Epic Change, and Engaging People Online as a Charity

Recently while browsing online, I came across a fantastic charity called Epic Change that I felt needs to have its word spread to those who haven’t yet come across it. It is a charity that is behind many successful American Social Media Campaigns such as Tweetsgiving and others. They use a very similar engagement process for all their projects, which is way too cool to be kept a secret, thus I wanted to spread the word for what they’re doing.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Epic Change’s Mission in their word: Epic Change amplifies the voices and impact of grassroots changemakers and social entrepreneurs.
Epic Change collects donations from people like you and I, and put this into communities with lack of resources to give people the opportunity to utilize their skills to come up with an entrepreneurial idea in their area, using the micro loan given to them by Epic Change.
As an online-operating project, you can bet that the majority of your donation will actually be going toward those loans!

An inspiring story of Epic Change’s $35,000 impact on a School in Tanzania can be found here - I was totally sold on the idea after reading this – what an amazing opportunity to help a community, as well as give them the opportunity to have a ‘story’ to share for the rest of their lives.

Now to go a step further, I want to dissect Epic Change’s process as an organisation, because it really is a fantastic one that utilizes four basic principles that are valuable for any non-profit, or even business organisation who want to achieve success online.

Epic Change’s 4 Step Process

Step 1: Raise Money
First of all, after reading all about the amazing work Epic Change or their project is doing, they ask for a donation. They make it easy by allowing you a number of online and offline ways to donate, and in some cases will actually spell out what influence exactly your amount will have on those they are helping.

Step 2: Make a Change
This goes on from Step 1 – they actually tell you how your donation will influence others. In the example of Epic Change’s actual website, they are very transparent that your funds will go towards giving out loans to help those wanting to create positive change within communities. How cool is that! You’re contributing to business growth just by doing a good deed. It’s based on the ‘teach them how to fish’ principle, and boy, is that powerful when you know your funds are going towards something.

Step 3: Share the Story
By donating, you are becoming part of the story that you can pass on. It’s a feel-good factor that your donations are contributing to the success of others.

Step 4: Pay it Forward
Become a part of history! Some of Epic Change’s projects offer you the option to spread the word through your networks online by a one-click action that will send out a message to say you’re supporting the cause. What more would you want – a whole army of people that are your personal supporters out there to their networks. How cool!

So are you using the four step process in your Social Media? Give it a try…you never know what might come out of it!

Social Media: Online vs. Offline

Time and time again, business owners enquire about why Social Media is right for their business.
Let’s get this straight: you went into business because you have a product, service, or even a gift to help others. Am I right? I hope so. The business aspect of running this wholesome goal I to make money, right?

The logic continues…in order to make money, you need to have customers. And how will customers find out about you? Some businesses invest in advertising through magazines, newspapers, newsletters – a small ad on page 3, in home that the phone will start ringing off the hook, right? Well what if I told you that for the very same price, you could be on the front page of every top newspaper or magazine with an instant engagement tool? Social Media makes this possible. The only difference is that the money you’d be investing will be translated into time. I know – not everyone has time – as business people, as a good friend and colleague speaker Tony Ryan once said, we only have 28 hours in a day. So how can you make this happen?

I won’t go all evangelistic on you about the benefits of Social Media, or how much success it can bring you. But the point I really want to bring across is that you can engage people more when you’re talking one-on-one. The most powerful marketing tactic they say is word of mouth, and there is some great truth in this – people want to buy from people they trust – you must have heard this a million times. So as a person in business, how could you start a conversation with someone, to build the trust you need for them to take that step and buy from you? We don’t have time to become best friends with all our potential clients, but think of the online world as a place where people like you and I are on every single day and they might actually be in need of something that you’re offering. All you need to do is tap into a conversation with them – just start talking to them. The easiest way to do this is to talk about something relevant to them. Perhaps you’re a café owner, and you go onto Twitter and see a whole string of updates of people that have gone on and said something like ‘Gosh I just had the worst coffee at *insert your competitor’s name here*’. This is your perfect cue! ‘Hey, have you tried our coffee? Might be a way better experience!’ is all you need to reply to them, and from there…who knows, maybe they might visit your café and you get another customer, maybe they will start up a conversation with you, but at the very least, they will see you’re making an effort to improve their coffee experience. This might be all you need to do to build that trust.

At the risk of sounding like the used car sales-man, people want to know what else is out there; we all love our options, so look at it as your way of helping people find other options.

Let’s look at some of the traditional methods of marketing, and how this could be replicated online with less time, and more importantly, less investment on your behalf.

Putting up a big sign outside your business
This might be a good idea for Google Maps the next time they come around the street your business is on, but the only way people are going to see it is if they’re in the area. The way you can replicate this online is to associate your business with where you are geographically. Instead of naming your Facebook Business Page as ‘Brad’s Restaurant’, why not go a little further and enter your address details into the ‘Info’ section on the page, or perhaps even re-name your Facebook Page name to: ‘Brad’s Restaurant: home of the best pizza on Brazil Street’. Now we’re talking.

Advertise on a billboard or in a local newspaper
If you’re advertising in a publication that specializes in a local area, why not go online and find forums, or networks of people in that area? Perhaps your target market are people in the Wellington area; go onto Facebook, or find Twitter lists that are for people in the Wellington region; voila! You have people in that particular area, and you can single them out, direct market, and advertise to them through the channels they are used to online.

Putting out flyers
Flyers take quite a bit to print. Bring those costs down by going out there and do a direct marketing campaign! Going back to Facebook, go online and search for networks of people in a particular area, or with particular interests – Facebook is so huge, that it’s likely you will come across a group of people that, for example, have created a group along the lines of ‘What is the best rest-home in the X region?’…or ‘Soccer Moms Unite’…it’s all possible!

Most importantly, these online vs. offline marketing is all going in the direction of direct marketing: the way marketing should be. If you don’t know who your target market is, it’s time to go back to the drawing board, because just by putting up a large billboard in your town, won’t be bringing in thousands of customers overnight – because you’re trying to market to a mass amount of people, without any personalization to them. Go online; go straight to the source – the right people who actually need your product or service. You definitely can’t go wrong there.

Benefits of Using Facebook & Twitter

Time and time again, business courses, workshops, general media and people are going on about using Social Media for business.
People are pretty much sold on the benefits of it, but are still unsure – what is my ROI? What will I get out of it? How do I know this is beneficial for my business?

Simply speaking, Social Media is merely another platform for your brand to be seen by the public. Just like newspaper and TV advertising, Social Media is a medium for promoting what you do, and letting people know of the benefits you can bring their current situation.

At the same time, Social Media also doubles as a networking tool. Think about how much time you currently spend talking on the phone, replying to e-mails, networking at events, and any other ways you use to socialize and network for your personal and business use. To really make Social Media work for you, you’d need to invest the same amount of time you currently spend networking, and do it through social networks.

Social Media gives people the opportunity to combine marketing strategies with networking into one. The nature of Social Networking helps you network, and when coupled with basic marketing principals, it can fully succeed no matter what way you need it to. The way to market on Social Media is to spend time on there. Unlike setting up a billboard and have it bring value to each person who sees it, you need to bring that value with individual comments, joining in with discussions, being forward enough to introduce yourself to potential clients, and bringing value by sharing links to articles, products and services you recommend.

So what ARE the benefits of using Social Networking Sites like Twitter and Facebook?

Engage with your target market. Through the power of Social Media, it’s all about the amount and quality of content you produce and share with your target audience. The relevance to your audience and value you produce makes sure you are positioned to be as much of an expert in your field as your words portray. The amount of content you produce gives you the advantage to make sure your audience never forget about you, but also as we all know, we all have our own lives and people just aren’t sitting at their computer waiting for your next update, so you need to make sure you catch them when they finally do get round to logging onto their social networks. So that’s where the repetition and amount of time you keep putting yourself out there will amount to valuable engagement with your target market.

Getting straight feedback. Sure it may sometimes be from the general public, but it’s very valuable information for you to obtain about how others perceive your services and benefits of doing business with you through the internet.

Instantly reaching out to your potential clients. The beauty of the internet is that the entire world, news, advice and events can be uploaded and circulated instantly. As soon as you have any new press releases, or content to share, upload it! The benefit of the internet is that it has the power to update the world about events as they happen. Once something happens and you wait until tomorrow morning to report on it, chances are it won’t be as current or someone else would have taken the space of being ‘the first reporter’ of the happenings.

Get the inside scoop about your industry. Social Media is public. And that can be a good thing. This means you can find out valuable information about your competitors, and any current events or news happening within your industry. This can also be a great opportunity to tie in popular current events with the relevance of your work. A friend of mine races Suzuki Swifts, and he loves the singer Taylor Swift, so he called his car ‘Taylor The Swift’ and made a Facebook Fan Page for it. So when the big mishap happened at the Music Awards when Kanye West interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech, everyone around the world of all ages were talking about how unfair this was on Taylor, people were searching the internet for the video clips, opinions, forums and pages about this event. Coincidentally, although for most people a race car driver wasn’t going to be of interest, because of the amounts of people searching the name ‘Taylor Swift’ guided their Google searches to my friend’s ‘Taylor the Swift’ Facebook Page. Almost overnight, his Fan page grew from about 100 of his friends and fans to about 700 fans. That’s a 600% increase! How would you like to increase your target, pin-pointed audience online by 600%?

Raise awareness of your brand. Through your involvement in Social Media, you have the power to not only connect and engage your target audience, but by doing so, you will also be raising the awareness of your brand. Of course we can’t all be McDonald’s with the yellow arches, but we can certainly try become the expert in our industry through the value of our content we produce and share with our online audience. Just make sure you’re including your website, logo, and anything else that will give your brand association with your name online, so when people say ‘Eva-Maria’ online now, if they are within my target audience and don’t necessarily know my name, they will at least be able to identify with my bestselling book’s title ‘You Shut Up!’ because I always make sure I’m consistent with my subject, brand and content.

Promote your Content. Once you write anything – a press release, article, blog post or update on your life, use your social networks to update the rest of the world. By keeping in constant touch with people online, you’re ultimately building awareness of your being, expertise and important-ness online.

What would it take to convince you to get onto those Social Networks?

Social Networking: Our Future?

From the GrownUps Column that can be found here

Social Networking has exponentially grown in popularity since I started this column. Although some of my entries are to do with the young people of today, I think there are many parallels between the online world and the way younger generations are growing up in the 21^st century; after all, they, or should I say we, are indeed the product of what technology has created. And what technology has created is a fast-paced, never-still, ever-changing world that surprises us every single day.

I remember when the iPhone first came out, and a speaker from the US was speaking at a workshop I was sitting in on. At the end of the talk, he went on to give a couple of points about why people in business need to get onto the new technologies and embrace them. I was not impressed; “Isn’t that obvious to these people in suits?” I thought. I was even less impressed when he took out his iPhone, and went on to show the audience a new app where you can tilt the phone and it makes it look like the phone is a glass with drink disappearing. A teenager at the time, I was most of all un-impressed by how easily these ‘adults’ were impressed. I had heard of this new drinking app, but there are definitely more impressive things in the world, surely.

What I’m trying to get at is not that young generations are not easily amused; it’s that the world in all its fast speed is constantly coming up with new inventions and discoveries for the potential to do something better; to amuse people more and more. It’s not impressive to have a touch-screen phone anymore. If anything, speaking from my own experience, I’m hating my new touch screen phone. I need a phone to call and TXT; I don’t want all the weird gadgets on there…necessarily, and get very restless when a TXT takes longer than a split second to open up on my screen. That’s the reality.

But here comes my biggest point:
Social Media has brought people closer. What we couldn’t do 20, 10 or even 5 years ago is available at our fingertips. I never try to be an evangelist for the online world – there are many things it cannot replace, but for what it’s worth, it has made some things attainable. Think meetings. I’m on the National Executive of the National Speakers Association. We have a meeting every month. It would take a large collective investment to fly everyone to one city, but the Association can use the pool of knowledge from people from all over the country by having a Skype conference. People have meetings from all around the world over the internet, I can coach people about relationships with their teens, or about how to use Social Media for their business over the internet; years ago, we couldn’t even dream of doing business deals without meeting someone in person, but it’s possible.
Social Media isn’t all about how many Skype conversations you can have; it can serve a higher purpose: to connect. Connect with your existing, future and potential clients, family members; anyone. It’s about starting a conversation.

Imagine you’re at one of those networking events, standing in a corner and everyone seems to have some sort of natural link, but you. Enter the online world; you can butt into any conversation, put in your two cents about a topic, or person, and it’s normal. You don’t need to be the awkward freak of nature trying to ease your way into the conversation; online, it’s a GOOD thing to butt into conversations, compliment people, and all the rest.

Of course the how-to of engaging with people online isn’t something you can break down in a few words, but when you start with the ‘why’ when you sit down at a computer, ready to take on the social media world, just keep your goal in mind – is your goal to connect and network with potential client? Is it to keep in touch with existing clients or relatives? Is it to make new friends or find a soulmate?

Just keep the end goal in mind, and everything will come from there.

Google Plus…the future…?

Recently, I’ve been bombarded by invitations to join the Google Plus social network. There’s been a lot of talk around how Google is trying to conceive ‘the new Facebook’, and even rumours that Google is thinking of partnering with Facebook because they’ll never be able to re-create the revolutionized social networking aspect that Facebook has created to date.

What are your thoughts? Have you tried it? Are Google trying to be wannabes, or is this really going to revolutionize the way we view social networking?

Comment on my video below, or on YouTube

Get your Business Social-Mediazed!

Although I’m a huge advocate for Social Media, but at the end of the day, it’s merely a marketing platform, and just like you, as a business, don’t visit every business networking event, your business also doesn’t need to be on every social networking site, so here’s a few tips to help you be as productive as possible in your online ventures:

- Have a reason. Sit down and ask yourself: what do I hope to achieve through social media? Is it to drive traffic to my site? Or will I get more business by sharing articles and links that will be useful to my potential clients and become a trustworthy brand by being an information hub?

- Do your research. Numbers are available everywhere – as a business, take a look at the social media sites that attract your demographic, and use those. If you’re a business selling office chairs to large corporates, your primary audience won’t be found on Bebo, which is made up of the Gen Y & Z audience with a passion for socializing with their age group.

- Find time. Social Media can become daunting if you get stuck on checking your profile every time a new alert comes into your inbox. Set aside, say, half an hour every Monday morning to reply to messages and update your personal/business page and stick to it.

- Automate it. A couple of useful tools our clients love are ping.fm and futuretweets.com. Ping lets you update all your social networks at once with the same message. Say you’ve done your half an hour of updating on Monday but come Tuesday and an important press release just appeared in a local paper about your company. You can log onto Ping and send a link to update all your profiles without logging onto each one individually. FutureTweets is a great partner for businesses on Twitter - you can schedule a series of tweets to go out to your Twitter audience at different days and times. Free, quick and easy!

And if you need any extra consulting, or a full-time person to do everything to get your business social-mediazed for success, let us know – our team of Social-Media savvy youth are ready to add success to your business exposure and profits.

Catch you soon,
Eva-Maria
eva@socialnetworkingnz.co.nz
www.socialnetworkingnz.co.nz

....WOW technology's gone far! For the video version of this blog post, watch it here:

Social Media in New Zealand

I've just been told I'm a Social Networking Expert :O And funnily enough, here's my latest project: Successful Social Media in New Zealand:

http://www.eva-maria.co.nz/page/snstart/default.asp

Get on it.

Un-Impressed by Social Networking

My regular Agony Aunt Column for teachers in NZ schools came across an interesting case last night, and I thought to share this very interesting exchange with you!

Dear Eva-Maria

I'd like to know your views on the latest scandals about social networks and how this is negatively impacting schools. We all know with new age comes change, and this generations' it's unfortunately the opportunity to hide behind a computer screen and write anything they want about the people who truly care about them - their teachers. You've grown up in this age Eva-Maria - what do you think - is it fair our students are allowed to post such public and hurtful comments for the entire world to see?

Un-impressed

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Dear Un-impressed

Do you remember a teacher you didn't like, and you felt you may have to tell your friends about your frustrations too?

Social networking = same thing, except online.

Whether there is a social network or 'group' dedicated to something bad about a school or teacher, it does NOT make any more or less students feel this way. There are always different
people, different teachers, different students. The internet has given people all over the world an environment and an opportunity to voice their opinions, but this doesn't necessarily convert
people. It may bond together the like-minded, but that could happen in real life too if the internet didn't exist. I find the same mind-boggling thing with adults who won't put their photo up on the internet because they're scared someone will steal their identity or something. Realistically, these people leave their house, and any person passing them, if they wanted to, could take a photo of them and steal their identity. Putting a photo up online is just as dangerous as leaving your house!

The main point is to use the internet for positive purposes. If you're annoyed at all the hate groups online, make an 'I Love My School' group! Like-minded people will join you, and you will be making a positive impact in the internet world - impacts will be made through the internet - it's up to you if you're going to contribute to them in a good or bad way! "Be the change you want
to see in the world" - famous words of Mahatma Gandhi, and I cannot agree more.

But bottom line, no; I'm not impressed either because students should respect their teachers. Perhaps this whole social networking business is a point you can raise at your next class - what are their views on this? You both have alot to learn, and a different point of view to see from each other - they may just surprise you!

Trust Your Future - it depends on you too!

Eva-Maria

To see more Agony Aunt Columns, or perhaps ask your own question
you'd like answered, click here!


So what are your thoughts on Social Networking?