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Blogging wins out over social networking as Change.org shifts strategy from connecting to content.
Something profound happened today, and few seem to have noticed its true significance. The online activism platform Change.org relaunched its site with a new approach to changing the world. Change.org is still committed to the big issues of stopping global warming and ending genocide, but the online strategy has profoundly…changed.
According to CenterNetworks, where we first spotted the story, Change.org managing editor Josh Levy “spoke about moving away from leveraging only the social networks as the Facebook application Causes does. He believes there is power in the blog and has basically shifted Change.org into a variety of blogs on the most popular causes across the world.”
In other words, content trumped connecting and blogging trumped social networking.
We first wrote about the for-profit social enterprise in Be the Change You Wish to See on the Social Web. Founded in the summer of 2005 and launched in early 2007, Change.org relied on social networking to connect people around these important issues in the hopes that they’d recruit others and take action. Unfortunately, simply connecting like-minded people is not compelling enough to empower them to take on big issues like women’s rights or immigration. Social networking is great for socializing but much less effective when it comes to inspiring action. This applies equally to making charitable contributions and being influenced by advertising. Few things inspire or motivate like a good story, and that’s what content is all about.
A similar sentiment was expressed in one of the first reviews of Change.org after it launched. According to Sonny Cloward of NTEN,
The premise is pretty straightforward – connect people with one another and organizations to push forward common causes (i.e. changes). I perused the site, thought it was a great idea, didn’t dig very deeply, felt a moment of kumbaya with my fellow do-gooders and then quickly forgot about it.
So is Change.org just another fly-by-night project of some well meaning people with a good concept – just badly planned and executed – awaiting a slow descent into the dead pool? The site has a nicely streamlined and accessible UI, so it’s obvious someone put some thought and resources into it. Yet it has nothing in the way of features that hook me and keep me engaged and active in issues and people that matter to me (via dashboard, email, or RSS).
Change.org appears to have taken this last line to heart, as the new blogging (content) strategy seeks to hook and engage people with the information that’s essential to inspiring action. (As of this writing, though, it has yet to integrate RSS.)
In terms of design, the new Change.org is a network of blogs in the spirit of Gawker Media, Sugar, and Green Options, only these are not standalone blog properties but rather subdomains for each cause e.g. http://genocide.change.org and http://globalwarming.change.org. The main Change.org page is a portal of sorts to each of the blogs with featured headlines and links to the social networking component and cause profiles. By organizing the blogs on subdomains according to the main cause keyword, it will help to push them to the top of corresponding search results and ultimately recruit new members who wouldn’t have discovered Change.org otherwise. This is the more strategic part of Change.org’s blogging strategy, as they’ll seek to become more relevant not only to the people who want to learn about these issues but to Google itself. It’s an excellent blogging for SEO approach.
Just today, Google chief Eric Schmidt was featured in AdAge, where he spoke about the importance of brands and content.
Speaking with an audience of magazine executives visiting the Google campus as part of their annual industry conference, [Schmidt] said their brands were increasingly important signals that content can be trusted. “Brands are the solution, not the problem,” Mr. Schmidt said. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”
In a talk that he structured mostly as an invitation for questions and ideas, Mr. Schmidt declined to advise magazines on looking more popular to Google’s page-ranking programs.
“We don’t actually want you to be successful,” he said. The company’s algorithms are trying to find the most relevant search results, after all, not the sites that best game the system. “The fundamental way to increase your rank is to increase your relevance,” he added.
Branding, on the other hand, may be an essential element that helps people navigate the world, he said. “Brand affinity is clearly hard wired,” he said. “It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”
Change.org is applying these truths to its new approach by building on its brand and making it more relevant and discoverable through content.
This also speaks to an October 6th CNET News article, “Analyst: Half of ‘social media campaigns’ will flop“, in which an analyst claims that while “75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies with Web sites will have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes” by 2012, half of them will fail.
Notice that neither the headline nor the article mentions blogging or content. Because while these are fundamental to social media, they aren’t typically factored into what one calls a “social media campaign”. This has to change.
Our point is simple. As we wrote in The First Rule of Social Media Club and Can a Blog Lead Your Business Strategy?, the supreme value of social media is content. Social media enables more efficient creation, distribution, and discovery of content…with plenty of help from Google, of course. The social media strategies we develop are grounded in content. One of our mantras is that all companies are now media companies. Most just haven’t realized it.
We help companies to release their inner media company. Just as Change.org did today.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Jesse Luna // Oct 8, 2008 at 10:45 pm
The blog is the center of the social media world. It pulls together communities and is a concrete “value point” vis-a-vis its content.
God, I love using vis-a-vis in comments…..
2 Richly Chheuy // Oct 9, 2008 at 11:08 am
The wrong strategy for any business or organization to take is jump from social network to social network. You can have 1000′s of friends or “followers” but in the end, if you don’t provide relevant content or an easy mechanism for your audience to directly interact with you, you gain NOTHING. It’s just a big waste of time, investment, and resources.
I recommend starting off with blogs with commenting features. Then move onto forums as your community grows so other users can start generating content, topics, and conversation. And then branch out to Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace grow your community even further. Don’t do the opposite.
That’s my soapbox for the day =).
3 Time Tracker // Oct 15, 2008 at 12:52 am
To be honest, I’m not sure why this didn’t happen sooner. The social networking field is already over crowded, and I personally didn’t see anything that change.org was doing any differently than a lot of other ‘hey me too’ social networking sites.
I believe Richly to be spot on. Change.org was doing the promotion cycle in the exact opposite. You can’t build a community on just a community alone. There has to be something there for them to do once they’re there. Blogs, comments, discussions, and forums are a great way to BEGIN building a community. Not something to be added after the fact.
At it’s heart, I think change.org is on the right mission, just coming at it from perhaps the wrong angle. I wonder if this will be change.org 2.0?
4 Change.org's New Content Strategy a Success | Max Gladwell // Dec 27, 2008 at 6:09 pm
[...] its social action platform with a new blogging strategy. We immediately wrote that “Change.org Shifts Strategy to Blogging and Content.” The site was re0rganized around topical blogs for each of the causes such as global [...]
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