Showing posts with label cause marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cause marketing. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Interesting stuff out there...

Thanks Melissa for these links:

HP & Gwen Stefani
Everyone has something to say. We all have this little voice in our heads that says, "Make something." And now, we all have the tools at our fingertips. We can be the author, the editor and the publisher. We can make amazing things. The "What do you have to say" campaign features great ideas and how-tos, from personalized tour books to professionally designed business materials.
http://h30393.www3.hp.com/printing/gwen.html
TV ad http://h30418.www3.hp.com/index.jsp?fr_story=048bd65106c9b4f93012b25ef39080eeb4781bfc&rf=bm

A pledge to reduce bottled water
http://www.filterforgood.com/

Microsoft Inspiration anyone (follow on from the break up)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knQKdhGmL8s

The intelligent first aid kit
http://www.intelligentfirstaid.com/catalog/index.php/cPath/2

50 bizarre social networks
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/0,39029471,49296847,00.htm





Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Euro 2008 Fan Kit

Google’s euro 2008 effort - A nice example of aggregating existing content, and a little bit of development work to create something new:

The 2008 European Championship lasts for 23 days this year, which means 23 days of thrills, hopes, tears and cheers.

To celebrate those 23 days, Google and YouTube have put together a fan kit, so you can share your passion for football with thousands of other fans from around the world!

The Google Fan Map

Explore all the locations for the European Championship and view the latest news and information about your team. Find your favourite spot to watch, play or celebrate football, then share it with the world!

YouTube Fan Diary

Be a part of the YouTube Fan Diary:  http://youtube.com/23days

Monday, May 26, 2008

Guest Post: How the Chinese Internet Becomes a Platform for Earthquake Grief (A local perspective)

With thanks to Web Strategy by Jeremiah

Posted: 23 May 2008 08:01 AM CDT

Jeremiah: Paul Denlinger of Beijing is an internet expert on China, and I’ve offered him the opportunity to help share from an insiders perspective. Keeping in the theme of internet strategy and how the web impacts business, (and in this case the world) Paul, a resident of China, shares his perspective.

Although a long post, please show him the same respect that you do for me.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chinese Internet Becomes Platform for Earthquake Grief

-A guest post by Paul Denlinger

The Sichuan earthquake of May 12, which first registered as 7.8 on the Richter scale, has now been revised upwards to 8.0. As of Thursday May 22 in Beijing, the number of fatalities has so far reached more than 52,000, missing are 30,000, while injured are 400,000 and the number of homeless has reached 5 million. The final death toll is projected to be around 72,000. The Chinese government has appealed to foreign governments for aid and assistance, and Russia, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong have all sent teams to aid in the search for survivors in the rubble, and for body recovery. With the huge number of refugees, there is also a severe shortage of tents to house them, and many foreign governments including the US, UK, Russia, Germany and Italy have all sent cargo aircraft to Chengdu, the nearest major city, to drop off needed supplies.

The Chinese government reacted swiftly to the tragedy, with Chinese premier Wen Jiabao flying to Sichuan the afternoon of the earthquake. He won wide praise for his swift action, and was photographed and taped talking and holding newly-orphaned children, telling them that the government would care for them, and would be committed to helping them rebuild their lives. He was photographed weeping when the bodies of two young children were removed from the rubble of their collapsed school. After several days of non-stop work directing rescue teams, making sure that they got all the help they needed, the exhausted Wen returned to Beijing, and was replaced by Chinese president Hu Jintao, who in one of the more memorable scenes, was seen holding an 8-year old boy, and telling his family that the government was committed to helping them rebuild, and to finding the bodies of their loved ones.

Military rescue teams from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) were dispatched from all of China’s 31 provinces to aid in the rescue effort. The first two days after the earthquake there was heavy rain in the area, and in a few instances, paratroopers were dropped into stranded villages to help the local inhabitants. In one instance a dangerous night drop was made into an isolated village, and the mission was so high-risk that the 15 men were required to write their wills before departure. There continue to be mudslides in the area, and the government says that so far more than 200 volunteers have been killed in mudslides, trying to get supplies to the villagers.

The earthquake struck in a mountainous region of Sichuan, at the foothill of the mountains which run to the west and become the Tibetan plateau. A mix of Han Chinese and ethnic Tibetans live in the area, mostly in small villages surrounded by mountains. The main earthquake struck at 2:28PM, and an estimated 7,000 school classrooms collapsed. Schools were particularly hard-hit since many of the primary school students were taking their afternoon naps, or had just started their afternoon classes. There are many stories of children escaping from their classrooms to their sports field, only to be buried alive when the mountain surrounding the school collapsed on them. For many of their families, their bodies will never be recovered. In other instances, parents rushed to their children’s schools to dig out their children, only to find them dead. In some of the more horrifying stories, the quake was so severe that mountains which were separated by valleys with villages in-between moved together, completely obliterating the villages and their inhabitants.

In most of these village households, three generations of families live together, including grandparents, children and grandchildren, as is the usual Chinese custom. In many of the households, the parents of the children are migrant workers in Shanghai, Beijing and the more prosperous cities of China’s east coast. Upon hearing of the tragedy, and being unable to connect with their families on their mobile phones, they took trains back to Sichuan to search for their families. Many returned only to find that their whole household had been wiped out, or to find that their only child had already been buried in a mass grave. In some cases, there was a single survivor, with no surviving relatives. Most of these people were severely injured, and on learning that their families had been wiped out, said that they too wanted to die.

But then something curious started to happen, something which hadn’t happened before in Chinese society. Strangers started going to hospitals in Chongqing and Chengdu, and started caring for people whom they were not related to, effectively adopting them. All during last week, the news started to spread, not only of the need to send supplies, but also to care for the survivors. Stories of this kind spread quickly though China’s officially-controlled newspapers and television, and spread even more quickly on the Internet, especially Chinese BBSes such as Tianya, which are the most popular community tool for unofficial news. Other popular outlets for information are Twitter and a Chinese version of Twitter, Fanfou. The most popular IM client in China is QQ, which has more than 500 million registered users.

The news spread very quickly about the scale of the disaster, and strangers started organizing themselves online to take supplies to the disaster area. Google China and Baidu, China’s leading search engine, soon created specialized searches for relatives. Then on the weekend of May 17 and 18, some Chinese started designing online memorial sites where visitors could sign a book and give a white flower in mourning for the earthquake victims. These sites were designed and set up by volunteers without any payment from the government or corporations. As of May 22, one site had more than 262,000 unique visitors.

Late on the evening of May 18 Beijing time, the Chinese government announced that there would be three official days of mourning, from May 19-21, and recommending that game and entertainment sites shut down during the mourning period. Robert Scoble interpreted this event out of context and turned a human tragedy into a political event, narrowly framing it in terms of politics and human rights, and suggested that this meant that the Chinese government was enforcing a government crackdown during the mourning period, as could be evidenced from his comments, and those of his followers, on his Friendfeed account.

In fact, the Chinese government’s Central Publicity Department, which is in charge of content on the officially controlled media, was playing a catchup game with China’s Internet population, which is now the largest in the world, as well as the general population of China. As people learned more about the scope of the tragedy, they wanted to do more, and even more, the government sensed that they needed a public outlet to channel their grievance. The problem was that, in China’s long history, there never has been a defined way to remember and mourn ordinary citizens who have been killed in an enormous natural disaster. For this reason, the government prescribed that all cars and citizens would stop where they were on May 19 at 2:28PM, exactly one week to the day from the time of the earthquake, and while air raid alarms sounded, they would stand still for three minutes. They did this on Monday, as can be seen in this Youtube video and this interesting account of the event. Many websites have voluntarily changed their colors to black and white during the mourning period, while some have added the Chinese character for "mourning" to their websites, and many Chinese have chosen to wear black and white during the mourning period. All of this has been done without government orders of any kind; it has all been organized on the Internet through BBSes and people who voluntarily spread the message. Many other sites have set up donation badges to facilitate online donations to help organizations, and there have been blood drives as well. There have also been a few sites, including Google and Baidu, which have created people search sites, so that relatives can look for their loved ones. Most newspapers and magazines, all of which are controlled by the government, have moved to publishing in black and white only.

While younger Chinese have turned to the Internet, older Chinese have devoured huge amounts of TV programming and newspapers, all of which are state-owned and are now fully devoted to reporting the aftermath of the disaster. Unlike in the past, all of this reporting about the disaster is what the audience demands from the bottom up, not what the government wants to give to the people in a top-down fashion. In order to show the people that the government is on top of things and doing its job, state-owned news agencies have been working round the clock to provide news about the situation in Sichuan. When not reporting about rescues, stories detailing the amount of goods and supplies being sent to Sichuan from the various cities and provinces of China form a solid wall of disaster reporting. In keeping with the Chinese affinity for numerical data, precise numbers of boxes sent, trucks dispatched, tons of supplies sent, trains sent, etc. are all reported in these stories. In contrast with the past, Chinese government officials have promised a higher degree of transparency and accountability to the people. Many Chinese have also started openly asking questions on the Internet and on television and radio, including why so many schools collapsed, and if dams in the region may have caused soil erosion.

Whether it is television, print or the Internet, there are endless stories of people living just because they ran a different direction from the rest of their family, or because someone left home on a shopping errand, only to find their home flattened and all their family killed by falling debris. Ever since the end of WWII, China and Japan have had a rocky relationship, but the dispatch of Japanese rescuers to aid the rescue process, has won significant praise and goodwill from Chinese citizens.

Maybe most interesting has been a publicly-driven drive for corporate donations of money and supplies to the earthquake victims. Sina, one of China’s three leading portals, has set up a corporate donation page which lists amounts Chinese corporations have given (minimum amount for listing: 10 million yuan or US$1.4 million). As of the afternoon of May 21 Beijing time, total corporate donations listed on the page had come to 5.58 billion yuan or US$797 million. On the Chinese Internet, netizens have been especially loud in driving corporations to donate more, and in some cases, have publicly attacked corporations for being too cheap in their donation amounts. In most cases, the criticized companies have quickly upped their donation amounts in reaction. Corporations have also looked sideways to see how much their market competitors have donated, and have matched or trumped their donations, sometimes setting off donation bid wars to win praise from the public and favorable PR.

For the past ten days, Chinese have spent most of their time glued to their TV sets or on the Internet, collecting every scrap of information about this huge human tragedy. The outpouring of emotion has been enormous. As the mourning period draws to a close, the next phase will begin, that of reconstruction. Without a doubt, the Chinese Internet will continue to play a major role.

Paul Denlinger is an Internet consultant based in Beijing who publishes his own blog at the China Vortex.

Additional Resources:

Danwei
Shanghaiist Earthquake Special Report
EastSouthWestNorth blog
China Web 2.0 Review
The China Vortex - Let’s See How Many Ways We Can Get This Wrong


http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/


http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/05/23/guest-post-how-the-chinese-internet-becomes-a-platform-for-earthquake-grief/

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Cause marketing sites

Thanks Trendcentral for this report on some recent cause marketing efforts

BURMA: IT CAN'T WAIT VIDEO CAMPAIGN,
TOMS TOURS' SHOE DROP VOLUNTEER VACATION
XBOX 360 GAMES FOR CHANGE CHALLENGE

Burma: It Can't Wait:
Kicking off this week to raise awareness and bring to light the turmoil and human atrocities that are facing the Southeast Asian country of Burma is a star studded campaign that will release a different video vignette every day this month, featuring Hollywood elite such as Will Ferrell, Jennifer Aniston, Ellen Page, Sarah Silverman and Judd Apatow, to name a few. With the hope of building a one million person movement to free imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi, and her fellow citizens of Burma, this campaign is a call to action for people all over the world to be part of a movement that could change the course of the country. While the issue is serious, the vignettes are very funny. The full campaign will live within social shopping site Fanista at BurmaItCantWait.org, where visitors also will be able to join the campaign, to watch bonus footage from the shoots, and to join Fanista, thereby allowing up to 10% of all of their entertainment purchases to be donated to the U.S. Campaign for Burma.

TOMS Tours: After popularizing the cause-driven, buy-one-give-one consumer product model, TOMS Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie's latest endeavor may just do the same for branded volunteer vacations. What started off as an outreach program to help educate and activate consumers (wherein volunteers were invited to help distribute free shoes to children living in some of the world's poorest neighborhoods) has evolved into a full-fledged travel company called TOMS Tours. Due to instantaneous popularity of the "shoe drops", interested parties must fill out an online application to be considered for one of the 15 volunteer positions. Once selected, participants pay $1800 (plus international airfare) for an otherwise all-inclusive trip, to locations such as Argentina, that combines the village visits (where shoes are distributed) with regional group activities such as hiking, wine tasting, and sightseeing.

Xbox 360's Games for Change Challenge: Microsoft has partnered with Games For Change (an organization that supports and promotes social change through game play) to kick off a global competition that challenges socially minded individuals within the gaming community to make the world a better place. The competition, which will kick off in August to coincide with the 5th annual GFC Festival in New York, is open to college students and will require them to create a game in which the goal is to combat global warming. The top three contenders will be considered as potential Xbox LIVE Arcade downloads and their "socially minded" creators will receive cash prizes. The overall winner will also be awarded with an opportunity to apprentice at Microsoft's Interactive Business division as an intern.