Slaktivism : Awareness or Useless?

“Slaktivism” is a term coined in the early 2000′s that generally means: the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem.⁽¹⁾ In other words, doing something easy that makes “you” feel good rather than doing something that might actually help. Last week a campaign on Facebook started to help raise awareness about child abuse. The goal was to have everyone change their Facebook avatar to a cartoon character. Generally these types of campaigns see limited support, but the combination of a worthy cause and an opportunity for adults to revisit memories of their childhood made the avatar switch an event with the potential to accomplish something.

Call To Action

With any marketing attempt one of the most important aspects is a clear call to action. In this campaign the call to action was vague at best, except for the changing of a profile avatar. The stated goal was to “raise awareness” of a difficult subject, child abuse.  This left me wondering, how effective would simply changing your avatar be at preventing child abuse? Or even make more people aware of it? With the way some of the conversations turned on Facebook, I had to wonder if the abuse heaped on people for doing nothing more than “just” changing their avatar, I admit to doing it a bit, was justified or if this now viral action was actually having a positive effect.

PreventChildAbuse.Org

Quite a few people were declaring the entire event a useless waste of time. I spotted @sugarrae on Twitter giving to preventchildabuse.org and challenging everyone else to do the same. In a moment of clarity I agreed, sent in my donation and began a campaign across Facebook and twitter challenging others to do the same. On Tuesday I began to wonder, did this moment of slaktivism really make a difference? Or were we really just tilting at windmills making ourselves feel good without actually doing anything meaningful.

I talked with Ben Tanzer at PreventChildAbuse.Org and put the question to him, did this avatar changing drama on Facebook make a difference that they had noticed? While he only had anecdotal data at this point, Ben informed me that they were seeing an estimated 4x boost in donations over the last week. Four Times. Let me say this again, FOUR TIMES their normal donation levels. Ben also pointed me to their blog where they had posted about how they viewed the event.

Awareness Equals Branding

One of the things we preach as marketers is that building your brand is one of the most important things you can do for your business or organization. Anything that you can do to build awareness for your organization improves your brand, even slaktivism. While this may be a unique situation, it may just as easily be the norm for viral slaktivism. Can your organization benefit from a viral campaign like this? Anecdotal evidence says definitely.

So the next time you see a silly campaign happening on Facebook, or any of the social sites, don’t pass it off as a waste of time, study it and and see how you can use a similar campaign to build awareness for you and your brand.

Posted in Cause Marketing, Viral Marketing | 1 Comment »

SEO Podcast

I’ve been one of 4 regulars on the SEO Dojo Radio Podcast since episode #1 along with great SEOs like David Harry, Terry Van Horne and Justin Parks.

Most episodes we have a guest interview with an SEO or marketing professional, discuss the latest issues in SEO and rant about the latest idiocy on the net. You can listen to the show on the SEO Dojo Podcast web site or you can subscribe to us on iTunes by searching for SEODojo in the iTunes store.

Take a listen and let us know what you think. But be warned, this show is not really kid friendly, Justin and Terry tend to swear a lot.

Posted in SEO | What Do You Think? »

SEO Breadcrumbs for OpenCart

OpenCart is one of the more popular open source eCommerce systems available. We use it here for many of our clients and like most aspects of it. One of it’s failings, however, is the lack of attention to clean URLs in the breadcrumb structure.

Fortunately this is a relatively easy fix.

As installed, the Home link in the breadcrumb navigation is the rather unweildy /index.php?route=common/home instead of pointing to the clean URL of your choice.

You will need to edit the following pages:

• /catalog/controller/category.php
• /catalog/controller/manufacturer.php
• /catalog/controller/product.php
• /catalog/controller/search.php
• /catalog/controller/special.php

Find the following code in each file:

$this->document->breadcrumbs[] = array(
‘href’      => HTTP_SERVER . ‘index.php?route=common/home’,

Replace it with this code:

$this->document->breadcrumbs[] = array(
‘href’      => HTTP_SERVER . ‘http://www.domain.com’,

Obviously you will need to enter your domain name.

This small change will go a long way toward cleaning up your URL structure and reduce the potential impact of having the Search Engines finding what they see as duplicate content.

Posted in OpenCart, SEO, eCommerce | 1 Comment »

World Records the New Viral Marketing

Over the last few years viral marketing, leveraging social networks in an effort to drive large amounts of traffic to your web site in a short amount of time, has become one of the hottest marketing tactics. Unfortunately for every 1,000 attempts at viral marketing one may succeed. We have seen some brilliant ideas that were stunningly successful, others that just left us shaking our heads wondering what just happened.

The biggest weakness in viral marketing is finding a topic that will actually go viral. Sometimes the best ideas go nowhere while some random thing on the net goes absolutely nuts. The second biggest weakness in viral marketing is that you can often leave your potential customers wondering what they are supposed to do after they see your video or event or whatever you did that went viral. So, how do you find a topic that fits you?

Go for a world record

The folks over at Guinness are the go to guys when it comes to world records. They currently track a few thousand world records and are always willing at accept new record attempts. All you need to do is find a record you can break, or invent a new record to attempt and get started.

Gourmet Gift Baskets tied together two very marketable ideas and have just set a new world record as I type this. Their goal is to break the old world record of largest cup of coffee by more than doubling it from 911.5 gallons to 2010 gallons of fresh brewed coffee. That’s more than 32,000 cups of coffee. Additionally, the goal is to support Susan G. Komen for the Cure by selling cups of coffee and opportunities to be photographed with the world’s largest cup of coffee.

Of course they haven’t done this alone, there are plenty of corporate sponsors helping make this happen. And the event is taking place at Blog World Expo, one of the largest conventions for bloggers, so it is getting plenty of exposure all across the net.

Make it easy for me

So how do you kick off your own viral marketing world record attempt?

1. find or create a record you can actually break
2. find corporate sponsors to cover the parts that you can’t cover yourself
3. tie the attempt in with a charity or event that already has national exposure and a large fan base
4. promote the attempt early and often using twitter, facebook, blogs, tv (local news), radio (local radio stations), and anything else you can think of
5. invite local and internet celebrities to participate
6. finally, get the record

With the right record, event, and charity, you can turn this attempt in to a marketing home run while doing some good at the same time. And you might even be able to get other people to pay you to do it if you market it right.

Posted in Marketing, Viral Marketing | What Do You Think? »