The Tip Jar – 6/25/10

Lots of big news to share! Here’s the latest…

• The next Social Marketing University will be in Atlanta, GA on August 16, 2010. I know that for many of us, taking time away from work can be difficult. That’s why the next Social Marketing University training will be a “crash course” where you’ll get much of the same social marketing information offered in longer SMU trainings in an intensive one-day format. It’s the day prior to the CDC’s National Conference on Health Communication, Marketing and Media in the same venue. If you’ll be attending that research- and practice-focused conference, SMU will provide you with a good foundation in the principles of social marketing so that you can get the most out of the conference sessions. The training is, of course, open to people who are not attending the conference as well and will not focus exclusively on health issues. The early registration discount for SMU ends July 16th, and a student discount is available.

• Several fantastic books have come out in the past month or so related to nonprofit marketing, written by fellow bloggers who I have known virtually for ages, and who are all at the top of the field. Each book deserves a blog post unto itself, but I don’t want to wait that long to tell you about them. They are:
  • Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits by Jay Levinson, Frank Adkins and Chris Forbes – This book will teach you how to use the well-known Guerrilla Marketing approach and apply it to the unique situations of nonprofits. With strong guidance on how to develop the right mindset and create an effective strategy, plus 250 tactics to put to use right away, the book will give nonprofits a whole new way of thinking about marketing.
  • The Nonprofit Marketing Guide by Kivi Leroux Miller – This book is the logical extension of Kivi’s nonprofit marketing empire. Drawing on her fantastic blogging, trainings and webinars, this book offers clear instruction on how to create a nonprofit marketing strategy and implement it effectively.
  • The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine – Beth, the grand-dame of nonprofit social media and Allison, a well-known author and blogger herself, offer a new model for how nonprofits can get rid of the fortress mentality and hook up with “free agents” inside and out of their organization to maximize their effectiveness. Using social media provides an opportunity for bringing together distributed social networks to work toward a common goal, and real success requires organizations to start operating differently.

• Speaking of books, the new edition of my book Hands-On Social Marketing: A Step-by-Step Guide to Making Change for Good is in the process of being typeset at this very moment. It has lots of new material and case studies, including a big section on social media, and is scheduled to come out in mid-October. Whether or not you have a copy of the first edition, I think this new one is substantially different enough that you will want to buy a copy for yourself or your staff.

• While it’s not related to social marketing, I would be remiss if I talked about books on my own blog without mentioning that my husband just published a book as well. It’s called Who Really Wrote the Bible? (And Why It Should Be Taken Seriously Again). It’s a literary whodunnit that takes on the established dogma, so if you’re interested in that sort of thing I hope you’ll check it out.

• Fard Johnmar, the driving force behind the health marketing community Path of the Blue Eye, is thinking ever bigger and planning a unique event called unNiched 2010. Not a traditional conference, unNiched is a collaborative online and offline “bootcamp” for health marketing communicators, where attendees from across professional disciplines will come together to apply the unNiched Innovation Model to help a real-world organization – the Lung Cancer Alliance. Learning by doing, plus learning from each other, will be an amazing educational experience (Disclaimer: I’m on the Advisory Committee). For a discount on registration, use code ‘unich10disc’.

• Finally, I’m excited to have been offered a free airplane ticket by Virgin America and Klout to fly out to Toronto (apparently they consider me an “influencer” –disclaimer-). As much as I’d love to spend a few days just exploring the city, I’d also like to make the most of it by seeing if any organizations (e.g., nonprofits, government agencies, hospitals, universities) would be interested in social marketing or social media training/consultation while I’m in town. Please drop me a line soon if you’d like to set something up at a discounted rate.

There are so many other things and thoughts I’d like to share with you, so I’m hoping I can fit some more blogging into my schedule. Until then, don’t forget you can usually find me on Twitter if you want to see the latest ideas and resources I’m excited about!

Photo: Fifi LePew