Bloggin’ it

When I saw the commercial, my first thought was “Well, that’s cheeky”. My second was “I wonder if they have to pony up some cash for all that extra bandwidth”. I’m talking about how the studio who has brought us “John Tucker Must Die” is using MySpace to promote their new movie. In fact, their MySpace page is the film’s official site. Brilliant! At the time of writing, JT already had 69,881 friends.

Hmm I say, is there something to be learned here for small fry non-profits? Given that MySpace is free, is it worthwhile for your charity have a Myspace page to use as an interactive marketing tool? Man, that sounds rather Mr. Burns evil when you put it that way. Excellent, Smithers. Here are a few tips to MySpace marketing if you have the proper time to devote to it. My biggest recommendation is to not bother at all if you can only to a slapdash job as this might hurt your brand and waste your precious time.

Read more… »

So I’m not a Mac person. They’re pretty, oh Lord are the pretty, but I really don’t like know difficult it is to get into them to do repairs or upgrades of RAM, et al. Humph.

That being said, I watched “An Inconvenient Truth” last night and aside from being a wee bit scared over the global warming prospects, I was salivating over the Mac presentation software that Gore was using. Man, the folks at Apple must be psyched at all the free exposure. His laptop should win an Oscar as the supporting cast.

Anyhoo, for those of you who haven’t seen the film, it had the coolest slide show presentation graphics that I’ve ever seen. Not the dinky animations and sound effects that you get with Powerpoint but some “cinematic quality” stuff. Keynote in Apple’s IWork suite. You would-be Mac afficionados should check out the demo on the site. IWork is surprisingly affordable at $79 a pop.

It 2:22am and I really should be in bed. But I got a steak burrito snack attack and decided to watch a little Rocketboom. June 7th, they ran an interesting piece about Nata Village in Botswana and the ongoing efforts to control HIV/AIDS there. How did our intrepid reporter, Amanda Congdon, find out about it? Melody Jenkins, a Peace Corps Volunteer, and Jon Rawlinson, your basic world-travelling do-gooder, teamed up and set up a video blog documenting life in Nata. They are using it to raise awareness about the village as well as funds. Read more… »

An important way to generate more traffic for your site is to get other people to link to you. Many orgs provide cute buttons and code with link requests. Here is a nice example from the Genocide Intervention Network.

If you look at the bottom of this page, you will see a small little 80 x 15 image for AIDG, my favorite nonprofit. In another bout of strategic laziness, I used an online tool to generate this png as well as the PIH (Partner’s in Health) button that you may have seen on other pages.

To create your own button go to the Brilliant Button Maker.

Aaah it’s time for marketing. You need to do a brochure or create other collateral for your business/non-profit. DO NOT just nick the pictures off Google Images. Not that I’m some big “respect copyright” proponent. I’m just saying that, as a business, you should be doing everything on the up and up as much as possible.

Luckily there is an alternative to paying the obscene amounts that Comstock, Corbis or Getty charge for their oh so pretty pictures.

• Istockphoto: Pictures from $1-5. I use them quite a bit in my work now.
• Image After: Free
• 123 Royalty Free: $1
• Fotolia: $1-5
• Everystockphoto: Varies

Several of the above companies also have extended licenses that give you more flexibility over how you can use the images.

It’s oh so nice. The photographer gets paid/free exposure and you don’t get ripped off.