Jahnke’s Thoughts

I was watching TV on Saturday, and I noticed at the end of a VW commercial that, rather than their website, they had the URL to their facebook fan page. This reminded me of an experience in 1999, when I was in my first year of University and “the Internet” as we know it today was just becoming a reality. I finished a snickers bar, and noticed on the wrapper that they had their website printed on it. It got me asking ‘why on earth would someone go to snickers.com’ ? I mean sure, there would be nutritional information and stuff, but it seemed that basically you were subjecting yourself to more advertising and branding, I mean, you’d have to really like snickers.

Today, with facebook fan pages, users can interact with their favorite brands and companies, and discover other people that have similar interests. It makes sense that corporations and brands would want to partner with facebook – it’s so ubiquitous. What branding and marketing professional wouldn’t want influencers to self select to be a fan of their product, sharing this information with their entire friend network, just like they have for a government office, a type of food, or an actor?

It will be interesting to see how this continues to play out, and how companies will evolve in promoting their brands and products on facebook. So far, my friends at Involver have told me they’ve had the most success with their integrated facebook fan page platform through exclusive offers and valuable coupons.

I recently wrote a guest blog post for Involver about what I do for a living – fundraising. The gist of this post is essentially that fundraisers need to tell a compelling story to be effective, mail/phone appeals are too costly and do not do a very good job at this, and that a combination of video and email is where fundraising professionals should be focusing their time and effort in order to inspire and educate donors. The Stanford Young Alumni and student campaigns I manage are going to be testing out some of the things we learned from previous campaigns over the next couple of months, and I’m very excited to see the results.