These tips and ideas came from the AdFero Viral marketing workshop I attended in January. I thought it would be worth re-posting.

• A messaging tools must NOT turn into a spamming tool. Any messaging system has to be careful about not being to aggressive.The key is to find people of like-mind, and work to form them into a group.
• Take pictures and videos of your offline events (videos: fun and edgy), and upload it to a MySpace profile, Facebook, or Flickr.
• Manage the campaign. You have to keep going back to the people that came by your social network page, visit their profiles and their pages, and leave comments on their pages. This brings in their friends, and is a sort of “link farming” to increase awareness and visibility of your campaign.
  
• Following up with people is one of the weaknesses of many non-profits. You have to cultivate the relationship, and work at it each level of the relationship. It takes work.
• How much time or money do I need to invest? Its fairly easy to re-purpose content. If you already have a blog, you can include it in your Facebook profile using RSS. Facebook will push this content out to your friends network. There are easy ways to get out re-purposed content.
• Leverage your assets, your networks of friends you have recruited, to get your message out.
• Use interns. They are usually more tech savvy, and its a great way for them to learn, while providing low-cost help to a non-profit.
• Start a blog! Blogs form a network online, and are essential to spreading a message.
• Reaching out to blogs: Find blogs that will be supportive of your cause. Don’t just send press releases, but instead cultivate relationships.
• You have to be prepared to lose control when it comes to user generated content, and online advocacy.
• The risk or challenge is in the accountability that results from having everything in your past recorded, and can and probably will be brought up. An example that keeps getting mentioned is Allan’s “Makaka” incident.

technorati tags:Web, social, networking, blogging, viral, marketing, NSHMBA