Seth Godin en su post de hoy reporta y comenta varios fenomenos virales aparecidos recientemente y os aconsejo leerlo.

Entre otros, habla del video generado por el fundador de Dollar Shave Club que utilicé

en mi clase de Digital Entrepreneurship el 8 de marzo: se trata del pitch de esta empresa que te envia a tu casa y para siempre cuchillas de afeitar a muy buen precio.

Utilizó una técnica inteligente para levantar financiación: primero hizo famoso al video en Youtube y luego lanzó la ronda que parece ha conseguido sus objetivos.

Aquí tenemos a otro ejemplo de utilización del Mktg viral interpretando a la perfección su dinámica y ejecución.

A través de twitter acabo de recibir un video impactante y he dedicado casi 30 minutos en verlo, hasta el final. Es una iniciativa de “Invisible children” una ONG que denuncia la situación de los niños soldados en Uganda, reclutados a la fuerza por Joseph Kony, dictador y líder de APR, una organización revolucionaria sin ningún fin declarado que no sea el poder y la extorsión.

La idea de la campaña viral es hacer famoso a este desgraciado para que el mundo sepa lo que está haciendo y el Gobierno de EEUU deje de mirar a otro lado y mantenga a los “observadores” desplazados en el área, para ayudar al ejercito local en encontrar y parar a Kony.

El video sobre Kony ha sido bajado más de 70 millones de veces y confio que consiga su objetivo: propondré al team de TedxPlazaCibeles para que invitemos al fundador de Invisible Children a nuestro evento del 26 de Mayo. El mundo tiene que saber y los niños como Jacob tienen derecho a su infancia.

A la ya consabida de que “cada vez hay más bazares chinos porque hacen la cultura del esfuerzo que nosotros no hacemos”, el presidente de Mercadona también ha comentado que “el nivel de vida y la productividad se van a equiparar, así que o sube la productividad del país o baja el nivel de vida”.

Estas y otras declaraciones las ha realizado en la presentación de cuentas del ejercicio de 2011, el mejor año para Mercadona.

Juan Roig también dijo que está en contra del recorte por puro recorte, apostando por medidas que frenen el derroche en la sanidad, educación y justicia, ya que “la gente piensa que todo es gratis”. También ha apuntado que ningún español se libra de haber contribuido a llegar a la situación en la que estamos “al derrochar muchos recursos en corrupción, en economía sumergida, en subvenciones improductivas, en absentismo injustificado –con más de 1.000 personas que hoy no han ido a trabajar pudiendo y al no desincentivar el paro”.

En cuanto a las medidas que se están adoptando, Juan Roig dice que hubiera ido más lejos, reivindicando que “hay que favorecer a los empresarios, que son los que crean puestos de trabajo”, además comenta que él hubiera “perseguido mucho más el absentismo“, además de haber pasado a lunes “todos los festivos” porque “cada puente nos cuesta 1.200 millones de euros”, y añadió que “hay que desincentivar el paro porque hay muchísimo trabajo posible” y concluye diciendiendo que “En España nadie recoge las naranjas ni las fresas, todo son extranjeros”.

Respecto a las cifras de Mercadona, señalar que creó 6.500 empleos fijos en 2011 y anuncia otros 2.000 para este año. Cuenta ya con 70.000 trabajadores y 400.000 de forma indirecta.

Every small Hotel, Consultant, Restaurant, café, shop, … any service related company needs to make the personal experience its major differentiator to create satisfied, loyal customers, evangelists.

In tourism, big chains like Four Seasons or Amandari are able to create this feeling in any resort they manage; Singapore Airline, the best airline in the world but also Jet Blue and Southwestern Airlines are doing pretty good in this sense.

Apple is not an exception: on one side it is a closed, gated, high walled environment, managed by the most arrogant CEO in the world, but since Jobs return they offered great experiences and insanely great quality in whatever they touched. Quality is its culture. Quality is its brand.

Starbucks Coffee created a huge chain of smiling barista crews: “latte” was unknown everywhere but in Italy and Europe and they added quality and personal touch.

There is no further marketing tool as quality to satisfy customers and make them come back.

The contrary of “excellent” is not “bad”: its contrary is “very good”.

This is the mantra of my division when I was in charge of the International business of Amper. We were all obsessed about performing a great service to our customers, the only thing we had to really differentiate us in a world of tech products and engineers.

We were different. We thought differently even before listening to this great spot of Apple.

We delivered “insanely great products and services” before reading Steve Jobs biography.

This allowed us, a tiny company from a small country in the tech business to win the most important contract in the payphone world in Australia.

I remember one business retreat at the Ritz Carlton: when I explained to the Hotel manager I wanted to start up a workshop for my people (Phds, engineers, phisics, …) given by their waiters, porters, room managers and assistants, he thought I was crazy.

I loved their approach of listening to each customer, collecting her/his preferences and reproducing them in every Ritz Carlton they would visit later. I loved this concept of seeing a customer as part of our tribe, of our family, globally. Thus when you enter your room in a Ritz in Rome, Paris, New York, … you find your preferite flowers, your pillow is sinthetic because they know you are allergic to duck feathers, they serve you green tee by default because they know you do not like coffee, …

They make you feel at home: only somebody who loves you remember you do not like tomatoes or you prefer your beef almost row: your mother, your sister, your fiancé, your granma, … and at the Ritz.

I married my wife on July 25th, 1997 at 12:00: all my customers were invited and knew it but the Australians could not come.

At 11:55 I received a call on my mobile phone: I was entering the church but I picked up the handset for “a customer with a problem” was my priority then; she was Janet Sayer, Australian Telstra payphone CEO. She said she just won a dinner with her boss for she bet that my mobile phone would be on even during my wedding ceremony. Then she said: “Antonio, please swithch off the mobile now or pass me through the priest in order not to marry a crazy guy like you with this poor girl”.

That was my compromise: I was happy to serve my customers. I considered a privilege and an honour to do that.

In our house in Madrid we had two spare bedrooms for hosting my customers when they visited Madrid (now they are my kids rooms). I cooked for them with pleasure, fixed a lot of problems and I considered them as partners: a sale was not good until it was good for my customers.

It does not really matter if your business is small or big: your company, your brand importance will be proportional to how big are your promises, the ones you respect and deliver, even though you have to loose some money sometimes.

The Chinese say:” If you can not smile, why are you opening a shop?”

Marketing is an unfamiliar concept for many nonprofit organizations.

It’s important these organizations understand that marketing is more than just the old sense of making a sale or obtaining a donation.

Marketing is a way to satisfying the consumer and donor needs, but where does the nonprofit organization start?

Below are eight steps that will get you started in brainstorming marketing ideas that could make a significant difference in the bottom-line of your organization.

1. Define your target market, research similar organizations and associations.

2. Determine the desired outcome of your marketing efforts.

3. Using the information gathered in Step 1 and 2 develop brochures and marketing materials that describe the benefits, services, donation opportunities, and values of your organization.

4. Develop a social media marketing strategy. Social media such as Twitter and Facebook can provide you with ways to reach out to those interested in your organization in a low cost and effective way. Social media works great when it comes to reaching those who are passionate about causes that individuals hold dear to their hearts.

5. Develop and maintain a professional internet marketing presence by creating a web site. You can use a web site as a great resource to display useful information, news, monthly newsletters, events, create community, share alternatives to donating money, and showcase the benefits of your organization.

6. Research and maintain your prospect and customer databases. Do not let these resources be wasted. Use them for special mailings, follow-up telephone calls, event invitations, alliance development, research profiling, and market segmentation.

7. Show and advertise the results and objectives that your organization achieves. You fill find that it is effective to showcase those that are receiving benefits, inversions, activities, and projects.

8. Always actively search for alliances with other organizations, commerce, government, advertising media, and business. This step alone often brings the most benefit to nonprofit organizations.

USING SOCIAL MEDIA FOR NPO BRANDING

It is no surprise that in a recent study, it was shown that nonprofit organizations have been setting the pace for the use of social media in marketing since 2007.

Social media is a cost-effective option for Nonprofit organizations to market themselves without needing an exorbitant amount of funding.

The report showed that nonprofits were leading both corporations and universities in the use of social media tools, while they were more familiar with the tools and were using them significantly more often.

Nonprofits had even delved into monitoring attitudes of others with regard to the use of social mediums, which is light years ahead of even some fairly large-sized businesses.

An updated study showed that even today 89% of charitable organizations are using some form of social media in their marketing.

This includes the use of blogging, podcasting, message boards, social networking, video blogging and wikis. If this research isn’t enough to convince you that social media is a viable tool for your nonprofit organization, consider that 45% of these organizations stated that social media played a very important role in their fundraising strategy.

Why does social media work for Nonprofit organizations?

Stakeholders take an interest in causes that relate to them and social mediums create an overall integrated experience with those very same stakeholders.

Additionally, social mediums enable nonprofit organizations to create relationships and engage with their constituents. This allows them to nurture their online communities which, in fact creates, a viral marketing affect with little or no effort.

Moreover, the costs associated with this marketing effort are often less expensive with better return-on-investment than traditional marketing efforts.

The realm of social media helps equip individuals with an outlet and tool to help in growing their own nonprofit organizations, as well as enabling individuals who have a specific interest in a charitable organization and who want to share it broadly.

Social mediums provide a central place for nonprofits organizations to collaborate and connect. And, as touched on earlier, they help Nonprofits gain feedback from constituents and stakeholders in the organization.

As a nonprofit organization it’s important to take the proper steps when delving into social mediums but, as you can see it, has proven to be beneficial to many organizations just like yours.

How can you get started in the social media marketing of your nonprofit organization?

It’s important when entering into social media that if you decide to do it internally you’ll want to create a social media policy and a marketing plan that uphold the core principles of your organization. Your policy and strategy plan should include the following:

1. Who will be your spokesperson and the voice of your organization?

2. Will the voice of that spokesperson be personal or professional – what does that split look like?

3. Who will be in charge of responding to conversation and social media buzz that is created?

4. Who will be monitoring the social media effects?

5. What, if any, monitoring tools will you or should you use?

6. How will you protect the brand of your organization?

7. Which vehicles in social media will you use? Your choices include blogging, podcasting, message boards, social networking, video blogging and wikis.

This will get you started in creating your policy as well as your strategy.

The worst thing that could happen is that you start a social media marketing campaign, but do not interact or engage with constituents and stakeholders.

Finally please find attached a BLOG DEDICATED TO NPO MARKETING by Jocelyn Harmon as a reference.

TED SPEECH ABOUT OPEN SOURCE EDUCATION

Moreover, please find attached the translaton of part of my blog post about on-line education and the same matter, with a list of great places for open learning.

Finally, please read this great post about MITx FREE ON-LINE EDUCATION a great initiative of MIT to allow free online courses to anybodywith an internet connection, in addition to the existing MITOPENCOURSEWARE offer (with more than 2,000 free courses) I already reported in my previous post.

The big difference will reside in the fact that MITx courses will have interaction with educators and an assistance title issued by an MIT foundation.

I hope this would inspire you and increase your sharing actitude.

¿Education online or Face to Face?

It is impossible to explain processes and the dissemination of knowledge that some business schools are carrying out since a long time, to those who imagine a business school as something like the experience they had while studying at old style universities: repetitive classes, with tyrants teachers using the same notes year after year, with memory processes, and so on.

None of this takes place or has any meaning in the institutions where I collaborate: Students learn from the environment, their classmates, debate and discussion, from the high performance environment that we are able to crate together: the materials are meaningless without this process.

And that is precisely what leads to an intelligent and sane person to pay $ 150,000 for four years of education at MIT, where many of the materials used during the courses are available for free on the same network (MITOpenCourseWare ).

The explanation lies in the massive use in classes of the “case method”, a variation of the Socratic method which can stimulate the brain to develop by itself, with the help of the classroom environment, discussing a case based on a real company.

When we think of online education, our mind automatically goes to clichés associated with the self-study materials that a student goes solo, to multimedia lessons that are prepared once and used for thousands of people, one after another.

Again, none of that has to do with what happens in the EOI online learning and other business schools, where there is always a work group, a group discussion, a teacher who is intervening and moderating forums: this environment acts in a similar manner to the face to face method.

Of course we use blogs, wikis, video, podcasts and all the paraphernalia that offers on-line universe, so the experience is diverse, multi-sensory and certainly memorable, but the teacher’s presence is essential in his role as moderator, director of the timings of the program.

In my opinion, a well-planned online session can be superior to a Face to Face class in terms of depth of analysis, richness of interaction, quality of material contributed by each stakeholder.

Education is at a very interesting point: Seth Godin believes that the impact of technology in education will be higher than many other industries are suffering, such as newspapers.

Online education makes the world flatter and it is our duty to give it a try to give an opportunity to existing talents, anywhere, anytime, anywhere.

Finally, think of the experiment carried out by a professor at the New York State University with 64 students in class; he divided them into 2 groups of 32 each by chance and the first group was given a normal class, recording it.

The other students were sent a podcasted, recorded class and all 64 students did the same test: Guess who got better grades?

Those who had received the recorded class, among other things, because they had the power to hear again the most difficult passages.

Those who attended the class taking notes, got second place and then everyone else.

A class with a teacher is only useful if there is debate, discussion and entropy at top level, from teacher to the class and vice versa, if not, better to record a podcast. The same thing happens to students who do not participate in class discussion, which generously share their knowledge, experience and know-how.

Also for these students would be better to see the recording of the class every time they would like: by not participating, they have not broken the dynamics, they have not changed the course of lesson, have not guided the class to their areas of interest.

“I-tunes University” is very popular among students worldwide and you can find there cases and teaching materials for free, published by the best institutions in the world.

Please find attached (in alphabetical order) the sites where I find very valuable information to compare my programs, find new case studies, articles, etc..: There are even entire courses with Sylabus, class notes, cases, grade, etc.

Carnegie Mellon http://www.cmu.edu/oli/index/.shtml

Harvard http://athome.harvard.edu/archive

IE Business School http://openmultimedia.ie.edu/index_e.html

Johns Hopkins http://ocw.jhsph.edu/

MIT http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

Stanford http://itunes.stanford.edu

UC Berkeley http://webcast.berkeley.edu/

Umass Boston http://ocw.umb.edu/

Yale http://oyc.yale.edu/

Many colleagues and I believe that the best place for our class presentations power points is “Slideshare.net” or “Authorshare” while “Vimeo” and “Mediateca EOI” are the best places for videotaped lectures: thus everyone with an access to the Internet can train him/herself as they wish.

A world of better trained people, by themselves, by me or my colleagues will surely be a better world for me and my children, is not it?.

Please visit Ken Robinson conferences at Ted.com, especially this: “Bring on the learning revolution!”

Let’s be different.