The Greater Good

As marketers, we most often use messaging and awareness to help drive sales. The focus on the bottom line and shareholder value leads the more progressive marketers to explore such vehicles as blogging, podcasts and video to engage customers, employees and CEO’s in effort to create a so-called community to build the brand which ultimately lead to…sales. Viral communication: an honest attempt to connect to the customer, or another form of Jedi mind trickery by corporations to get into consumer pockets?

The line between good and evil for corporations is blurred. And so begins my search. First stop on the quest to find “good” lead me to disaster and relief organizations (The Red Cross, FEMA and Aidmatrix). The American people had a lot to say about FEMA response to 2005 Hurricane Katrina. But aside from public statement in news and print, what did FEMA have to say for themselves? I was surprised to find two years later that while FEMA had a blog FEMA blog, the sole post was on the history and purposed of blogging. What a waste of space. While large corporations are blogging about their customer value and new product offering, more cause-worthy organizations are silent.

My angst and concern was to put ease when I came across the Aidmatrix blog. Communication on this blog is posted monthly and provides information on Aidmatrix contribution to disaster relief, warning about upcoming storm seasons, promotion to all the disaster relief organizations in America and the opportunity to click on a link and provide comment and feedback to the blogger. Aidmatrix does it right. Not only is the blog written in a personal voice but the link is prominently displayed on the Aidmatrix home page.

In cynical times and instant information age, it’s surprising that more non-profits are not using blogs as an insightful and inexpensive tool to gather information from customers as well as provide feedback on organization initiatives.

Assignment: Are there other non-profits who use viral marketing for the greater good?