

When you comment on someone’s blog post, why not also add what was particularly great about the piece as well?

Subscribe to the blogs you want to read regularly. Show the blog owner/writers that you appreciate their work that way. Socially share blog posts that you love on all of your other social sites.

Don’t forget to assign credit to everyone that you reference in your blog posts. I like to “litter” my posts with all sorts of outgoing links to offer my readers more information as well as give credit to those who contribute to the development of a blog post.

Just thank them. In a blog post.

I’ve thanked contributors to posts, contributors to conversations that inspired posts, and in fact, I’m going to thank a few people who have inspired this post: Mama Lucy, Stacey Monk, John Haydon and Avi Kaplan for inviting me to participate in Tweetsgiving, the team of amazing bloggers who are also joining in this effort. I also want to offer special recognition in particular to two bloggers Ching Ya and Aviva Victoria Bruekner who, once I asked them to participate, put more than 100% of their energy and gratitude into this project and vigorously publicized it to their networks.

I haven’t even touched on all the ways we can thank someone, express gratitude, or show appreciation on social media. How do you do it?

This post was created as part of a global groundswell of gratitude called TweetsGiving. The celebration, created by US nonprofit Epic Change, is an experiment in social innovation that seeks to change the world through the power of gratitude. I hope you’ll visit the TweetsGiving site to learn more, and to bring your grateful heart to the party by sharing your gratitude, and giving in honor of that for which you’re most thankful.

If you’re planning a social media campaign, how important is it to integrate bloggers before and during the campaign? I’m referring to social media campaigns launched on a platform(s) other than a blog platform.

People join causes because they know and trust either the organization itself, or someone associated with the cause. Translating this to our virtual lives, outside bloggers have the reach and trust to be that friend that recruits others to a cause or a campaign. I know this from my community organizing days: friends bring friends into a a cause or a campaign. The strongest advocates become the best recruiters.

Bloggers not only have reach within their community, but they amplify their reach through social bookmarking (Digg, StumpleUpon, etc), re-tweets, and of course leveraging their personal twitter networks. Also, bloggers tell compelling stories. From John Haydon: “Bloggers can have the biggest impact in online campaigns by telling a sincere, heartfelt story. They can also have a big impact by knowing who among their readers would also stand up and take action for particular causes.” During social media campaigns, bloggers are the grease that can push a campaign forward, help it gain momentum, and bring needed attention and value when it is faltering.

I believe that bloggers play an integral role in the success of the campaign, and I spent some time trying to find evidence of their contributions to online campaigns.

Opportunity International Australia: Micro Finance Trust Fund Camapaign

As an Australian ambassador for Opportunity International, Jasmin Tragas pledged to raise $10,000 to create a micro finance trust fund for female entrepreneurs in the Philippines. She created an online fundraising campaign, and blogger relations was integral to iy.  As part of the campaign, Jasmin created an eBook about female world shapers entitled “WorldShapers: Extraordinary Women Making a Difference.” Many of the women featured in the book wrote blog posts about the cause and championed the campaign. (Disclosure: I was one of the women featured in the eBook.) When I asked Jasmin to describe the role of bloggers in the campaign, she replied, “huge in terms of getting visibility. Not just bloggers writing about the campaign but also sharing in fun blog challenges. This raised the profile and brand. Blogging may not have helped right away but that it increased visibility over time. I was describing it to friends earlier today as a trickle effect.”

Visible Government: Beers for Canada

Beers for Canada was a social media campaign run by Visible Government to fund software to monitor government transparency. According to an interview with Alistair Croll on Beth’s Blog, the organizers pre-seeded the 3-day campaign by identifying and speaking with key bloggers and twitterers, who brought their voices to the campaign. Incredibly popular and respected bloggers (Tim O’Reily, Om Malik. Tara Hunt) also tweeted about the campaign.

Epic Change: Tweetsgiving 2008

Epic Change’s Tweetsgiving  2008 event was extremely successful in terms of the amount of tweets, publicity and funds raised to build a school in Tanzania. In Avi Kaplan’s Tweetgiving analysis, he writes that the campaign pre-seeded the event with a few bloggers, but not many. The blogger mentions began to roll in as the campaign gained momentum, resulting in over 100 press and blogger mentions. Deeper analysis revealed that 15% of the visits to the donation/Epic Change Tweetsgiving site came from blog posts and articles. Avi writes: “the press we received was so valuable to Epic Change and continues to benefit the organization, but in terms of raw traffic, it looks like word of mouth and twitter mentions were the main drivers.”

Epic Change: Tweetsgiving 2009

This year’s Tweetsgiving 2009 social media campaign (November 24 – 26) embraced and integrated bloggers. The Tweetsgiving website encourages participants to self-organize into groups; the “Blogger’s Group” is one of them. Organizers also pre-seeded the campaign by asking influencers within certain online communities to bring their own “flock of Turkeys” (my wording, not theirs) to the event, essentially turning these influencers into recruiters and campaign leaders. (Disclosure: I am a member of this group, called Wild Turkeys – their wording, not mine.) John Haydon (one of the campaign leaders) told me that “for Tweetsgiving, the main role bloggers have is encouraging their communities to participate.”

How important are bloggers to online campaigns? Very.

A trusted blogger is the Walter Cronkite of his/her community.

Walter Cronkite was “the most trusted man in America” for decades. If he would have told my parents to donate money to your cause, I’m sure they would have opened up their checkbook and written one right then. Use trusted bloggers to be your campaign’s Walter Cronkite.

Have any of you been involved in campaigns that use bloggers? How was the blogger element integral to the campaign’s success? Did you learn any great lessons or best practices you’d like to share here? I hope that this is the beginning of a list of campaigns that have used bloggers, and anecdotes about the effect of blogging on the outcomes. I’ll keep the list as a reference guide for others planning their next social media campaigns.  Look forward to the hearing about the campaigns!