NPC is happy to share that TechSoup Global won the open-vote portion of the Justmeans/Financial Times 2010 Social Innovation Awards . There were 88 other contenders for this Citizen’s Choice Award, but because your participation, we went from 116 to 1,545 votes . Great work everybody, and we deeply appreciate the help from the entire virtual community.
To win the vote, NPC/TechSoup employees and volunteers sent emails to personal contacts and deployed a grass-roots social media campaign to reach out to supporters around the world.
Volunteers rallied fans to take action through Second Life, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Avatars United, as well as through private email campaigns and on blogs.
NPC’s Layal Rabat wrote a powerful blog post which was tweeted to get folks psyched, and as voters left comments about TechSoup, we captured and tweet-shared these from Tweetphoto .
The response was phenomenal! The tweets went viral, Facebook and LinkedIn groups shared the message with other groups, and residents of Second Life reached out to their constituencies in the nonprofit, education and business communities.
What We Learned from Barack Obama’s Social Media Strategy
So how did we win when we were up against multi-million dollar companies with hundreds of thousands of employees and fancy PR firms?
First, we learned from Barack Obama’s social media strategy. For his presidential campaign his team used email, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and many other platforms to get his message out. He maintained a consistent message for his audience, centering around “Hope”. He connected with specific groups and encouraged supporters. Since his supporters believed that he could deliver on his promise, they actively helped him get his message out.
For TechSoup, the words “Social Innovation” fit naturally with its core mission. This was easily apparent to the members, constituents and partners that engage daily with us on many social media platforms. So when we reached out to our global network to help us get the votes, they were there to deliver and help us get the message out.
Thank you everyone. In both the real and virtual worlds, this was truly a Citizen’s Choice award.
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Written by: DustyArtaud