Happy Blogiversary, Baby…

by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 24, 2007 | Blog, Miscellaneous

It’s time for a party — Spare Change is one year old today!! Boy, how the year flew by, and look how much it’s grown. I just want to pinch its cheeks. Here’s the blog’s vital stats:

When I started this, I didn’t know whether I would have enough interesting things to say each week or whether people would care what I had to say. But look! You’re here! So, thank you for giving me the honor of your time, comments, and in many cases, friendship. I truly feel that I am part of a community, and even though we may not ever meet in person (though I hope we will!), I’m glad we’re connected through the ether.

I’m going to have fun today and share with you some of my favorite blog posts from the past year that you may not have seen. These are presented in order, according to when they were published. You can also take a look at the list of the most popular posts in the sidebar to make sure you don’t miss the biggies like the CDC’s Second Life, Marketing to Introverts and others. So, without further ado, here is the Spare Change Retrospective:

1. On Challenges, Change and Cellos – How I learned humility along with the cello, and the social marketing lesson that some skills do not always come naturally. (Postscript: Finally, after about an additional year of lessons from the time I wrote this post, my playing is starting to sound more like a cello and less like a dying goose.)
2. Tune in Tomorrow: Soap Operas for Social Marketing – I’m fascinated by the possibilities in both broadcast and new media for providing education and role modeling for health and social issues.
3. Why Can’t Social Marketers Sustain a Professional Association? – I’m still wondering about the answer to this question. I think we have a critical mass of people who would be interested, and the technology exists to connect ourselves fairly cheaply. The profession already has a listserv, conferences, and an academic journal – it should just be a matter of formalizing alliances and putting a membership infrastructure in place. We need a unified voice to speak out about issues like…
4. Dueling Social Marketing Definitions – Jupiter Research’s misuse of the term “social marketing” is just the tip of the iceberg, with more and more people using the term to refer to social media marketing or social network marketing. Just since this post was written, I find myself having to clarify more often which type of social marketing I work in (whereas people used to have no clue what the term meant, now they think they know what it means but are incorrect). Also see the handy chart I made to help you tell them apart.
5. Marketing to Terrorists – The day after the State of the Union address, this continues to be relevant. An apparently well-meaning funder created a PSA designed to appeal to the humanity of potential suicide bombers and thereby dissuade them from their mission, but ended up reinforcing just how effective bombs are in destroying a street full of infidels. Nice thought, wrong strategy.
6. Branding for Social Marketers, Part 1 and Part 2 – A series on what branding is and how it is used in social marketing.
7. Dove Soothes Our Fragile Egos – Unless We Are in China – A look at the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty in the US and in China, with an interesting cultural twist.
8. Friendly Fire: Stigma & Social Marketing Redux – Recent social marketing campaigns addressing HIV/AIDS have generated a backlash among the target audience. How could this be avoided?
9. Search Engine Marketing Fun – I cracked myself up while looking at the search engine phrases that people used to find my blog. Hopefully you are as amused as I was.
10. Metamorphosis – Unless you are brand new to my blog, you probably saw this post from around New Years. But I wanted to give you an update on the butterflies. A couple of weeks ago, on a very windy but warm day, we let all the butterflies go that were able to fly away. Two were left, one of which had one good wing and one shriveled one, and the other that had two defective wings. We became the butterfly nursing home, feeding them sugar water and orange slices, and sadly, the one with only one bad wing died. My 6 year old daughter buried it in the dirt outside and when asked if she had any words she’d like to share, said with a pout, “I wish it didn’t die.” The other butterfly, whom we dubbed “Crumplewings,” has been going strong and is still alive, despite the fact that pieces of its wings keep falling off and it now has about one-third of one wing and half of the other. I’m thinking of changing its name to Tenacious B. This is one persistent butterfly – we could all learn a lesson from it about not giving up.

Are there any posts I didn’t mention that you particularly like? Let me know in the comments.

Here’s to the coming year. I hope you’ll watch with me as we see together what 2007 brings.

Photo Credit: plus with hat uploaded by FunnymanSE30 – it’s awfully appropriate that this picture is of a Mac Plus – the first computer I ever owned (not counting the Commodore 64 my parents bought us). I’m still a Mac girl, by the way.

Technorati Tags: blogiversary, spare change, blogging

Into the Future

by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 12, 2007 | Blog, Miscellaneous

A nice reminder that we are always traveling through time. Look! Out there! It’s the future!

from xkcd

Our Community

by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 10, 2007 | Blog, Miscellaneous

I had never paid much attention to MyBlogLog, even with the announcement that it was just bought by Yahoo, until I saw an example of what a blog community’s page looked like on the site because someone had clicked here from it. I was intrigued at the idea of being able to find out more about the people reading my blog and discovering new sites that my readers frequent. Presumably, someone who is interested in my content would be looking at other things I might want to know about too.

On MyBlogLog, you can join a blog’s community as a member, see who else has joined, leave messages, and explore what other likeminded people are interested in. I have seen other sites with the “Recent Readers” widget (see green box in my sidebar), but didn’t realize how many people are MyBlogLog members until I put the code on my site and started seeing people coming through immediately.

So let’s try this out. If you’re a MyBlogLog member, or if you would like to become one, go to the Spare Change community page and click on “Join Community.” We can get to know each other and discover some new sites together. What do you think?

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And speaking of community, one of my fellow bloggers, Nancy Schwartz of Getting Attention, is asking for your input through a survey she is conducting on nonprofit communication trends. Take the survey here within the next week or two, and Nancy will be reporting back on what she finds so we can all benefit from pooling our combined knowledge.

Technorati Tags: mybloglog, blog, community

Healthy Blog 2007

by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 8, 2007 | Blog, Miscellaneous

For 2007, I’m trying to improve my own health as well as the health of my blog. To that end, I have been wrestling with my feed to try to slim it down. After several programming frustrations, getting into the intricacies of xml that I never wanted to know, I think I’ve fixed it. If you’ve noticed the feed not working right for you (especially if you use Bloglines) for the past couple of days, I think it should be okay now.

I am putting my feed on a diet, narrowing it down to just the Feedburner feed and taking away the atom and rss options for new subscribers. Don’t worry, the Feedburner SmartFeed will work with any feed reader or application you want to throw at it.

If you are already subscribed to this blog via an atom or rss feed, I would love it if you would upgrade your subscription by just clicking on the orange feed icon here or in the right sidebar, or if you use Firefox you can click on the orange feed image in the URL box of your browser. This will give you some added features at the bottom of each post, and will help me keep track of how many subscribers I have (because I love each and every one of you). It only takes a second (okay, maybe three).

If you are not yet a subscriber and don’t want to have to bookmark and manually check for new posts, I encourage you to subscribe to the feed. If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about with all this feed stuff (especially after talking about putting the blog on a diet), here’s a great introduction to how it works and some recommendations for feed readers you can use (and don’t worry, even though the article talks about RSS, it also applies to Feedburner’s feed as well).

Enough housekeeping. Back to social marketing!

[UPDATE: Fri 1 pm PST: Bloglines is still not showing the corrected feed, and I have an email in to them to fix it. Should be soon.]
[UPDATE: Mon 9 am PST: Thanks to everyone who updated/started your subscriptions. New posts are showing up correctly in Bloglines now, but some older ones are still truncated and out of order. It shouldn’t affect you unless you are looking back at older posts via the feed reader, in which case you should just come directly to the blog.]

Photo Credit: Omnia

New Beginnings

by Nedra Weinreich | Jan 2, 2007 | Blog, Miscellaneous

And…I’m back. After sequestering myself from the blog so I could get some actual work done, I am ready to jump back in.

The butterflies have emerged from their chrysalids, with the last one coming out yesterday. Sadly, two of the butterflies have crumpled wings and won’t be able to fly (on the plus side, that means my daughter can keep them as “pets” without feeling guilty about not letting them go free). And one has a predilection for lying on its side and playing dead, but moving around when prodded. Maybe he’s just lazy?

Speaking of metamorphoses, I’m very excited to let you know that the Weinreich Communications website has been completely overhauled, and you can check out the new design now. Yes, it’s about time. Let me know what you think. Eventually, this blog will get a makeover as well.

Since I wasn’t blogging regularly last week, here are a couple of things to check out:

• Liz at Virtualpolitik came out with the winners (losers?) of the Foley Awards, her round-up of the worst uses of technology by policymakers in the past year. I weighed in on the social marketing category.
• The Mobile Persuasion conference that’s going to be happening at Stanford in February looks exciting. Speakers include “the world’s experts on persuasive games, mobile commerce, mobile health, mobile dating, and more.” If I can make it up there, I would love to attend.

And for some reason, my recent del.icio.us links didn’t get picked up automatically and added to the blog, so here they are:

• The doctor is in – The Boston Globe
  TV doctors may be fictional, but viewers still listen carefully to what they say
• Discovering the Activation Point
  A downloadable publication for people in social change organizations that focuses on strategies for mobilizing concerned people to supportive action by identifying and leveraging their activation points. (via Guy Kawasaki)
• Shared media contacts database
  The Media Volunteer Project lets people from the nonprofit community share their own media contact information in exchange for access to everyone else’s information.

Alrighty, I think we’re all caught up now. More to come soon.

Photo credit: Today is a good day

Daily Fix and Made to Sticks

by Nedra Weinreich | Dec 21, 2006 | Blog, Miscellaneous

Blogging is an interesting combination of solitariness and community. I sit here by myself in my blogger uniform (pajamas) writing out my thoughts. But once they are posted, readers make comments, send it around to their friends, post their own responses on their blogs, and I do the same for other bloggers. Being part of a community (though virtual, it’s still made up of real people) helps keep the act of blogging from being a lonely one and helps me to keep learning and improving what I do.

I’m excited to announce that I’ve been invited to join the stable of writers at what I think is the ultimate marketing blogger community – the Marketing Profs Daily Fix blog. Some of the best bloggers writing about marketing are there, so I’m humbled to be included. I am a longtime reader of the DF and have been part of the comment conversation there enough times that it already feels like home. I’ll be bringing the social marketing perspective, with the hope of inspiring commercial marketers to use their powers for good. I’m also hoping that my presence there will help raise the visibility of the field of social marketing (and help to combat the ubiquitous “social marketing” word virus). I invite you to come check it out and become involved in the warm and welcoming community there.

My first post at the Daily Fix is up today, and discusses the positive response/backlash to my Marketing to Introverts post last week. There seemed to be two camps – one in which introverts were saying “Wow! You really understand me!” and the other in which introverts were saying “No! Don’t give away all our secrets!” I was even called a “damn traitor” for publishing that article (written in all seriousness). I seem to have struck a nerve.

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In other news today, I can announce the winners of the Made to Stick gift packs: Mike Klein, Sandra Renshaw, Mark Woodman, Sara Brandspigel, Rob Chudzik, Angela Adamoli, Amy Krane, Shawn McCormick and Carol Kirschner. Congratulations to you, and thank you to everyone for taking the time to enter. Even if you did not win, you need to get this book anyways!