THIRD SCREEN: Mobile Voter Launches SFVote Campaign

From PDF:

Mobile Voter, the newly formed non-profit dedicated to providing voter registration information via mobile technology, launched their first campaign SFvote yesterday. In collaboration with the Chinese American Voter Education Committee (CAVEC) SFvote hopes to register voters using a text-messaging service developed by Mobile Voter founders Ben Rigby and Bart Cheever.

This is good stuff. Nonprofits and advocacy groups are notoriously un-creative when it comes to creative content, so mobile information services may be the best entrée for groups to get members and advocates on the mobile bandwagon.

MICROSITE VIRAL: Crony Jobs

Simple, clever and timely effort from the folks at Whitehouse.gov.

OPEN SOURCE MARKETING: AdAge Jumps On The Train

Good open-source marketing article from AdAge.

I think the point missed so often in these discussions is that the open-source movement does not represent a fundamental shift in what people believe in or what they want or expect from a product or service. Experts talk about open-source as a societal sea change where every consumer now feels they own your brand and is compelled to have a hand in marketing it. That’s crap in my book. That would smack of effort and damn it if we Americans have the time or energy to give a hoot on that level. We want information delivered just like we want our products delivered: in a convenient and tasty package. The open-source movement is more about the arrival of new channels and representatives of influence that can serve to compliment or undermine the traditional institutions of influence, not supplant them. Marketing is still a game of matching products and services to consumers through hubs of information and influence, there are just new channels to consider in the mix.

As the article mentions, transparency and feedback are important with open-source, but they have always been an important component of brand success. The only thing new under the sun is that your success or failure at addressing and accounting for them is now measurable. This represents a huge opportunity, not a threat. Not only can you now measure your brand efficacy quickly across these new channels, you can measure it on the cheap. That’s the real revolution in my book.

VIRAL: Bush Sings!

Via Boing Boing...
Amazing! Someone has mixed Bush audio clips so he's singing on a mash-up of “Imagine” and “Walk On the Wild Side.” Listen to the sweet, sweet stylings of 43. Also available, Bush sings "Sunday Bloody Sunday."

CAMPAIGNS: Taxation Without Representation Field

The buzz czar, John Hlinko, is back with a new grassroots campaign that is getting some serious buzz around the basepaths and the beltway. Be sure to check out the site, give some cash to the cause, and as Mr. Hlinko would say, "tell 10,000 of your closest friends."

The Nationals are coming to town...
...but apparently, DC is having trouble finding a company to pay for the naming rights, and hadn't even received a single offer in writing – until now. We have officially submitted the first written offer for a new name:"Taxation Without Representation Field at RFK Stadium" Think of it. Every time we enjoy the national pastime here in DC, we'll remind America that we lack another national tradition – democracy.

MEMBERSHIP: The Perfect Cultivation Email?

Mark Rovner got what he calls "the perfect cultivation email" from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Membership Department. Mark says it's "simple, clear, engaging, and involving":

Dear Mr. Rovner,
After careful consideration and planning, we removed the white shark from the Outer Bay exhibit early this morning and released her in the open waters just outside Monterey Bay at 5:45 a.m.

Two factors led to this decision. First, the shark was rapidly approaching a maximum size and weight at which she could be safely removed, transported and released with full confidence that she would thrive. Second, aquarists observed a marked change in her behavior over the past week of what they considered to be active hunting of other exhibit animals and they became substantially more concerned about the well-being of the other fishes.

She was not released because of any injury or health problem. At the time of her release, she was 6'-4" long and weighed 162 pounds. That means she grew more than a foot in length and gained 100 pounds in her six months on exhibit. She was healthy and strong when she swam away from the boat. We expect her to quickly adapt to hunting and feeding on natural prey. An electronic tag was attached to allow us to track her movements.

The decision to release her into the outer Monterey Bay is based on suitable water temperature and turbidity conditions. It is supported by research from tagging and tracking data about the movements of other young white sharks indicating that they inhabit our offshore waters.

We're proud of the fact we were able to keep this shark for more than six months and then release her safely back to the wild. You should be proud too as a member of the first aquarium ever to accomplish this. During the time she was here, we developed a better understanding of how best to collect, take care of and ultimately release a juvenile white shark.

Thank you for supporting our efforts to learn more about white sharks and to heighten public awareness about the threats facing shark populations worldwide.

For more information, please visit www.montereybayaquarium.org

Sincerely,
The Monterey Bay Aquarium Membership Department

Our mission is to inspire conservation of the oceans.

VIRAL: People Love To Send Holiday E-Greetings

Media Post has a story by way of media head-counter, Nielsen, about the popularity of e-greetings cards this last St. Patricks Day.

Suprisingly, this year consumers were almost as likely to send an e-greeting on St. Patrick's Day as on Valentine's Day, Nielsen//NetRatings reported this week. Driven by St. Patrick's Day cheer and good spirits, e-greeting card sites jumped 63 percent week-over-week for the week ending March 20, Nielsen found. That week the e-greeting card category drew over 5.1 million unique visitors, reaching more than 4.6 percent of active Netizons--not bad, considering that this year's Valentine's Day holiday week drew 6.2 percent of all active home Web users to e-greetings sites.

E-postcards are a simple way to get fans of your site to invite lots of new people to your site and your issue. Viral! Why not ride the holiday e-greeting wave and offer and promote unique message-centric e-postcards for all the major and semi-major holidays? (Even daylight savings is becoming a minor holiday celebrity according to some marketers.) Just a minor creative investment could yield some solid returns.

PRIVACY: The Race To Replace The Cookie

A JupiterResearch study recently found nearly 40 percent of web users clear cookies from their machines on a regular basis. The study sent shockwaves through online marketing, analytics and ad technology vendor communities and started the race to build a better cookie. An article today in Clickz introduces us to the the potential of the "Flash cookie."

This is entirely the wrong approach to the cookie problem. For the consumer the issue of cookies and tracking technology is not an inconvenience issue, it is part of a larger online privacy issue. They don't want a technology that embeds itself in their computer and records their behavior as they move about the web. For many consumers this type of "stalk-nology" is akin to rifling through their trash or eavesdropping on a private phone conversation, so they remove it.

Consumers are telling marketers that cookies are unwelcome and by refusing to listen to this loud and clear message the industry is inviting trouble. By trying to out-sneak the consumer with Flash cookies marketers run the risk of driving online customers offline or driving an expensive spy vs. spy subversion technology race. Or worse, they run the risk of inviting Congress to jump into the fray with a reactionary piece of privacy regulation that kills the online marketing industry.

The challenge is to find a solution that leaves marketers and privacy conscious consumers happy, but that isn't going to happen unless marketers invite consumers to the table to help figure it out. A recent DMNews commentary on marketing and privacy by Chet Meisner warns,

“every industry that uses consumer data needs to immediately treat this as a problem to solve, not just an annoyance to overcome. We should rally around the privacy advocates and offer to help them in any way we can.”

The online marketing industry would be wise to understand this and begin the privacy dialogue soon before the consumer backlash begins.

DONOR LISTS: Schiavo Donor List Allowed To Die?

Yesterday we mentioned the NYT story about the Schiavo donor list being sold. It looks like the negative attention from the Times story may have caused Response Unlimited to look deep into their direct marketing soul and reevaluate their ghoulish behavior...or maybe they just decided to stop crowing about selling the list until after Terri has died.

Broker Removes Schiavo List From Catalog
A list of donors to a fund set up by the parents of Terri Schiavo apparently was no longer advertised in a catalog of lists from broker Response Unlimited as of yesterday after a report in The New York Times. Response Unlimited had advertised the Terri Schindler-Schiavo Foundation Active Donors list as early as March 15. An ad on the broker's Web site had offered 6,198 2005 donor names and 4,439 opt-in e-mail addresses. As of yesterday, a link to the ad found through a Google search led to a page that stated, "This list is not a managed property of Response Unlimited, contact for details." A call to Response Unlimited president and founder Philip Zodhiates was not returned yesterday. [ DMNews ]

CAMPAIGNS: AFL-CIO Takin' It To 'The Street'

March 31 the AFL-CIO is organizing marches and rallies in more than 70 cities at the offices of Charles Schwab, Wachovia, and other Wall Street firms to urge them to withdraw support for Bush's Social Security privatization plan. Go AFL-CIO!!

The secret to campaign success is all about gaining leverage over your foe. Too often activist organizations get stuck playing political pong with faxes and emails to Reps offices. These days it takes serious volume to get a member of Congress quaking at the site of emails or faxes from an issue group. And a campaign organized around emailing or faxing your Rep just doesn't have the viral/harvesting sex appeal it once did. Maybe it's time to take a new look at the breadth of your issue and take stock of all the players. If there is an opportunity to target a specific brand or business it could be an attractive proposition for your activists and it could generate a lot of buzz around your effort. For the business world negative attention can be like kryptonite and the leverage battle can be a much easier ride. NRDC's BioGems campaign has proven that once the fax machine starts humming at corporate headquarters businesses get more nervous than Keanu Reeves at a Shakespeare festival. Get ready for some seriously shaky blue suits when the activists and the cameras show up outside Schwab offices this Thursday.