Interactive overalls - some amusing insights on making the real world interactive

Thanks Next Great Thing for this.
I love all this stuff, but what's bugging me is the transactional angle. I mean despite lacking a 'screen', a code, or not being interactive in any way, overalls are very very relevant to a bunch of people in a load of situations. So, rather then trying ot force new relevance into an old product, why not look for new, screen based ways to find and deliver our product to those who want and need it? Home renovation iphone app that helps you pick apint colours etc then sources products, including our overalls, and allows to buy them and have them delivered to your GPS location?

Thoughts?

Reviving Overalls: 6 Tips on Multi-Channel Strategy November 24th, 2008 by Allison

In this week’s New York Time’s Magazine, Benjamin Palmer (Barbarian Group), Lars Bastholm (AKQA) and Robert Rasmussen (R/GA) discussed how the proliferation of screens (big, small, PC and mobile) will affect advertising and marketing. At one point, moderator by Jack Hitt proposed a mock case study of “Jack’s Overalls,” an old-school functional clothing maker. The brainstorm that ensued grappled with how you can use all these new media channels to make overalls relevant to people today. We’re pulled out 6 top “to-dos”, along with some comments from the peanut gallery…

1) Create Relevance

Palmer: So you have to create a new market. Farming may be going away, but what’s on the rise? Right now your overalls are made with special pockets and holders for farming tools. Maybe we retool them for urban farmers, as it were, and their specialized gear. You have special pockets for your iPhone and your BlackBerry, and a pocket for your headphones, another for your wallet, your subway card, your keys.

We’ve actually seen a number of manufacturers taking this cargo-style approach like SeV’s tricked out sportswear to Thomas Pink’s iPod Tie. Guys hate carrying bags, so this is a good idea.

2) Embrace Technology

Bastholm: Let’s really take the brand into the 21st century, shall we? Why don’t we put a ShotCode on the front of every single pair of overalls. A ShotCode is like a bar code. You scan it with the camera in your cellphone. And then something comes out the other end. With bar codes, it’s a price. But with a ShotCode, it could be a song, it could be a picture, it could be a link to a Web site.

Sure to attract small contingents in NYC and San Fran and get some tech-cred, but not much potential for mainstream. Ralph Lauren recently used barcodes in marketing its Rugby line and not many people actually used it (downloading the reader was a big barrier). But hey, it looks cool.

3) Market to Niches

Palmer: But you don’t want to suddenly be seen as, like, this newfangled Internet overall company. If you’re talking to somebody who’s over 40, that’s going to freak them out, you know? So this becomes your special-edition ShotCode overalls. You place ads only on social networks, like MySpace or Flickr. Facebook users can buy the Facebook edition of these overalls. They come precoded with your Facebook page embedded as your ShotCode. But if you’re not a Facebook person, you’re never going to know about this unique brand…. It’s self-selecting, actually. The more narrowly you talk to your audience through these new screens, the more people and products will gravitate toward one another. And nobody else will necessarily know or care that that’s happening.

Great point, something we’ve thought about ourselves. Everyone doesn’t NEED to “get” it. Just the cool kids.

4) Branded Utility

Rasmussen: I would recommend a Web presence built around a utility that engages consumers and allows them to take your brand and own it. Maybe you give customers the ability to mix and match your overalls with other clothes. Maybe you create a widget that lets you drag your overalls and drop them onto an existing image. And the program blends the overalls with the outfit, so you can say, “Boom, that’s how it would look if I wore a pair of cord overalls with a blue jean jacket.”

Ah, widgets… as sick as we are of hearing about them, the man has a point. This tool reminds us of Instyle.com’s hair makeover tool and “Hair Style” in South Korea that allows users to virtually try on new hairstyles and then locate a salon near to create a similar haircut–all through their phones..

5) Sharability

Bastholm: My company developed this mobile application called Nike Photo ID, where you take a picture with your cellphone of anything and it sends you back a pair of sneakers in the two dominant colors in that picture. So maybe we create a site called Overall This. Send in a picture of somebody and get them back in overalls.

Rasmussen: Then you can post the images on your Web site. Create a gallery that shows how overalls can mesh with many styles, from metro to hip-hop to blue collar. People can comment and vote on their favorites.

We like the name of the site Overall This. Equally sigh of resignation, fightin’ words, and friendly invitation. But then we’re just suckers for wordplay.

Overall (no pun intended) some solid ideas on how to string multiple platforms and channels together to create a multi-pronged and fully integrated approach.

Living and Learning with New Media: Findings from a 3-year Ethnographic Study of Digital Youth

Thanks Futurelab for releaseing this report on young people and social media

by: danah boyd

For the last three years, I've been a part of a team of researchers at Berkeley and USC focused on digital youth practices. This project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, brought together 28 different researchers (led by Mimi Ito and my now deceased advisor Peter Lyman) to examine different aspects of American youth life. As many of you know, I focused on normative teen practices and the ways in which teens engaged in networked publics. We are now prepared to share our findings:

• Two page summary (pdf)
• White Paper - Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project (pdf)
• Book - Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out: Living and Learning with New Media

Already, write-ups of our research have hit the press:

• Teenagers’ Internet Socializing Not a Bad Thing (NY Times)
• Time online teaches kids important skills, study finds (Mercury News)
• ... and many more

Needless to say, we're excited by our research and uber excited by the coverage that we're getting. For years, we've been finding that youth do amazingly positive things with the technology that they use. Yet, during that time, we've watched as parents and news media continue to focus solely on what is negative. We're hoping that this report will help adults get a decent sense of what's going on.

For those who are only familiar with my research, I strongly encourage you to check out the report to get a better sense of the context in which I've been working. I focus primarily on "friendship-driven practices" but the "interest-driven practices" that motivate creative production, gaming, and all sorts of user generated content are tremendously important. I focus primarily on what happens when teens "hang out" but there's also amazing learning moments when they mess around and geek out with one another.

The book is currently available only in draft form but an updated print version will be available in the future. In the meantime, enjoy, and feel free to ask questions!!

Original Post: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/11/20/living_and_lear.html

Tags:

• danah boyd
• new media
• research
• social media
• teens
• young

If i started in social media today

Thanks Chris Brogan for this outline on getting started in social media
November 22, 2008

Okay, so you’ve heard from someone that this social media and social networking stuff is great and you should get involved, and it’s really going to help you out. Maybe it will help you in the economic downturn. Maybe you have heard how you can use Twitter for business. But there’s a lot to it all.

Where would you start? What would come first? How might you think about getting out there and joining in on the experience?

If I Started Today

Here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll build three different scenarios out, and give you the starting points for what I’d do with social media if I were in these steps. Try to extrapolate them out to your profession or your need. If you really want to have fun with this post, take what I’ve started here, and write your own post for your vertical or condition, and then be sure to share the ideas with us here, so we can go to your site and check it out. (We’ll even be able to visit via trackbacks, if you link back to the original post).

Before it All: Listening

(Note: this was updated after Lucretia pointed out that I probably inadvertently forgot to mention it.)

Listening is my first move in starting to understand social media. That means this: go and read the blogs that are out there. Read from different genres. Go visit Twitter.com and more importantly search.twitter.com, and see what people are saying. Read comments on people’s blogs and see which ones seem to get any response. Search using Google and Technorati.com, and start listening to conversations that are out there.

And then, start here.

First Platform: A Blog

No matter what, the very first piece of social media real estate I’d start with is a blog. It’s a website, with lots of built in features that make it useful from a search perspective, and simple from a content creation perspective. That alone is worth the price of admission.

Don’t worry as much about the features, although certain companies make blogging platforms that go above and beyond simple content publishing. Don’t focus hard on the add-ons and whizbangs, but do know that a bare bones, out of the box blog is about as appealing as two slices of bread with a piece of bologna on it.

Now, let’s break that into three potential scenarios.

Personal branding: I’d buy my own domain name, and host it somewhere inexpensive, but with good service.

Company communications: I’d use an off-brand domain, with a “powered by” mindset, similar to Digital Nomads by Dell. Meaning, I wouldn’t necessarily do a “product blog” or a “corporate voice” blog as much as I’d want to do a “something useful to people” blog. Exceptions: really big corporations with lots of bloggers, like Sun, IBM, Cisco, etc.

Nonprofit: I’d start a storytelling and pictures blog about the causes I was tasked with supporting. No question about it: stories and pictures are powerful contributors to nonprofit experiences.

For blog topics and other ideas, I’ve collected my best advice, and that should get you started there.

Second Step: Outposts

In all cases, I’d build outposts which help me reach into lots of different places and communicate with people where they might be. Depending on my needs, I might use different tools. At the very minimum, I’d start accounts on:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Facebook

I might or might not then pick one or two more specialized networks. Let’s look at how this works for our three examples.

Personal: use Twitter to build relationships and share interests. Use Facebook to learn about groups and events of interest. Keep LinkedIn active and updated, and stay involved in the answering of questions part of the site. Goal here: keep your name out there, far ahead of when you might need anything from anyone.

Company: use Twitter as a way to show that you’re humans in there. I like how Dell has several namesatDELL type accounts like RichardATDell and LionelATDell, etc. You could also just be yourself, like ScottMonty from Ford, or astrout(Aaron Strout) from Powered. Use Facebook as individuals and LinkedIn as individuals, but with a group purpose. You might participate in other people’s groups. You might find friends with like interests or similar demographics and reach out to them that way. Be human. That’s the main goal here.

Nonprofit: depending on the cause, you could either use Twitter as the cause name, or you can reach out as an individual. There are both in the field, and I’ve yet to see which is more productive. Maybe a nonprofit can comment on their experiences here. On Facebook and LinkedIn, be the individual, but form groups around your causes, and invite people who might be like minded into the groups.

With all three groups, the specific networks I mentioned at the beginning of these segments would obviously vary. One note: don’t use those tools that push your status across multiple platforms. I understand that it’s simpler to update things that way, but it also means that you don’t respect your individual audiences at those outposts.

In all cases, use your picture for the avatar, not a logo. Try to get a candid shot that’s not a stuffy professional photo, but one that isn’t a cropped picture of you next to some ex relation.

In all cases, put enough information in your profile to connote that you’re at once a business person as well as a human being. In Facebook, consider which applications you add to your profile. Yes, being a pirate or a vampire might be fun, but it might also make someone question your professional intent. But do feel free to share your interests in books or movies or sports, and make sure your status messages aren’t always and forever about your business interests, or people might be less engaged after a very short amount of time.

I also have my best advice about social networking to help you there, too.

Third Step: Audience

Once you have a primary place to express yourself (your blog), and a few outposts where you can communicate in a less structured, more real time way (outposts), the next then I would do is find like minds. It depends on your business goals what you might do with this audience, and for some people, this might not apply as much. For the three examples I gave, it would be an important thing to build a level of followership and interaction across your platforms, so we’ll cover this all as one group, not as separate goals.

My best advice about building community and audience is this: be helpful. Write blog posts that others can use (like this one, for instance). The more you can help others, the more they’ll come back.

Avoid writing “me too” blog posts about the latest news in your vertical. Chances are, someone else is doing it better, and your “me too” is just a throat-clearing proof that you’re not creating original content. Work harder on doing something original instead of just pumping out “I read this article about” types of posts, unless you’re going to expand on the ideas, and/or recast them for your particular audience.

If you’re writing for a company, maybe these blog topics will spark some ideas. If you’re writing a personal blog, here are 100 blog topics to get you started.

More important in growing a community: comment. Go out to other people’s blogs and start getting involved. Use a service like BackType to learn what other people are saying and where they’re commenting. The more you make your voice heard in the general space where you want to do business, the better you’ll be.

Note something important: you might want to think about commenting in two places. First, where your peers are writing their stuff makes sense as a place to comment, but that will only bring you into a better relationship with your peers in a space. If you want to start building business, start learning to comment on your customers’ blogs, in your customers’ verticals, where your customers are spending their online time.

Fourth Step: Experiment

If something’s not working, try something else. If you’re not using analytics and stats packages to learn more about your web visitors, you’re missing out. If you aren’t learning how these social media elements tie to your business, and you’re just using them as another isolated thing, then you’re missing the whole reason to start (for businesses, at least).

Experiment. Try new things. I try something new every day. It might be a blog post. It might be a strategy about how I can get more people to do X instead of Y. It might be something as simple as reaching out to other people in new ways. But experiment. If you just sit around doing the same things you did to start out, you might as well turn in now.

I just gave myself another idea even writing this post. That’s the power of experimenting. You learn by doing, not reading. So, read all this, but then do something.

Your Turn

What would you tell people about starting out? If you want to adapt this to your specific blogging or media making interest, what would you tell people differently? How else might you serve your community?

Or, what do you have further questions about? This would be a great post to encourage people to ask questions, and share with the rest of the larger community.

What do you need to start today?

Congratulations Motrin. You just proved why every brand needs to understand Social Media

Thanks Hard Knox life for this topliner on the current Motrin social web blunder

Are you still trying to convince your management why your brand should be monitoring Social Media? Well if you are a Consumer Packaged Good brand (or any brand really), just look at what happened to Motrin over the past couple of days and the reaction of Motrin Moms.

A simple search on Twitter of #motrinmoms will show you that they pissed off one hell of a lot of people with their latest ad around “babywearing.” Mommy Bloggers are not people you want to mess with and you sure better understand the sandbox you are playing in if you do them wrong. For instance, just look at this Consumer Generated Media that has already popped up in response. Not exactly brand content you want at the top of search results.

The Lesson for Brand Managers:

Motrin screwed up. It happens. But in today’s world of Social Media, the place they really screwed up was in not monitoring what people were saying about the brand. This PR disaster is happening underneath their nose and no one on the brand is responding. Not their advertising agency, not their Public Relations group and not the brand itself. The unfortunate fact is that company’s haven’t trained Brand Managers to respond quickly to situations like this. That needs to change….and it needs to change fast.

People are going to be talking about your brand, with or without the Brand Manager’s permission. This simple fact is reason enough that you should be monitoring the conversations around your brand. Motrin is just the latest brand to learn this lesson the hard way.

UPDATE - Well it looks like Motrin is trying to respond. If you commented on their website, it looks like their VP of Marketing has a response that is being sent out (Thanks to Amy Gates for the lead). And the Motrin.com site has been taken down for now, but thanks to the power of YouTube, you can still see the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmykFKjNpdYBill Seaver) (Thanks

5 brands that gave 'em something to talk about

Thanks imediaconnection for this post with some interesting word or mouth case studies

By Leah Messinger

Word-of-mouth marketing has become something of an art form. Check out these successful campaigns, and discover the secrets to replicating their results.

Word-of-mouth marketing (WOM) -- in which one consumer provides product or brand information to another -- has certainly been around for a long time. It's only in the age of TV, blogs, social networks, Twitter feeds and mobile texting that WOM marketing has become something of an art form

The trick is to give consumers accessing all of these media a reason to talk about a product and promote it themselves. Successful WOM marketing, according to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), is marketing that "empowers people to share their experiences. It's harnessing the voice of the customer for the good of the brand. And it's acknowledging that the unsatisfied customer is equally powerful."

Now is an especially hot moment for WOM marketing for three key reasons, says John Bell, president of the board of directors of WOMMA. First, people increasingly trust their peers more than they trust advertisers. Second, newly available social media tools mean more and more voices for WOM marketers to target. Third, and perhaps most important, social media tools make WOM measurable.

Take a look at a few examples of campaigns that did a great job of planting the seeds of conversation.

Company: Lenovo
Campaign: Voices of the Olympic Games

Computer-maker Lenovo armed 100 Olympic athletes from 25 countries with Lenovo laptops and Flip video cameras so they could blog about their experiences at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Participating athletes recorded their experiences prior to arriving in Beijing, during the games and from home after the games ended.

"The goal was to raise awareness about the new consumer platform and strengthen Lenovo's overall reputation," says Bell, whose company -- Ogilvy's 360º Digital Influence group -- worked on the campaign.

The campaign piggybacked on the popularity of a global event and relied on a variety of social media tools, including blogs (Blogspot), videos (YouTube), photo galleries (Flickr), mobile tweets (Twitter) and mobile widgets (Zumobi) to popularize the brand. The Voices campaign resulted in 1,500 blog posts with more than 8,000 comments.

Company: Fiskars
Campaign: Fisk-A-Teers

The "a-fisk-a-what?" link on the Fiskateers homepage gets right to the point:

Fiskateer. In other words, an ambassador for crafting. And for Fiskars. Why do we need ambassadors? Because we want to open the lines of communication -- to know the people who use our products. You are the ones who keep us in business. And we want to hear what you have to say about current and new products... We want to know about being a crafter/mom/working woman, and what you like about us and what you don't. We can take it, we promise.

Fiskateers is an ongoing campaign by the Fiskars company, traditionally known for its scissors, but more recently a maker of tools to meet the growing demands of rabid scrapbook hobbyists. The project relies on blogs and message boards to engage users with what Andy Sernovitz describes as "a fundamentally boring product." Sernovitz is CEO of GasPedal and adjunct lecturer in integrated marketing communications at Northwestern University.

Perhaps most importantly, through the campaign, Fiskars breaks the fourth wall by talking directly with its customers, including opening itself up to criticism. Fiskars also hosts real-world scrapbooking conventions as part of the campaign. Fiskateers.com brings in an estimated 353,000 visitors a week, according to Alexa traffic rankings.

Company: Duck Brand Duct Tape
Campaign: Stuckatprom.com

The Stuck at Prom campaign offers a prime example of how a brand can use WOM to capitalize on a trend it had nothing to do with creating. For years the DIY crafting community has been fashioning accessories and clothing from duct tape -- duct tape bracelets, duct tape wallets and eventually even duct tape prom dresses.

In 2001, Duck, a manufacturer of duct tape, decided it might as well get some publicity from the trend, so it started sponsoring an annual competition. Couples who fashioned their prom garb purely from duct tape could enter to win $3,000 for themselves and their schools.

Nineteen hundred couples have entered the contest since it first started seven years ago. Stuckatprom.com also allows users to email their friends and create T-shirts and flyers promoting their contest entries. Beyond WOM publicity, a variety of newspapers and magazines also cover the contest each year.

Company: McDonald's
Campaign: What Came First?

Many well-established brands also rely on WOM marketing, both online and off. This year, in an effort to get its customers to consider chicken a breakfast food, McDonald's rolled out its "What Came First?" campaign.

Visitors to Whatcamefirst.com (Quienfueprimero.com, for its Spanish-speaking customers) could help determine whether the chicken or the egg came first via a simulated chicken-egg dance-off. Users selected the player (chicken or egg), music and series of dance steps and watched the ensuing dance-off to see which animated character would win. Users could email their dances to friends, as well as challenge friends to a dancing duel. The campaign's web component also targeted key bloggers.

Offline, the campaign included a product sampling day, man-on-the-street interviews and live street dancing. "What Came First?" resulted in nearly 11,000 blog, video, messaging and Twitter discussions, and the free chicken sandwich sample was the "13th most Googled search term on the May 15th sampling day," according to WOMMA, which awarded the campaign its Wommie award this year.

Company: Intuit
Campaign: The Tax Rap

For a WOM campaign last year, financial software company Intuit turned to the incongruous pairing of TurboTax and has-been rap star Vanilla Ice. Ice and 500 others submitted raps about doing their taxes with TurboTax to a YouTube channel set up by Intuit for the contest. (The YouTube channel included the tagline "Just because we're experts in tax code doesn't mean we can't bust mad flow. Ahem.")

The participant with the best video was awarded $25,000; second- and third-place winners also received cash prizes. Winners of five Viewer's Choice awards received coveted cubic zirconium TurboTax bling. The combination of a celebrity spokesperson and user-generated content -- along with graphics and other media that gave consumers a sense that Intuit was in on the joke -- resulted in more than 3 million page views, more than 900 incoming links and 700 blog mentions, according to WOMMA.

So, how do you make WOM marketing work for your brand? Sernovitz advises that you stick to his 5 Ts:

Talkers. Identify the people who will do the talking for you. And remember, these people aren't always going to be your customers. They might be the mothers-in-law or the friends of the customer. Either way, they're going to be the ones starting the conversation about your product.

Topic. Unlike slogans and marketing messages, which no Joe Six-Pack is going use in real-world conversation, develop a broad topic your talkers can talk about. Lenovo's talkers could focus on how easy the company's tools made on-the-go communication; Fiskars customers can talk about how the company's products help with their favorite hobby or how much they like the community spearheaded by Fiskars.

Tools. Make sure the tools you select for spreading your message are ones that are likely to be used by your talkers. If your target audience is middle-aged bowlers, then Facebook and MySpace might not be the best places to start.

Taking part. Sernovitz warns that this T tends to scare marketers the most because it's the least familiar. "Most marketing departments are set up for one-way, outbound marketing," he says. But to get WOM to work, brands must participate in open-ended conversations on blogs and social networking sites. As the conversation grows, says Sernovitz, marketers must be willing to devote more resources to keeping it going.

Tracking. Marketers should also remember to build trackability into their campaigns. Secret discount codes in emails are extremely trackable, Sernovitz says. He adds that pretty much any action step that requires clicking or notifying others of an opportunity at the end of a WOM discussion will lead to the kinds of numbers marketers love.

Matt Moog, founder and CEO of Viewpoints Network, whose consumer review site is a WOM-based business, says it's important to keep campaigns simple and targeted. If a campaign "is barely related to your brand and doesn't do anything to reflect the product that you sell, that's not practical and sustainable," he says.

A recent example of a somewhat misguided WOM campaign comes via Ivanka Trump. Trump teamed up with Healthy Choice to promote its Fresh Mixers line, which essentially consists of MREs that can last up to a year in your desk drawer. Because when you think of eating a quick lunch at your desk, you think of... a Trump?

The campaign involves in-person appearances with Trump along with a blog she supposedly maintains at blog.alunchtrade.com. Though the campaign uses tools typical of WOM marketing, "It isn't really word of mouth," says Sernovitz. "Just because it's a blog doesn't mean it's word of mouth." Sernovitz suggests that Healthy Choice would have made a better marketing investment by focusing more on its message boards. He points out that thousands of visitors have posted on Healthy Choice's message boards, but that the company didn't get involved in those conversations. "They got the theory right, but the taking part was missing," says Sernovitz. "It just sort of faded away."

Leah Messinger is a freelance writer.

TiVo, Dominos: Broadband Never Tasted So Good

Thanks that Channel Wire for this post on TV finally getting sueful! TiVo, Dominos: Broadband Never Tasted So Good

November 17, 2008

When the moon hits your eye with a big pizza pie, thank TiVo and Dominos. Beginning today, TiVo subscribers can order pies for delivery or pick-up from the pizza maker.

Hungry viewers can order pizza when they see a Dominos ad on TiVo and click "I want that" through their remote. TiVo subscribers will be able to set-up a user name and password on Dominos.com and each time they use their TiVo remote to place an order, they can log-in via their account number.

Through the TiVo/Dominos interactive system, subscribers can also create a custom pizza from television and select types of crusts, toppings and sauces. Users can also track pizza delivery timing. The companies promise that pies will be delivered in 30 minutes. The new service is free and payable in cash upon pizza delivery.

The new service gives new meaning to the term couch potato, and in fact, the companies' marketing executives refer to the service as "couch commerce."

"Joining forces with Domino's Pizza creates an effective marketing and commerce tool for Domino's while enhancing and further distinguishing TiVo as the ultimate way to watch TV with a closed-loop advertising experience," said Karen Bressner, Tivo's senior vice president of advertising sales, said in a statement.

Or, as Bressner put it, the deal is an "advertising solution as commercial avoidance continues to increase."

So, get the door, get the scale, its Dominos

Top Mobile Trend: Mobile Giving

Thanks Next Great Thing for this on Mobile giving. Who says gen Y are a bunch of self-obsessed, navel gazing shifters?

November 17th, 2008 by Allison

Gen Y is often called “socially-conscious,” but they’ve also been tagged with “impatient,” “distractible,” and—like most youth—a bit “poor”. After throwing virtual change at Obama for a year, though, young philanthropists seem to be in the swing of giving. The Democrats just made it so easy; they didn’t even have to leave Facebook! They also rallied young supporters at events to text in small donations. This method of giving works for youth because it’s very impulsive—like them—so the donor barrier is lowered significantly. Now we’ve noticed a handful of new charity platforms looking to quite literally “mobilize” this young civic-minded generation.

This new trend hinges on the work of the Mobile Giving Foundation, which effectively eliminated the “carrier barrier” to mobile charity. Previously, carriers would take a big chunk (HALF!) of every donation. Combined with a cap of $5 donation per text (with a max of 5 texts = $25), the model was completely unfeasible. Now MGF has positioned themselves as a clearinghouse, managing to get fees waived for select non-profits so 90% of the donation goes to the charity, while they take 10%. The only stickler is Verizon, which only approved about 20 non-profits on its network.

Several application service providers are working with MGF to help non-profits run and manage their campaigns across platforms, while other companies are reimagining donation models to work on mobile.

• mGive from Mobile Accord allows micro donations via text with carrier billing through MGF. Alicia Keyes used this text-to-donate platform during her As I Am concert tour, asking her fans to text the word ‘ALIVE’ to shortcode 90999 to donate $5. Her effort raised $40,000 in donations for Keep a Child Alive.

• MobileCommons helps non-profits, advocacy and political groups create, manage and report on SMS communication campaigns. Campaigns are already learning how to engage women through mobile technology. Using MC technology, the Women’s Campaign Forum obtained 150 nominations of pro-choice women who should run for elected office via text message for its She Should Run program in about five minutes (more on it here).

• CredoMobile is an MVNO that builds giving right into their revenue model. They started back in 1985 with a long distance service where 1% of your charges went to progressive nonprofits of your choice. As they put it “your bill serves as a progressive newsletter and your phone company as a progressive lobby.” Now they’ve switched to mobile and to date, the company and its members have donated more than $60 million to NPOs. The company raises money–and awareness–for voter registration. Last year they staged political street theater using projected cartoon images on the sides of buildings drawn by political satirist Tom Tomorrow. Passerby could text dialogue inside the thought bubbles of Bush and Cheney.