Be Careful What You Wish For

So we submitted March of Dimes in a contest for the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, which is a great conference that I sent a group to last year. There we met our new friends at Goto media and Scrapblog, who helped us pull togethere Every Baby has a Story. We submitted that project as a model for a mashup of 2.0 technologies and they give us, as well as 10 other non-profits a table at the conference.

We are so psyched!

However, now we have to man this table for three days, which means not attending the sessions of the conference. So we are stuck in a dilemma. We have asked for volunteers but it's a pretty big time commitment and someone would have to be pretty familiar with our web projects. Do we fly someone out the SF (from NY) to sit there for three days? Isn't that counter to what a nonprofit should do? And what should be our goals?

Marketing and Relationships

I keep coming back to what Stengel said in his address to AAAA (my previous post). Marketing is all about relationships - particularly for charities. Why do I give to one and not the other? Invariably it's my personal connection.

David Weinberger, the author of the Cluetrain Manifesto (among many other things)is going to further confirm the importance of "relationships" in his keynote at the next Womma conference, where he will:
"unravel the ways in which the Internet and Web 2.0 technology are changing the way companies market themselves. Hint: It's all about relationships".

Ah - what a concept. Not selling, selling, selling but saying "let's hang out together". At MOD we are trying to figure this out: how do you establish and manage millions of relationships that will last a lifetime? How do you attract people at every demographic and psychographic stage? And then how do we turn them into customer evangelists - which is the only way to make this possible?