bryanmiller's blog

It’s often the way with things like Twitter that you tend mostly to hear stories about how well people are using them. Which can leave you with something of an inferiority complex about the fact that you haven’t actually had time to begin testing them properly (because you’ve been too busy raising money!)

With this in mind, it’s worth taking a quick look at a free report just released by PR Agency Webber Shandwick entitled ‘Do Fortune 100 Companies Need a twittervention?’ – because their research revealed that as much can be learned from what big US companies are doing wrong as from what they are doing right when it comes to Twitter use.

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The Twitter feeds are starting to run hot with requests for Followers to vote for the various sites nominated for the 2009 People’s Choice Website of the Year Awards...

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As is usual towards the end of the year – and even more so towards the end of a decade – people tend to start postulating as to what the future will hold, leading to a pre-Christmas flurry of articles and blog posts about key trends to watch going forward.

In the good old days this used to involve journalists calling-round or sending emails in early November and then collating whatever their contacts contributed into an end of year trends piece. In an interesting sign of the times, this year social media has undoubtedly taken-over as the key way of sharing and collating thoughts on the future – with a range of crowdsourcing initiatives underway focusing on just this topic...

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For quite a few months now I’ve been working with the team at Cancer Research UK to help develop their new supporter segmentation. After countless days spent working through transactional analyses, quantitative and qualitative research findings, and segment profiles, a week or so ago we reached the point where the segmentation was all set to launch. So, it was perfect timing for one of my old colleagues there to email me a link to a very interesting blog post by Brad Bortner of Forrester Research – explaining “Why good segmentations fail”!

In it, Bortner says that recent research reveals most segmentation projects never actually fully deliver their planned business results. Not because they haven’t been well developed, but because effective plans are not put in place to ensure that the segmentation is properly adopted and used across all parts of the organisation.

He then provides some very sound advice on how to avoid this happening, which I'm pleased to say tracked pretty closely with our own implementation plans...

Click here to read more on the Strategy Refresh Blog...

The 93 Dollar Club is a great example of donor-organised online community fundraising that began back in August this year through a chance meeting and act of personal kindness in a Trader Joes grocery store - of all places.

Starting with a $93 donation it has now generated over $23,000 and the 93 Dollar Club have just set themselves a new target of $93,000!

Click here to read the full story of the $93 Club at Giving in a Digital World...

The incredibly fast adoption of Social Media over the last couple of years has left many, if not most, organisations in something of a spin – as, in very short order, something that was at first dismissed as the preserve of the young and the geeks has become an unavoidable key component of mainstream communications.

With this recognition has come the desire to develop social media guidelines that help ensure everyone across an organisation works together to get the most from this new technology. However, this is not as easy a task as it might sound. Where do you start when trying to write guidelines for something that is, at its heart, often about engagement through spontaneous, unstructured conversations?

Well, one very handy place to start is Chris Boudreaux’s Social Media Governance website, where he has very helpfully collated links to social media guidelines from over 70 different organisations...

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There has been a growing level of discussion over the last couple of months about the much awaited launch of video-based charity project crowdfunding site See the Difference – added to just this week by a resounding endorsement in an open letter from UK Institute of Fundraising CEO Lindsay Boswell.

At first sight, this might just look like a video-based version of any number of fundraising websites already available. However, what I find particularly interesting about See the Difference is just how they describe their vision for the site.

On their introductory video, Stuart Hamilton, one of the founding team, shares the vision for See the Difference by explaining “We might start seeing the See the Difference logo in all sorts of unexpected places, the logo appearing in all of the different places around the world where projects are going on. So See the Difference could ultimately become the standard way in which people choose and express the things they care about and the differences that they want to make to the world”.

This is a very exciting ambition for the See the Difference brand – and also very interesting from the point of view of charity fundraisers who just might stand to lose ownership of relationships with those who support their work if the website's brand really does become that strong. Not necessarily a bad thing - if it grows the giving market - but certainly a real game changer for individual donor fundraising.

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Last week an interesting new initiative was launched by the team at Social Actions, bringing together data from a number of different social enterprise funders to create the world’s first open source database of social entrepreneurs who have who have won fellowships and awards. The idea being to make it easy for philanthropists, investors, journalists and others involved in similar non-profit work to make contact with formally vetted social entrepreneurs – and so facilitate easier collaboration, future funding, etc.

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Back in March I wrote about the launch of YouTube’s ‘Call to Action’ feature enabling UK and US organisations in its Non-profit Partners Programme to place overlay ads linking direct to their own websites from their YouTube videos for free – basically turning YouTube videos into simple interactive video ads. While this feature was good, it was also somewhat restricted – as the Call to Action link could only be placed in a banner at the bottom of the video, and if the video was embedded outside YouTube then the feature didn’t work at all.

The great news is that YouTube has just announced a much improved form of in-video interactivity and it will now work when your YouTube videos are embedded in any site – your own website, a supporter’s blog or Facebook profile, wherever…

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Some pretty shocking data for UK fans of the social networking site MySpace was highlighted last week, with the news that traffic to the site has now dropped behind that of microblogging site Twitter.

On one side, this is just more evidence of the amazing rise of Twitter in the UK (leading to London being described as the “capital of Twitter” by its CEO, Ev Williams) – and these site traffic stats actually only tell part of that story, due to the number of people using third-party applications to manage their Twitter accounts.

However what is more significant is such clear evidence for the apparent collapse of MySpace over here.

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