Influential Marketing Blog

Audubon Society Promotes Happy Bird Watching, Not Angry Bird Tossing

Imagine you're the marketing team at the Audubon Society, a group that has been around for nearly a century and your mission for that time has been to promote better man-bird relations -- how would you respond to a internationally addictive game which has been downloaded more than 400 million times that portrays your heroes as "angry" and encourages people to toss them into stuff for prizes?

The question probably isn't a fair one, as I imagine the Audubon Society probably hasn't lost much sleep over how the wildly popular Angry Birds mobile game has portrayed birds ... but it does bring birds and the pasttime of "birding" some long overdue attention.

Birding, as I once learned from one of my professors of English who was addicted to the activity, usually involves heading out to the forest and looking through binoculars and cameras with zoom lenses for different types of birds. Once seen, a bird is typically logged into a birding journal or documented via a photograph, and birders spend their time collecting long lists of exotic or rare birds that they have seen (the rarest of which are called "life birds") and compare lists with one another. 

Earlier this month, The Audubon Society launched what is quickly becoming another addictive bird-focused game online called "Birding The Net." Tying into the upcoming Hollywood movie release of The Big Year - an upcoming Hollywood film featuring Steve Martin and Jack Black where characters compete to see the most North American birds in one year - the game is built on Facebook and offers a virtual version of bird watching where participants are challenged to find birds spread across the Internet and collect the most in order to win prizes.  

As David Yarnold, President and CEO of Audubon describes, “birds are the best possible ambassadors for the environment, and this will help people see them in a whole new way. This is about fun – but it’s also about getting more people involved in taking action to protect birds and the planet we share with them. And with this unprecedented use of social media and the web, we’re also making it clear that this is not your grandmother’s Audubon.”

The game, which you can get a taste of on this blog for a week by clicking one of the birds above, will run through November 7th and I predict it will succeed brilliantly as a marketing strategy for Audubon Society. Spending some time looking, it offers at least five good lessons for marketers:

1. Timing/Hollywood Tie-in - With the link to the upcoming Hollywood film, the Audubon Society will get infinitely more eyeballs to this campaign and lots more funding and support. Chances are the beautiful visual design of this campaign was due in no small part to 20th Century Fox’s ability to fund the agency (Goodby, Silverstein & Partners) behind this.
2. Recreates A Real Life Experience - The act of surfing online to various sites and hoping to see birds perfectly recreates what the experience of birding in real life is. You never know what you'll see, you are sometimes disappointed, but you get that flash of excitement when you do see a bird and it's one you haven't seen before.
3. Uses Behavioural Economics - When you first register, you have a clean slate of grayed out cards ... which you immediately want to start collecting. "Earning" the first several are easy - you get one just for starting and there are another 3 or 4 easily available on obvious sites like www.audubonguides.com, but then it gets tougher. Once you have started, though, you can't help wanting to collect more.
4. Engagement Through Design - Though this would be hard to prove, my bet is that they will get much higher engagement with this effort as a result of a very strong creative execution. Put simply, the app and individual bird cards are beautifully designed. Looking at them online, you almost wish they would produce them in print too just so you could hold them in your hands. 
5. Built-in Shareability - There is lots of great shareability built into this campaign, from the ability to embed your own birdhouse on your blog or website to leaderboards and sharing through Facebook. The campaign has a strong understanding of why and how people share at its heart and makes it easy to do so. 
6. Bird Personality - A visit to the Twitter account for one of the birds, the Rufous Hummingbird (@RufHummingbird) yields this bio: "Tireless traveler and flower enthusiast on a mission of nectar discovery." All the other bird Twitter accounts feature similar personality and a bit of good natured rivalry between them. It makes it fun to engage with the birds and adds an important element of, well, humanity to the campaign.
7. Curiosity and Discovery - Perhaps the most important element that makes this fun is the fact that you need to make new discoveries of where the birds are, and they have engaged your curiosity to see where they turn up next. It is an essential element of gaming, and one that Angry Birds (coincidentally) makes excellent use of. 

Ultimately, Birding The Net stands is one of the most original uses of social media and gaming I've seen lately to achieve the dual purpose of promoting an upcoming movie as well as reminding people that a pasttime which has been around for centuries can still offer a thrill not only in the virtual world ... but if you shut off the technology and head out into the real world as well. 

Video Introduction To Birding The Net:

How To Create A CSR Program For Your Small Business

 

There is a relatively fancy term and acronym given to all the work that many large organizations do to combat many types of social causes. CSR – or Corporate Social Responsibility – is an umbrella term for everything from water conservation to fighting all kinds of addiction. Increasingly for many large businesses, it is becoming a critical way that they grow brand reputation as well as give back to the communities and societies that they sell to.  But CSR programs are not just for large companies.

Some businesses are famous for how they have built CSR programs into the fabric of their business. Tom’s Shoes calls itself a “socially responsible business” and lives up to it by giving one pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair of shoes you buy. There is growing evidence that it matters more than ever to consumer behavior as well. 

People are reading labels more than ever. They are rebelling against overly processed materials and making choices based on cleaner, healthier, more natural ingredients and processes.  More importantly, they are looking for companies that have a heart. In a groundbreaking book about consumer behavior called “Spend Shift” – the authors termed this the age of “mindful consumption” where the way that people are buying and interacting with businesses is based on more than just a product or service.

Every purchase is a vote, and consumers are taking more ownership over the votes they cast. How can you help your small business to adapt to this trend? Giving back, quite simply, is a smart business strategy.  Here are a few steps:

Step 1: Choose a relevant issue. 

Ideally this will be something that relates to the core nature of your business. Coke uses lots of water, so obviously they should care about it. What’s your similarly relevant issue? They key point here is that you need to focus. Resist the temptation to choose multiple issues – start with one main one, and you can always grow your efforts at a later stage.

Step 2: Find the right partners. 

No matter what issue you choose, chances are there will already be non profit organizations who are working on that issue. Do your research and try to identify the best ones to partner with.  They may not necessarily be the largest either. Think regionally and try to find groups who you can establish a personal connection with and therefore inspire more passion from your customers and employees in supporting them.

Step 3: Build your credibility. 

Simply announcing an issue to focus on isn’t enough, you need to back it up with actions. What foundation are you joining? Which volunteer community are your employees participating in? How much will you set aside to donate? These are the proof points that make your commitment real, and you need them.

Step 4: Evangelize your efforts. 

This stage is the most potentially beneficial from a marketing point of view for your business, but also needs to be handled carefully. You cannot be seen as exploiting your efforts for business gain … but that doesn’t mean you can’t talk about what you are doing and encourage more of your customers and potential customers to support your efforts either directly, or indirectly by patronizing your business.

Step 5: Maximize your impact.

A great CSR program involves continually reassessing your performance to make sure you are ACTUALLY impacting the issue that you care about. Are your donations getting to the population that needs them? Are you using all the resources that you could be using? Do you have the right partnerships? These questions will help you to optimize your efforts. 

 

What You Should Know About Google For NonProfits

This afternoon in front of a packed room of nearly 200 nonprofit communicators in Washington DC, Google announced their most innovative and ambitious set of tools to help nonprofit organizations to succeed yet. Promising to offer $10,000 in free keyword advertising credits, branded channels and other extended premium features, the announcement of the Google for Nonprofits program divided the ways that Google could help into three core areas; reaching more donors, improving operations and raising awareness.

There is a great description of the program available at www.google.com/nonprofits - including answers to all the basic questions anyone interested in the program is likely to have. If you are wondering how to apply, the specific services that Google offers, what types of organizations are eligible or what the specific terms are, please do check out the site.

Once you do, here are a few observations about the most interesting aspects of this program and how your nonprofit might best take advantage of it:

1. Get the right technical support. You may be tempted to think that Google making lots of technical resources freely available means you will be able to get by with internal less technical support ... actually, the opposite is true. To get the most out of many of Google's services, you need a smart and savvy technical person who can understand how to integrate all the free tools and really leverage them. If don't have a great technical person, do everything you can to find one.
2. Prioritize creating video. Whether or not your nonprofit is actively using video right now, Google's announcement should provide you with the motivation to start immediately. Extended features on YouTube that corporate brands pay tens of thousands of dollars for will be free for nonprofits - and taking advantage will be a great way to spread your message through a medium that people are more and more likely to engage with.
3. Move fast to become a case study. While Google's announcement is new, they will be looking for success stories to feature. As a result, the quicker you can move to be part of the program, the more likely you are to get featured. This is one of those situations where being an early adopter will almost certainly pay off.
4. Start with "citizen cartography." One of the best buzzwords to emerge out of the session at Google was the idea of "citizen cartography" - a slightly sexier way of describing the act of adding geographic information and context to Google Maps or Google Earth. Whether you use some of the newer digital cameras which include GPS tagging of images or input data about the locations that your nonprofit serves, there is a way to add your data to the global archive of geo-specific information that Google has which can be an easy way to start adding your mission and content to the global collective of data.
5. Visualize your data. One of the hottest trends of the year, creating a more visualized way to share your data should be high on your list of priorities because chances are you have data that is underleveraged simply because it is hard to tell a story around it.  Google's new "Fusion Tables" service will allow you to upload your data and turn it into a visual that can help to tell a more cohesive story. Grab your best spreadsheet, upload it and start to visualize your data now.

Overall, Google's announcement is exciting news and is bound to lead to more innovations and smart tools to help nonprofits. During the session, I asked the question of whether there would be more ways for nonprofits to collaborate with one another to help each other leverage the platforms and share both success stories and failures. The short answer was that there will be.

Ultimately, focusing on that may lead to Google tackling the biggest problem in the nonprofit world today ... duplication of resources. There are dozens of organizations all fighting to raise HIV awareness. Another dozen focused on homelessness. And the list goes on and on. It is inefficient. If anyone can enable collaboration on a global scale around the key issues, it is Google. Imagine the impact that a global network of nonprofits could achieve if they were able to efficiently work together to build on one another's successes.

Enabling that kind of collaboration really could change the world.

Why The "Digital Death" Campaign Failed Despite Celebrity Support

Last week on December 1st to support World AIDS Day, a small group of celebrities with millions of fans led by Alicia Keyes decided to sacrifice their digital lives to try and save real ones. The campaign, cleverly called "Digital Death" was supported by posters, online ads and a well branded microsite. The premise was simple: a group of celebrities forego using Twitter or Facebook until $1,000,000 in donations are raised for their cause. Anyone involved with the idea might have guessed that this would last for a day or two before the target was met. It has been five days and the donations still haven't even hit $300,000.

This idea isn't bad. The celebrity support is top notch. And the branding is really strong. So why did a campaign like this which has all the individual pieces it should need for success fall flat? Here are a few reasons:

1. Inherently egotistical idea. The premise of this entire campaign was built on what is a fairly egotistical idea: that fans care so much about the tweets of their favourite celebrities that they would be willing to donate money to a cause in order to get them back. For core fans - this premise likely holds true ... but there are likely many fans of the celebrities who just don't care THAT much.
2. Asking for too much. When I first saw this campaign last week, they had a minimum donation of $10. Immediately that struck me as a huge strategic mistake. Currently it has been reduced to $1, but this choice likely cost them many supporters who might have given a buck or two at the beginning of the campaign when the buzz was highest, but would never give $10. Even the American Red Cross raising money after the Haiti earthquake had a minimum of $5. The initial minimum of $10 was a big hurdle, and even though they corrected it - it likely was too late.
3. Unclear connection to cause. The campaign was understandable for what the celebrities were doing, but the connection between stopping the use (or overuse) of social media and helping keep kids fighting AIDS alive was a very thin one. The best campaigns are ones where the themes work together, and in this case they didn't.
4. Going against cultural trends. There is a big cultural trend today towards feeling overloaded. People are bombarded with marketing messages, tweets, updates, followers and friends. Most of us just want a bit more simplicity, so when a group of relatively prolific celebrity Twitter users decide to "go dark" - more than a few fans likely breathed a sigh of relief. For those folks, paying to bring back the noise would be like writing a check to someone to punch you in the nose. The money might go to a great cause, but I still like my nose too much for that.

How could this campaign have worked and still made a big impact? One core thing I would have changed is to use the power of all these celebrities Twitter accounts for something more than silence. What if they all chose to spend 24 or 48 hours ONLY tweeting about Keep A Child Alive? Or how about donating some of their own money for everyone who asks them to stop their digital death? 

This campaign had a chance to be something great - but now the only thing left for us to see is how the celebrities participating will come "back to life" online and quietly leave this behind them.

Update 12/6/10 4:06pm - Usher breaks his "digital death" pledge prematurely.

Update #2 12/6/10 9:02pm - Looks like the campaign miraculously went viral and raised over $700k in less than 24 hours so they are now at over $1 million raised. Either that or some of the celebs put up some cash to get their own digital lives back.

Can Jumo Solve The NonProfit World's Biggest Marketing Problem?

Today marks the launch of Jumo, the new long awaited social networking platform from Facebook co-Founder Chris Hughes. In a recent interview with the Huffington Post published today, Hughes described the mission of the site this way:

Most every site that's out there focuses on donations. And, don't get me wrong, donating to organizations, especially right now, is really important. But Jumo is taking a very different approach. It's not just about how much money are donating to this or that group. It's about what kind of relationship you are building with that organization.

As anyone who has ever worked on a nonprofit communications or marketing plan will tell you, the single biggest challenge when it comes to cause related marketing is motivating people to act on what they feel. You might hear about underpriveleged youth or dwindling trees in the rainforest and most of us will have an instinctual emotional reaction that these things are terrible and we should do something to help. The problem is that this emotion is tough to turn into real action - whether that action involves donating money or offering time.

Some have argued that this difficulty is leading nonprofits into a wrongheaded attempt to make supporting a cause nothing more than a click (mockingly called "slacktivism") - which devalues the importance of real contribution via time or money, and offers people a chance at "moral self licensing" where they feel they have done their good deed and therefore stop trying to do more.

Jumo's big insight, as Hughes shares in his launch blog post, is that there can be multiple levels of engagement and if a social network can make it easy to do everything from support a cause you care about simply by clicking a "like" button - to actually donating money or agreeing to volunteer, then that is a big win for the entire nonprofit community. On Jumo, I can support causes as much or as little as I like, and find all of them in one place. The mission of the site is clear, and it's promise is huge.

The most powerful part of this idea, however, may be its directory aspect that first launched early Internet superstar sites like Craigslist and Yahoo. In a world where we have far too much noise and demands on our attention - something like Jumo could offer a one-stop shop for anything related to doing good by supporting a cause related organization. At least in part it is based on the assumption that there is a large population of Internet-savvy people who would do more if it were just easier. Whether you think Jumo can succeed at its mission or not, it's hard to argue with that.

How Political Advertising Is Killing Marketing (And How To Fight Back)

Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left.
                - David Ogilvy

If marketing were a person, political advertising would be its cancer. I work in marketing and have never worked on a political campaign, so despite my choice to live in Washington DC - my perspective is not one of a political insider. Instead, I am a marketer and voting American who sees with increasing frequency TV spots, radio ads, print advertising and online banners designed to instill fear, spread lies and intentionally confuse people. To some degree, the "Rally to Restore Sanity" this past weekend in DC was inspired by this advertising.

Yet this is not a partisan problem limited to one side or the other. The central problem with political advertising in the US is that it is has become more important to fabricate a list of negative things that your opponent stands for instead of having to stand for something yourself. Instead of electing people based on their ideas and qualifications, this advertising tries to motivate us to vote for someone based on a fear that the other guy (or girl) might win.

Aside from the politics of it, though, as marketers we need to care about this because it is destroying the credibility of our profession. When people see advertising as manipulating them with half-truths, this perception extends far beyond politics. The next time you are trying to promote a product or service, you have to do it to the same cynical public that has become wary of marketing messages due in large part to unethical and misleading forms of marketing such as political advertising.

Though this may seem like a big problem, I believe the solution is actually quite simple. Political advertising should have to follow the same parameters as any other kind of marketing. Coke cannot create and run a marketing campaign solely talking about the 12 ways that Pepsi could kill you, steal your school's funding and pull the plug on your sick grandma. Why is this acceptable in political advertising?

Right now, there are vague rules around "misrepresentation" - but most competent communicators can find a source for just about any statement. The rule needs to be stronger. After the election tomorrow, we need new legislation that makes it illegal for political ads to talk about opponents instead of themselves. These so-called "attack ads" are at the heart of the problem.

If you want to run a marketing message on behalf of a candidate for public office, it should be about what he or she stands for and what they will do if elected. When more of this marketing focuses on positive messages instead of negative, then we all win. As marketers and business people with products and services to promote, we all need to stand up and lead this call - because it is in our best interests as well. Not just as professionals, but as citizens.

The Pink Backlash: Is There Such A Thing As Too Much Awareness?

This weekend I watched NFL football players with pink shoes ferociously attack each other. At every break, TV ads for all kinds of brands used varying shades of pink for the same cause. On my flight yesterday, as the cabin crew on my Delta flight checked our tickets, they were adorned with pink scarves and ribbons. This is October in America, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and pink is everywhere.

As a marketer, it is easy to love the multi-tiered campaign that has hundreds of brands (large and small) involved in using the color pink to represent support for Breast Cancer research, the women who are fighting the disease and the ones who have survived it. Based on the sheer volume of partners involved, this awareness campaign already occupies a unique place in the recent history of advocacy marketing and has inspired countless other advocacy groups and organizations to strive towards creating their own "pink-esque" campaigns.

When I looked at this campaign back in October of last year, I created a presentation to share some reasons why I thought (and still think) it was so effective, but also included a caution about how the campaign had already started to show signs of overexposure and a potential for losing its authenticity due to a sort of "pink overload" that may happen as more and more companies jumped on the bandwagon.

Last week I gave a phone interview to a reporter for a sports magazine who subsequently came out with a piece titled "We'll be the bad guys -- we hate pink."  In his piece, he shares the cynical view that the average NFL fan is getting overloaded by the healthy dose of pink on everything from uniforms to hand towels. Is it all too much?

Where is the imaginary line between softly cajoling or convincing and full on yelling? The Pink campaign may occupy a unique place not only for its pervasiveness, but also for the chance that it offers for marketers so focused on generating awareness to shift the conversation towards effectiveness instead. No one can argue the Pink campaign has not been successful in raising awareness of breast cancer and (hopefully) the resulting behaviour change of women choosing to get tested regularly to spot the cancer early.

The question of this post is, should we be looking further than that? Is the net good of a campaign as popular as this increased by the dearth of partners who have embraced it, or is it headed towards a backlash of consumer cynicism from people who just want to watch their football without the pink towels and buy their products without constant pink reminders?

Share your thoughts in a comment below.  

Life And Marketing Lessons From LIVESTRONG CEO Doug Ulman

Every day too many people hear the three worst words in the English language: "you have cancer." That was one of the many insights that emerged in my talk with Doug Ulman on the stage last night at BlogWorld as we talked about the fight against cancer, his personal battle as a three time cancer survivor and how social tools have helped LIVESTRONG to become one of the most social media savvy organizations in the world of healthcare and perhaps in any industry. With nearly a million followers on Twitter, Doug himself was recently described in a Fast Company piece as the "most savvy healthcare leader in social media" - a description he shrugs off because it has never been a goal for him to achieve that sort of niche notoriety.

The discussion we had, though, was telling of not only his personal philosophy but an enlightened way of thinking about openness and authenticity within an organization that more and more businesses will be looking to for inspiration. Some people know LIVESTRONG from the association with its founder Lance Armstrong. Others know it from the ever present yellow wristbands that many at the event were wearing to remember people in their own lives who had fought against cancer. As we opened the session, I asked people to stand if they were a survivor of cancer, or had a loved one who had fought cancer or if they had someone who had lost the fight against cancer. By the end of it, everyone was standing.

After our session, several people came to me and shared that this was one of those topics that went beyond social media and at a conference like BlogWorld where it is easy to focus just on very tactical things like building an audience for your blog or how to rank higher on Google or how to earn more money from writing ... the bigger picture can be forgotten. Doug's story, for me and many others, helped to bring back that perspective to the event. You can watch our full talk on UStream below - but here are a few highlights that I will take away as advice for how to better use social media to spread an idea, and more importantly, how to be a better person.

1. Be Compassionate. It has become easy not to really care about anything. You can follow advice blindly, do what you are supposed to do and forget about the all important quality of compassion. Yet this compassion is such an important piece of how we connect with one another. It means that you are not only listening to someone, but you actually care about their experience and what they are sharing with you. For Doug, this compassion is a necessity, because some of the people he interacts with may very well be going through the worst experience of their lives. The real question is, how compassionate are you on a daily basis with things that may seem much more ordinary? Compassion stands out. It makes you memorable, and it makes your conversations more meaningful.
2. Try Out Your Dumb Ideas. There was a marketing idea that Nike shares with LIVESTRONG which nearly everyone who heard it hated. It was half baked, relied on a behaviour from people that there was no reasonable basis to expect would happen, and seemed even to visionary leaders like Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, to be a complete waste of time. That idea was to create 5000 yellow bracelets with the words "LIVESTRONG" and the Nike swoosh on them and sell them for $1 each. Then, elite athletes started wearing these bracelets, others wanted them, and the idea went viral. Now the LIVESTRONG yellow bracelet is as recognizable as any iconic cause related symbol all across the world. If LIVESTRONG had killed that idea based on feedback, they would have missed a game changing opportunity. Sometimes you need to let dumb ideas be tried, because they just might work.
3. Channel Instead Of Shutting Down. Every day around the world someone wants to create something to help promote the mission of LIVESTRONG. With a brand to manage, though, the challenge is how to take all of this well meaning energy and make sure that it is being used in an efficient way without damaging the core things that the brand stands for. Doug and his team spend a lot of time identifying people around the world as LIVESTRONG leaders and giving them the tools to work in their local communities to promote the mission of LIVESTRONG, while staying connected to the core organization. This focus on channeling all the energy towards a common goal rather than shutting people out pays off with happy, engaged and motivated leaders and advocates around the world.
4. Use Social Media To Focus On The Real World. Social media can feel like a very virtual and intangible world where people give each other digital high-fives and just do things like chatting, poking, friending and following. One of the biggest things you can see if you look at the content and experiences on LIVESTRONG is that social media is a key way that their organization helps people to connect with one another IN REAL LIFE. They organize events and biking tours, they host runs and local fundraisers. All of this activity can be coordinated online through social media, and content that is generated may live on social media - but the end goal is to get people to connect in real life and get to know one another and build the community.

If you do want to see the full video of our session, you can check out the live video on UStream or watch it below. Also, from the stage we announced the second year of the #beatcancer program - an online effort to raise money for cancer research to be donated to multiple organizations (including LIVESTRONG). To participate, just include the hashtag #beatcancer in a tweet and 5 cents will be donated by one of our corporate partners to cancer research. Last year this effort set a Guiness Book of World Records mark with over 200,000 tweets in 24 hours - and this we want to top that mark. Please participate and add your voice to the global fight against cancer by tweeting #beatcancer!

The Five Branches Of Government 2.0

Earlier this week I had the privilege of moderating at panel at the Ogilvy offices in Washington DC all about defining and exploring Government 2.0 (watch the livestream archive online). The panelists featured several visionary minds and leading thinkings in the world of Government 2.0, including:

- Alex Howard, O’Reilly Media
- Gwynne Kostin, U.S. General Services Administration
- Micah Sifry, Personal Democracy Forum
- Ari Melber, The Nation
- Mark Murray, NBC News

In our conversation, the topics ranged from defining the buzzword of "Gov2.0" to some leading case studies today of how social media and the web is being used by government agencies, to the potential risks and complications of all this evolution from a privacy or accessibility point of view. One of the biggest visions ifor what Government 2.0 could be has come from Tim O'Reilly who shared his ideas of "government as a platform" - but one of the most considered definitions of Government 2.0 I uncovered comes from a dedicated discussion thread on the popular social network GovLoop for those interested in the evolution of Government*:

"Government 2.0 is the socialization and commoditization of government processes, services and data."

Through our panel discussion, the big theme that came through for me was that the government workers, contractors and thought leaders who live and breathe in this world of Government 2.0 every day are often tackling very different categories of issues.

As I took notes from the conversation and spoke to some of the attendees afterwards, I started thinking in terms of the different emerging "branches" on this tree of Government 2.0 - and how they might be defined based on the examples that people spoke about as well as what I have seen in my work with clients in this area. This post is an attempt to share how I thought about that framework, and I'm interested to hear your thoughts (particularly if you work in the sector) on whether this works or feels too simplistic or incomplete. 

1. Campaigning 2.0 - With an election looming, it sometimes may feel that this category gets the most attention. Campaigning 2.0 is about using social media and online collaborative tools to organize people around a campaign to get someone into an elected position. The Obama campaign turned many people's heads in terms of how to build a brand and use these tools effectively around something as pivotal as an election for the US President, and today we see new stories every day about how other candidates are using tools like Meetup, FourSquare, Twitter, Facebook and others to motivate their supporters and try to win elections.
2. Open Data 2.0 - Moving from campaigning to actually governing, this is the category of work that Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra often speaks about - relating to the big challenges of getting various government agencies to begin to have their huge databases share information with one another, as well as publishing government data on open standards so that third parties and the private sector can start to build useful applications and tools on top of this data. This category captures the millions of dollars of investment on the IT infrastructure and the cloud that are being made to improve these systems and increase their efficiency and utility. More and more this focus will allow for innovative sites and tools like Pillbox from the NIH which help anyone to identify unknown pills.
3. Collaboration 2.0 - Some (including myself) could argue that this aspect of Government 2.0 has the most potential to have a big impact in terms of creating cultural change within America. GovLoop currently allows government employees to have conversations with others in the government outside of their agencies and fields of expertise. NASA is one agency that has used social tools to allow a highly engaged citizen population to do everything from experience missions in real time to aid the underlying mission of the agency by sharing their computer processing power. As platforms become open and people use them to share their knowledge, this collaboration will lead to greater and greater innovation and engagement from the citizenry of the country with government in all the areas they are most passionate about.
4. Services 2.0 - Alternately described as the "e-government" or "ecommerce" aspect of Government 2.0, this category would describe all the initiatives to let people complete the logistical tasks that they need to engage with government on in an easier and more interactive way. This is everything from e-filing your taxes to renewing your driver's license online. These services are a vital part of what government offers to citizens, and are often the most visible area to the average citizen of how Gov 2.0 can affect their daily life.
5. Security 2.0 - Though some see this category as opposite to opening up data (#2), there is no denying that there is and will continue to be a huge focus in Government 2.0 on using technology to improve our nation's security, whether through highly debated "big brother" style monitoring or new platforms and tools to handle legal and illegal immigration issues.  Broadly speaking, some of the innovative use of these tools by the US Military that we know about (such as the DoD Social Media Hub), as well as what we don't yet know about could fit into this category as well.

In putting this list together, I was tempted to note down entire categories for industries such as Healthcare or Education. Upon further thought, I think that each of these industries will have (and has already had) innovation in several of the areas I shared above, so I resisted creating entire categories for them. What do you think of this structure? Does it help to describe and explain the state of work in Government 2.0 today, or just introduce another layer of buzzwords to an already confusing category? Let me know what you think or suggest another link that covers this question and I'll add it to the list below.

*Note: Thanks to Adriel Hampton for pointing out in a comment that this definition of Gov 2.0 originally came from a Gartner report by Andrea DiMaio.

Related Articles & Additional Thinking 

• Kety Esquivel: Gov 2.0 at Ogilvy DC (huffingtonpost.com)
• Alex Howard: Making sense of Gov2.0, Open Government and We Government at Ogilvy (gov20.govfresh.com)

How Filmmaking Can Change The World (With Your Help)

Every community has its secrets. There are things that no one talks about because they are afraid to. Often, these things are not well understood and it is hard to know what to say about them. They are usually deeply personal as well and referred to as a stigma, which is a word that communicators who work in health care know well. When it comes to changing perceptions about a disease condition or issue, combating the stigma around it is usually the toughest battle to fight.

But if we don't try, then the unthinkable can happen. About five years ago, the father of my friend Rashi put a gun to his head and shot himself. He was struggling with a deep depression and no one in the community knew how to acknowledge it or help him. After years of struggling in the hospital, he died last year. This story has been repeated over and over in communities around the world. The fact is, mental illness is a taboo. Because it is not physically visible, many communities don't acknowledge it and this lack of understanding can lead to disastrous results.

While some are making strides in changing this, it still remains an undiscussed topic all over the world - including in my culture: the South Asian one. Inspired by the story of Rashi's father, this weekend another good friend, Rehana Mirza, is releasing her first feature film called Hiding Divya about 3 generations of women who struggle with mental illness and a community surrounding them who don't understand. It is a very personal project for the entire team behind it, and one that all of us hope can have a transformative power to reduce the stigma around mental illness in many communities, including our own.

If you live in New York City, NY; Edison, NJ, Novi, MI, Peachtree, GA, North Bergen, NJ or Fremont, CA - please consider going and seeing the film in person ... and if you happen to be in another community, check out the Facebook page for the film and read a letter from the Director of the film to help support this important effort.

Stigma can be a terrible thing and when films like Hiding Divya take on the tough challenge of shining a light on it and forcing communities to confront it, we all need to help share that story. The world needs more of them.

See a list of participating theaters or buy a ticket online >>