We all know that the Internet represents a natural fit for social and political causes. Quite a few companies and organizations have been born on the net, utilizing the direct-connect and person-to-person element to inform people in mass and mobilize activity.

I recently discovered a site (also discussed about 10 minutes into the March 8, 2009 radio show) while surfing the net that caught my eye as another good portal for sharing and spurring activity on various causes. The company is MyCauseTV.

MyCauseTV is a video platform and a social network for consumers who are passionately involved with a cause. The company is currently seeking to establish partnerships between “for-profit brands and non-profit organizations” and to build online participation from consumers. The entire dynamic is certainly a positive one, as the staff at MyCauseTV recognizes the growing importance corporate responsibility and authenticity in social causes play in consumer decision-making.

What’s more, by taking advantage of the video format, MyCauseTV enables activists to put a more personalized and visual message together that resonates with a core audience.

I have already signed up to try out the site, and though it is in the early stages – you can see there is a lot of promise. Check out my profile at: http://www.mycausetv.com/users/hackmer/.

A couple of things I did notice that you will notice as well that the folks at MyCauseTV should address:

1) I did not find an intuitive way to access my Yahoo!, Outlook or other email address book to spread my profile to my contacts or share the site. Since the community is just getting started and needs to grow (a larger community will help make it easier to establish some of the long-term strategic partnerships MyCauseTV desires), a viral / sharing component is absolutely essential. This also is not a hard thing to code into the website.

2) I had trouble uploading a photo. It could be me, but I noticed there were lots of other people without photos which makes the site look more vacant and uninteresting. If there are photo requirements, they need to be spelled out. If there is a technical glitch – it needs to get fixed. But one suggestion is that users – who may not have a photo they want to post immediately available to them – be allowed to choose from 3 to 5 default images / pictures as a placeholder for their profile. This will at least make the community’s profiles look a bit better.

3) Last comment / suggestion, MyCauseTV needs to find another source of revenue (both short-term and long-term) from Google advertising on the site. One model they might consider is to offer users the option of selecting an advertiser video to precede (and only precede) their content. This then allows the user to select a cause or company they respect and what to be associated with their content, and gives them a voice. It’s a boon for the advertiser, because it buys them some additional positive street cred. Also, it helps your advertising base understand what kinds of causes and people support which advertisers and which content. The other model, which can be run in conjunction with this, is to give users the option to pay a nominal fee to run their video without any corporate or non-profit advertising. In both cases, the company comes out ahead revenue-wise, and helps to build better engagement with the people using the site.

On the whole, I highly recommend you check out MyCauseTV

Splashed on this morning’s DrudgeReport is the story from Nicholas Carlson, BusinessInsider, about the invite the White House has sent to Twitter cofounder and CEO Ev Williams.

Apparently, Williams does not know what to say to the White House about the current economic crisis, and posted as much on Twitter (see image courtesy of BusinessInsider)



For Williams to suggest that the White House must be “really out of ideas” is either an immature remark designed to be funny, or more proof that you do not need experience to be President or the leader of one of the most popular companies in the world.

Of course, dare I point out the obvious that neither the above have viable business models and neither can demonstrate any future profitability.

Allow me to get started by offering two ideas on how the White House can get us out of this economic crisis. And in true digital age fashion – comments are not just welcomed – they are encouraged. So, let’s get started:

1) The President and his team need to stop selling panic and building demons (Bush, Limbaugh, etc), and start focusing on building hope. Confidence in markets, in the economy and in taking business risks cannot exist if every day the message is not based on what we can do to succeed.

2) We cannot spend our way out of this economic crisis. It may seem hard to fathom, but expanding the deficit by $1.5 to $2 trillion dollars has not exactly bought us very much except higher interest payments and a larger debt that you, I and our children will have to pay in the not-so-distant future. The automotive industry is still plagued by its bad decisions, over-paid workforce and out-of-whack health care benefits. If a tech company starts-up and fails, it does so because its was not meant to succeed. Sorry, but we need to let some of these companies fail and start eliminating our debt for future viability.

3) Spend less, reduce the size of government so its more agile and fuel economic growth through upper middle class tax cuts. We cannot afford to punish wealth-builders, and likewise, we cannot afford to provide additional money to people who do not currently pay taxes or who have a small tax burden.

That is my start… Your turn, America…

There seems to be concern from all sides of the American public about the lack of objective journalism in mass media, and the breakdown of the traditional wall that stood between reporters and the politicians they covered. Well, the truth is – mass media is changing.

The politicization of reporting is just an example of how media organizations are scuttling the mold of “neutral observer” and identifying more with ideologies as a means to attract specific demographics of viewers. This has tremendous advantages, but it also is contrary to the typical mass-media model. Focusing content and specialization are all traits of the digital age, something mass media does not completely fit into… at least, not in its current form.

The bottom line is – people gather information to gain insight and discern the truth. One of the most important components of that process is to know from what perspective their news is being delivered.

Of course, the dirty little secret we don’t like to tell ourselves is that mass media has always been biased. It just lacked the transparency of intent, and instead built trust on a false perception that it had no other purpose than to serve the common good. Now that their pool of consumers have more options for content, mass media has no choice. The pie is getting smaller, so the need to specialize and find a niche becomes even more critical for survival. Reporting for the masses just does not work anymore.

This is why more politicized news anchors are a good thing. They demonstrate that the system is indeed changing and changing for the better. Consumers will be better able to evaluate the news because the broadcasts will be more specialized and the reporter’s perspectives will be transparent. This will actually help restore some measure of trust in both reporters and their news organizations.

Online marketing professionals are certainly faced with a lot of challenges these days. Not only does a recession often force us to do more with less, but the growth of online users means we are fighting a tougher battle for consumers than ever before.

The number of people going online to find products, services, information and the like continues to grow strong. With each new person, a new product or service pops up to meet some demand. Since nobody waits for a company to fill a product or service void, the competition to be recognized or get noticed is getting more and more fierce.

To help emerge successful from this offensive by independent software developers and small to mid-sized companies, marketing professionals across the board are seeing a renewed emphasis on strategies around search engine optimization and search engine marketing. SEO and SEM are two relatively cost-effective approaches to expand brand recognition. When you add the use of email marketing, which, as I have written in a previous post, is still pound-for-pound, the most cost-effective method of reaching your customer base in the market today, you have a well rounded program to leverage what you already have.

But is that really good enough?

The truth of the matter is that online marketers need to build “attention-getting” content and value. All the other strategies are meaningless if you have nothing of value to draw-in the attention of your audience.

With that said, content that grabs your users attention is going to depend, first and foremost, on knowing your audience. What may interest a group of financial professionals concerned about the state of M&A during the recession is not going to be a prime target for moms searching online for an affordable family vacation. So, the first step is to survey your audience – even if informally – about what they like, and most importantly what they need. This will start you down the path to putting together content that will get their attention.

Another thing to consider is the medium you use to drive the content you create. You may have a dynamic report on the latest mobile user trends in Latin America, but how are you going to transmit that data? Are you going to push out a white paper? Post a video? Perhaps you are going to engage multiple media outlets in an all-encompassing press promotion? Perhaps it will be a combination of those three and more?

This is another area where a brief survey can help identify not just what your audience needs to know, but how they want to learn it.

In the end, content and method of distribution are a critical one-two-punch for online marketers.

The one thing I find companies miss in getting the web design process underway are the opinions of their customers.

Design, navigation, content, SEO, are all critical aspects of the process, but it all begins and ends with your customers. They are the ones you need to attract to the site in the first place. Before you hire a designer, hire someone to survey your core customers to ensure you get the total picture. You may find that they perceive your offerings differently than you do, are interested in new things, and/or have specific expectations that you were not going to meet had you just proceeded without their input.

Setting up a survey tool, or hiring some people to help collect the data is a relatively inexpensive process. Especially when you consider that you may discover you need to make changes to your strategic offerings before you are even ready to consider a website and SEO effort.

Sitting among colleagues of mine, I heard the topic of conversation change from regular work chatter to matters of the economy. The question arose, “Are we in a ‘Depression’?”

This question got me thinking last week, and even more this weekend as yet another newspaper went down for the count and talk of a “global new deal” emerged from British PM, Gordon Brown. What I started wondering was, “What is really going on?” Is this a recession, a depression, or is something more profound taking place here?

On my radio show yesterday, I concluded that what we are witnessing was an event driven more by technology than we realize, and by institutions and policies that are based or structured on the models of the industrial age and not the digital age.

Digital age strategies are based on individualization – meeting the specific needs of a person, as opposed to one cookie-cutter solution designed for everyone. They also are based on demassification as opposed to massification. In other words, the digital age ethos is that smaller, more agile entities will thrive, while larger and more bureaucratic ones will wither and eventually fade away.

So, what does this mean in context with the current economic crisis?

For starters, command and control economies are passe. However, we seemingly have not learned the lessons the failures communism and European-styled socialism brought to light. Namely, we still rely on large scale institutions to hold almost monopolistic like control, both in the public sector and the private sector, over our economic welfare. Then we act surprised when a bubble pops and the small number of large organizations the government encouraged and at times directed to make bad decisions go under. Everyone is stuck in the same pot, a collapse ensues and then everyone is scrambling around trying to do the same thing: save the system that caused the very problems in the first place.

If the digital age has shown us anything, its that going backwards to the future just will not work. The kind of “New Deal” era set of policies on a national scale (and especially on an international scale) will simply not do the job. What we need to face is that a reorder of power needs to take place. We need get smaller, more personalized and more technologically driven in our approach to solving the problems government has created today and the problems we will face going forward.