Get 1 Million+ Views by Leveraging Social Partnerships

Partnering for Good

With Water.org, Mike McCamon spends his time finding creative ways to solve the water crisis on a day-to-day basis.
When he began working there, the organization was focused mostly on using direct mail as a way to communicate with donors and to spread awareness. Over the past 5 years, they have made a successful transition to social as the primary channel of engagement.

By looking to new media and always seeking mutually beneficial partnerships, the Water.org team has grown its digital presence. Mike’s team, for example, recently leveraged a partnership with Zynga to create awareness through online gaming and raised over $1 million to use toward their work in Haiti.
Mike’s team also created a very successful video campaign, in conjunction with co-founder of Water.org Matt Damon, called Strike With Me. After finding that their typical public service announcement videos weren’t getting more than 10,000 views, they decided to go in a different direction.

The first video shows Matt Damon holding a faux press conference to announce that, until everyone in the world has access to clean water and sanitation, he refuses to go to the bathroom.
The genius of the campaign is that it doesn’t stop there. Matt Damon also did cameos in videos of six YouTubers, all of whom had more than 200,000 subscribers. The campaign was immediately spread far beyond Water.org’s immediate contacts. The videos, along with a #strikewithme Instagram feed, all aggregated at StrikeWithMe.org.
Instead of putting a celebrity spokesperson in front of a camera and hitting “record,” Mike’s team is creating new ways to use celebrity within the context of new media to garner support for their cause.

Social Media Number of the Week: 227

According to a new study from Shareaholic, YouTube keeps users the most engaged of all the social media platforms. Users who click on shared YouTube links spend an average of 227 seconds on the page they land on and visit an average of 2.99 pages.

This contrasts sharply with Facebook’s referrals, who only spend 127 seconds on a clicked page.
Successful and independent YouTubers are placing calls to action throughout their videos: subscribe to the channel, visit the online store, like the video. “Maybe [traditional] marketers have been afraid of overwhelming that channel with too many calls to action,” Jeff says. Maybe that is something we’ll see change with numbers like these.
If conversions from YouTube links are successfully driving traffic and sales, then strategy will change accordingly. “That’s the next goal for people who are creating on [YouTube],” says Nick. “Knowing they have that traffic that’s captivated, how are people actually taking that and converting on top of it.”

Holy Social!

This week’s Holy Social comes via the music world from Nick Cicero. An indie band called Vulfpeck from Ann Arbor, Michigan is funding their next tour using the money they make from Spotify. The catch is that they’ve created a silent album, called Sleepify, and asked fans to play it all night while they’re sleeping. The 8 tracks are all silent and last just over 30 seconds, which is the threshold at which Spotify pays out to the artist.
[bquote cite=”Vulfpec @vulfpeck”]please don’t “shuffle” sleepify. i know this might come of snobbish, but we spent a lot of time on track order.[/bquote]
It’s like a streaming Kickstarter hacking gamification and a publicity stunt. Jeff’s question, “How repeatable is it?” is an apt one. We’ll see how long Spotify will put up with bands streaming silence to fans in order to make money.

See you next week!