Adwords and Social Justice Campaigns

Update: See also this story on Dutch UNICEF AdWords activities.

Couldn’t help but notice after doing a Google search for Amnesty these paid results:

You’ll notice that the political right has got its grips on this one. I think this is a way underutilized means of promotion, especially by small radical organizations. You get your links on these lists by chosing keywords, bidding on a price-per-click and setting a maximum daily expenditure. It doesn’t have to be expensive. Here’s where you do it.

Check out this dismal example, paid results for “immigrant rights”. There’s only one paid result. That means that if you bid anything – you’re going to be at least the number 2 result on the right had side of the page in search results for “immigrant rights.”

More, better and stranger after the jump.
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Live Help Desk went well

Last Friday I did a conference call by Skype with Seth Mazow of Interplast, Norris McDonald of the African American Environmentalist Association and Kim Felton from Northwest Medical Teams. I thought it went quite well. Everyone had some overlapping interests and experiences and communicated well. We didn’t address all of the things we planned to, but I think that was ok.

We did discuss:

  • Adding a presence-indicating (available/unavailable) “Skype me!” button to the sidebars of blogs.
  • Good times to use Skype and good times to use Gizmo Project (Seth says Skype is better for calling land lines or mobiles – Skype out – in developing countries, otherwise go with Gizmo.)
  • Using Audacity to record, edit and turn Skype calls into MP3 format. (Seth’s great idea!)
  • Using Odeo to upload recorded Skype calls and to record single voice audio files through the browser.
  • How to submit that Odeo channel to iTunes for inclusion in its podcast directory.
  • Trying to include a cell phone into an otherwise all four Skype-in conference call crashed the call.
  • We discussed the limitations and possibilities of using Skype conference calls.
  • We also talked a little bit about how to use Feedburner to watch for unpermitted scraping of your content by other sites – a problem that Seth is dealing with right now.
  • And we talked about how to use comment tags to hide code in your blog and leave notes for yourself and others.

All in all I thought it was a good use of time. A little more structure could have been helpful, but I don’t think it was too bad. I’ll put on another one of these calls soon, so keep your eyes peeled. For now though, I’ve got some serious catch up to do. I’ve been doing too many training type activities last week and not enough content production.

AjaxWrite is nice

I’ve used AjaxWrite a number of times now to prepare documents on my Mac for people that I’m guessing are MS Word dependent and it’s great! It’s a project of a group calling itself AjaxLaunch. They aim to launch a new Ajax application every week and have so far succeeded. Their newest is a browser based video editor that seems to be getting good reviews. I’ll be exctied to see what else they come up with.

Promoting yourself by praising your competitor

Hugh at Gaping Void, a hugely popular marketing blog, makes a really nice point….

Not only is a great story, full of local history and color, it does a superb job of pulling off what has become my favorite thing to do as a marketer:

i.e. Praising one’s competition to the hilt:

If you fancy a new suit, he’s one of the best. Hardcore old school.
Brian Staples: +44 (0) 207 734 5069.

Of course, you can only do that when [A] your praise is sincere and [B] your own product is up to snuff. Otherwise you just sound obsequious.

This is so different from traditional promotional communication! I had a client freak out last week because I posted a link to a competitor on their web site. I mean freak out. My response was: yes, your readers will find out about this resource your competitor offers (that I linked to) but they’ll remember you as the place to consistantly find the best resources from around the web. Information can’t be hidden from people anymore, it can only be gardened gracefully – that’s were your value proposition should be. Though a very nice and supportive man, this he didn’t buy. (I’m subcontracted with him and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t read this blog, but if you are reading here – there’s another piece of the discussion.)

Get a feed full of inspiration with Net Squared case studies

I just noticed that there’s an easy link to subscribe to new case studies at Net Squared. These are organizations around the world using new web tools in innovative ways. It’s totally inspiring. Here’s the most recent case studies added and here’s the feed URL to subscribe to updates.

If you work for a nonprofit organization doing innovative things online you can write up a case study yourself on the Net Squared site.