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Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog had a killer post the other day titled 3 questions before plunging into new media. But it was missing something…

Here are three good questions to answer before you start going crazy with technology, from Alyce Myatt of Grantmakers in Film + Electronic Media.  I’m sharing them from the session I just blogged:

1.What are you trying to do?  (As opposed to what you are trying to say.  What are you trying to get a certain audience to do?)

2.How best can you make that change occur?  How can it best be done?  (Given your audience and where they hang out online or in the world, what technology or media will engage them best)?

3.What resources do you have at hand? (This will help you determine the right scope.)

I’m not sure we’re asking these questions enough before we get started.

I’m also concerned we’re not getting started.  Ramya just noted in this session that YouTube for nonprofits is the slowest growing vertical on the site.  Not enough nonprofits are involved, and too many just slap up a video without seeking to build a community or reaching out to popular YouTube users.

This is a great list of tips, but what’s not there? It’s the item missing from most professional social media plunges. “What is the mutual benefit for us and our audience?”

So many companies diving into social media forget this important question. Professional social media marketers spend too much time on #1 and completely disregard this point I just brought up. But it’s probably the most important thing when it comes to engaging a market via social media.

So here’s the appended list of questions to ask before plunging into new media:

1. What are you trying to do? (As opposed to what you are trying to say.  What are you trying to get a certain audience to do?)
2. How best can you make that change occur? How can it best be done?  (Given your audience and where they hang out online or in the world, what technology or media will engage them best)
3. What resources do you have at hand? (This will help you determine the right scope.)
4. What is the mutual benefit? (How can you add value to the environment in which the conversation is happening? How does listening to your message directly benefit your audience? )

If you can’t answer this last question clearly, you’ll just end up amongst all the other noise your audience filters out to get to the (benefit) signal. The reason social media is social is because it’s permission-based, not push-based. With no mutual benefit for you and your audience, there will be no permission, or even worse: there will be, but it will be revoked because of backlash.

The image at the top of this post is Identically Named Places Connected(USA) by Neil Freeman and is available as a limited edition print from Next American City.

This is a 5-step tutorial on branding your Twitter profile. It includes a Photoshop file for you to download and use as a template. (There’s more to this tutorial than just the template. So even if you don’t have Photoshop, read on for some Twitter-branding tips.)

Twitter is making a beeline for the mainstream. Marketers, friends and moms are finding more and more ways to connect using this social media service. You can scoop it, remix it or you can use it as a social news source and that’s probably just the beginning. Twitter is here to stay.

With more eyeballs flocking to the service, it’s high time we got rid of the default look and upgraded to something unique. Branding your profile will convey sincerity to potential followers. (Sincerity is just about the only currency that matters online, anymore.) It will be well worth our trouble. Let’s go… Read more

The Chronicle Review is running a fascinating deconstruction of the infamous 1938 broadcast of Orson Welles’s War of The Worlds radio broadcast that should be required reading for anyone interested in word of mouth or viral marketing. The widely reported hysteria was pretty tame in reality, but it was spun into something greater by a self-important media in love with a story about the power it possessed.

So what accounts for the legend? First — and perhaps most important — the news media loved the story, and Welles loved the news media. The panic became a global story literally overnight. Even the Nazis could not resist commenting, noting the credulity of the American public. Americans certainly appeared gullible, but they were not alone. The news media, handed a sensational story of national scope, reported every detail (including fictional ones) about Welles, the program, and the reaction.

Welles’s greatest performance that evening wasn’t in the studio; it was in a hallway, at the improvised news conference, when he feigned a stunned, apologetic demeanor. In reality, as Paul Heyer notes in The Medium and the Magician, Welles carefully concealed his satisfaction with the hysteria while expressing concern over the rumors of deaths attributed to the program.

The only firsthand study of the event with any scientific credibility actually disproved then-present-day perceptions of mass-media’s role in human psyche as some sort of great controller… It showed that people are not easily manipulated, at least not with predictable results.

The hypodermic model of media effects, which prevailed at the time, posited that the media injected ideas, more or less directly, into the consciousness of the audience. The book’s data seriously undermined that model, demonstrating empirically that each member of the mass audience filters the media’s messages through a matrix of personal variables (education, critical ability, class, etc.). Those data complicated media theory tremendously and intensified the research focus on the complexities of audience reception.

Lazarsfeld surprised many by concluding in The People’s Choice, his classic study of the 1940 election, that the media’s effects are, in general, much more selective and limited than we assume. Other forms of communication, from those in the education system to religious communication to interpersonal communication, were apparently more powerful. The mass media were but one part of a larger web of influence, and as one factor, their actual influence was mediated by several other variables. Thus, the media’s ability to control us was far less pronounced than assumed.

That is the ultimate irony behind “The War of the Worlds.” The discovery that the media are not all-powerful, that they cannot dominate our political consciousness or even our consumer behavior as much as we suppose, was an important one. It may seem like a counter intuitive discovery (especially considering its provenance), but ask yourself this: If we really know how to control people through the media, then why isn’t every advertising campaign a success? Why do advertisements sometimes backfire? If persuasive technique can be scientifically devised, then why do political campaigns pursue different strategies? Why does the candidate with the most media access sometimes lose?

The answer is that humans are not automatons. We might scare easily, we might, at different times and in different places, be susceptible to persuasion, but our behavior remains structured by a complex and dynamic series of interacting factors.

Something to keep in mind next time you have big plans for your market.

The Hyped Panic Over ‘War of the Worlds’ – The Chronicle Review.

[Illustration by Doug Savage]